Red for German, yellow for French, green for English – or is it for math? There is rainbow-colored fan chaos in the school bags. Who should keep track of things?
You don’t have to look to Berlin for the wildest play of colors. A look in the satchel is also good. The big traffic light coalition of loose-leaf binders gathers there, red for German, yellow for French, green for English. Or maybe yellow for religion and green for math?
Two children, two schools, a jumble of rainbow-colored fans. Orange means Italian here, geography there, pink stands for history or music. For the subject of art, of all places, one school requires colorless envelopes, while the other allows maximum creativity and leaves the choice of color to the children. But there is one thing in common: Rote-Socken-Rot means German over there as over there. And black does not appear at all this school year, which is due to the lack of chemistry. Not currently on the schedule.
In the first few weeks of school it is almost impossible to keep track of the great battle of learning materials. Because nothing burdens the nerves of parents as severely as the good, German “material requirements list” in its confusing petty-mindedness. Please an A5 vocabulary booklet with two columns, a A4 vocabulary booklet with three columns and A8 vocabulary cards, soso. In addition, a “music book combined with writing lines”, aha. And does “with an imprinted edge” actually mean the same as “with a circumferential edge”? On the verge of a nervous breakdown, you fumble your way into the list of more than 50 lines on the Internet, but then you make a mistake in the pattern and the child is bent.
After several additional requests trickling in – a workbook here, a 5B pencil there – the last still open item could finally be ticked off from the material list this week: The world atlas had arrived, there had been delivery bottlenecks, so someone asked at the parents’ evening whether a 1998 edition would not do. The teacher politely but firmly declined.
So now everything is actually complete. Success all along the line? Oh no! Evening look in the school satchel: the colorful coalition of notebooks is facing an acid test. The tatters of the green and red envelopes are flying, the yellow one is crumpled, which may also be due to the fact that they are made of recycled paper. A climate coalition – at least in the school bag it has its pitfalls.