Hardly a day goes by now without horror reports from schools. They culminate in the fact that the children and young people not only learned nothing during the pandemic, but also forgot what they had known before. This is very terrible because it reminds the author of the useless period of his adolescence when five foursome spoiled his interim report card in eleventh grade. Note: Even the best face-to-face lessons can pass a young man by without a trace if his brand new body pours out hormones like crazy.
His competencies in mathematics were limited to the fact that he could calculate the average grade down to the second digit after the decimal point and make prognoses on this basis. One gloomy realization was that he had to get full marks on the last Latin school assignment to save himself to a 4. Because Latin – caution, joke – seemed more and more Latin to him, he learned Ovid’s Metamorphoses by heart in homeschooling – one of the greatest memory achievements of all time.
When he just said “Bonjour” in French, the whole class would growl, because from the mouth of an old Bavarian the word sounds like “a pair of shoes”. With the math teacher, the youth agreed on 0.54 points and the promise that in return he would never do anything with numbers again. So he dragged himself through to high school. With his grade point average, he would have had to wait 324 semesters to study medicine in Regensburg. Then he did something else. A few sentences from school are still remembered: “It’s simple to drink Dimple” – “Quem, quam, quod” – “Fundamental movement 8” – “Le piéton de l’air”. That’s basically it. By the way, the father of the lazy high school student from Markt Schwaben had passed the secondary school diploma in Straubing. After the war, a small table was enough for the class reunion.
Yes, of course, now it’s easy to say: Worse is always possible. But maybe the pandemic year wasn’t all bad for the students. Perhaps in 20 years they will look back and say: We missed a lot of material during the pandemic, but we learned a lot about life.