Higher (Mis)Education Part II

Following Higher (Mis)Education Part I ....

So, I applied to bachelor degree programs in urban planning and urban economics, two of my new-found interests since getting a degree in Linguistics in 2010.   I missed the application deadlines for a couple of schools, but got an acceptance offer from a few German-speaking bachelor degree programs.  I got acceptance letters from the Spatial Planning program at the  Technical University of Dortmund, the Urban Design program at the Brandenburg Technical University in Cottbus and the Real Estate Economics program at Regensburg University (Bavaria).  

I was so delighted. 

I turned down the Spatial Planning offer at Dortmund, but Lars started putting out job applications in the Ruhr area around Dortmund just in case I ended up transferring there after a semester or two.  After much deliberation, I finally accepted the offer from Regensburg University to study economics. 

There is so much to tell about this period of my life when I was preparing to study at a German university.  But, in this post, I am instead going to tell you about my introduction to higher education in Germany and what I have learned about educational reform in the United States in general.  

Basically, I am going to stick to the topic of what Germany universities are like from an American-educated person's perspective, and not get into all the little details about whether Lars started looking for jobs or how we planned to manage the move.

First, let me tell you a bit about German primary schools and universities. 

First of all, college-bound German school-boys and girls don't have the choice of not taking Calculus.  That means that everybody at the university has already had "high-school" math, aka Calculus 1 and 2.  Also, universities in Germany do NOT offer courses covering what you were already supposed to have learned in high school.  Period.  That calculus stuff is so high school, any baby could do it, right?  High School students heading to college get a special High School-level degree called "Arbitur," which means that they passed all the state or national tests in the subject.  

Second, students are weeded out from the "college-bound" crowd before high-school.  If a child does poorly in middle or elementary school, the child will be told that he/she should learn a trade and not go to Gymnasium (High School), which means that the child won't be able to go to the university.   If the child does really well later, it should be possible to switch to Gymnasium from a "regular" non-college bound school, but it is unlikely to happen. 

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Before moving to a different city and enrolling at Regensburg University, I wanted to brush up on my math.  I had one to two months time before the program would begin, so I figured that I had enough time to review what I had forgotten since my last course of "Advanced Topics of Mathematics," an alternative to College Algebra as a junior in high school.  I took that course some, oh, eight years ago, so I really needed a math review!  

Let me add that I didn't think a math review would be so hard because I did really well on the math portion of the GRE (one of the tests you take to apply to graduate schools in the US).

I wanted to review what I considered to be basic High School math.  I signed up for the general pre-university week-long math seminar and review session for entering students, which was being offered at the Brandenburg Technical University, or BTU, in Cottbus, where Lars and I were living then. 

So, there I was in Cottbus, Germany, and I was super excited to go to the math review at BTU.  Maybe I kind of expected to have one of those experiences often portrayed in 1990's pop-culture movies where the more mature twenty-something-er gets the chance to pose as a High-Schooler or College Student and, due to his/her ultimate life-wisdom, shines like never before.

What happened to me was less glamorous: I walked into a gray-concrete modernistic building and into a lecture hall full with  300+ students.  The volume of noise must have been intensified in the lecture hall (felt like a concert hall), because it's something I remember very well.  (As a foreign-language speaker, a foreign language can start to sound like white noise when your brain has language-overload.  That is not my professional linguistic opinion, just an observation!) I picked a seat and waited for the fun to begin.

 The professor (a woman) walked in with her assistant and turned on a projector (!!!!) and started putting slides up (like in the 90's?) of complicated mathematical theories and logic formulas.  First of all, I couldn't really understand what she was saying because my German immersion didn't prepare me for listening to German through a speaker system.   And I couldn't really see what she was writing because I was too far away from the board. Naturally, I did not understand anything.  

 

Well, I'm an American which probably means I am naively confident.  We are just taught to be that way. "There's no such thing as a stupid question," and "Never be afraid to ask," my dad always said.  So I figured I would just introduce myself to the professor after class, as I always did in the US, and ask her for help or find out what she recommends in order to catch up on things.

Don't get me wrong.  I was nervous walking down the stadium-lecture hall and approaching the professor.  My German also gets a little worse when I'm nervous.  I was practicing what I would say the whole way down the steps.  You could have seen my lips move as I rehearsed what I would say.  I came up to where she was straightening up her slides.    It felt like hours before she acknowledged me standing there. 

I must have said in German, "Hello, my name is Rebecca and I didn't quite understand some things, like, for example XX." 

She looked at me, assessed my accent, and answered, "All German students learn that in school," and turned away from me.   I think she even frowned at me, disappointed that I would bother her holiness on the podium after a lecture.  

Then, she walked away.  Apparently there is such a thing as a stupid question.

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After the lecture, I went to the library and took out all the High-School math books I could fit in my roller JanSport backpack.  I started reading the books in my apartment in the evening and tried to follow along in the seminar during the following days.  Only after a few days did I realize that it would be impossible.  Clearly, the material was more than I could learn in a week.  After the final lecture, I remember standing in the courtyard outside the lecture and feeling envious of all the students around me.  They were all so young and had never really made a big mistake in their lives probably.  They  all seemed so innocent and free.

Later, I called up the admissions office in Regensburg and told them that I wasn't going to be able to enroll this semester.  "Sorry for the inconvenience."

Well, that's ok, I thought.  Rome wasn't built in a day after all.  I can learn all this and then I'll apply for an economics program!  Not to sound trite, but sometimes you can't afford the luxury of a negative thought....  And I wasn't really in a position to change my decision to come to Germany and go back to school.  I felt like I had to learn math; I needed to learn math.

But even that turned out to be harder than it should have been.

TO BE CONTINUED Higher (Mis)Education Part III.....