The story of teacher Christine

Never standing still, being curious about new things, developing and building new things, showing appreciation, tolerance and acceptance towards my fellow human beings – that is important to me.

In my daily educational life, I meet and teach people from different cultures, some of whom have never attended school – this is a real challenge for me. It's also a challenge for the interns and the graduates of the pre-apprenticeship program. Not only are they learning to speak a new language, they are also suddenly required to write and read from left to right.

Even more difficult is pronouncing the numbers you've learned. From 1 to 11, it's easy, but then the newly learned skill—reading from left to right—is no longer valid. How do I read two-digit numbers? And with three-, four-, and five-digit numbers, it becomes even more difficult. This literally makes some interns sweat.

Filing completed worksheets in a folder presents another challenge. My eyes widen...How do I properly punch holes in this sheet so that it's filed in a way that allows me to flip through it from the beginning later without having to turn everything upside down?

And then true miracles happen. I have never been able to explain percentage calculations to someone in a plausible way within two hours. And then it worked straight away and I asked myself why it went so smoothly and quickly? The person I was talking to was someone who had attended a Koran school in his home country and had therefore learned above all to reproduce the material accurately. On top of that, this person has a photographic memory. The challenge then was what to do if the problem to be solved was formulated differently. I had to start the explanations again from the beginning, only differently, because what I had learned, i.e. applying a learned formula, is not possible with this learning background. This way my creativity in teaching stays alive and every school day is guaranteed to be full of surprises as we learn together.