Maya gets schuled. The first day…

Ali – It is ever true that first days are hard. But more precisely it’s the fear of what will happen on the first day… the neophyte mistakes, the embarrassing anxiety-induced akwardness, the exhausting effort to appear comfortable and confident while internally screaming ‘get me the hell out of here!’ The anticipation of this trying first day is always worse than the actual experience. No matter how many boogers are actually hanging out of your nose at the end of that first day you usually think, ‘Well that wasn’t so bad.’ 

Maya has been dreading the first day of Swiss school since we first gleefully broke the news that we were moving abroad for a year- and to be fair with good reason. Not only did this event promise to have all the terribleness of a new school, it had the bonus horribleness of all the terribleness occurring in a foreign language. Now despite this, Joe and I were fairly confident that we were making a solid parental choice in sending her to the local public school. I had done extensive research on school options in Zurich and the bulk of the opinions and data pointed us towards the financial and intellectual benefits of immersion in the local system. Not to say that we didn’t have our doubts and detractors. My query on this subject on englishforum.ch revealed that we were somewhere between mildly abusive and heroic on the parenting scale.

But nevertheless we abusively and bravely pushed forward and now the first school day was upon us. 

Monday morning brought us panic attacks over clothing choices and an imminent friendless existence. We had already navigated (by navigated I mean completely caved and thrown money at the problem) the panic attack over the embarrassing HIV conference freebie backpack that I had brought for Maya to take to school. But suddenly, with 30 minutes to go, she pulled herself out of the tween drama abyss, rallied her courage and headed out the door.

Now I should note that the Swiss generally foster independence in their school age kids by having them make their own way to school. We didn’t want to be the helicopter parent foreigners so we watched her walk off for the 20 minute hike down the hill to Schule Letten. ….then we scrambled out the door and tailed her like private eyes on assignment. 

Fast forward and its 10 am. We could now come out of hiding in the bushes around the school and go to the parent orientation in the class. Now there’s two things I haven’t mentioned. 1) We are actually slightly less horrible parents than you think as we located ourselves in a school district that offered an ‘integration’ class or Aufnameklasse as they call it. This is a special class just for non-German speaking foreigners that provides a gentler introduction to the language and the culture. 2) Because the native languages spoken by students and parents can vary widely the whole parent orientation was in German. They assured us anything important would be repeated in English but apparently there was nothing really important because nothing was repeated in English. Despite that I think the parents: an Australian mother, a French father, a Thai couple and us, seemed to get most of the info that Frau Müller and Frau Diener threw at us, mostly because they are the most excellent charades players I have ever seen and acted out most discussion points. They also had helpful informational documents clearly tailored to the German-illiterate and ignorant parental masses. 

Clearly integrating the parents was also a goal of the program as evidenced by the helpful female adult foreigners integration offerings (with childcare!).As you might expect, the shared tribulations brought rapid bonding to both kid and parent groups. We headed home after orientation and Maya joined us at home for lunch at 12:15ish. The kids get a generous 1 hour 45 minute lunch because Swiss kids typically go back home at lunch time. Maya ran the 10 blocks up hill to our apartment to maximize her lunch time, affirming our belief that her fitness level will dramatically improve along with her German skills over the course of the year. The morning report was good: teachers nice, friendships budding. Fast forward to 3 pm. Joe met her at the end of her first school day with the traditional Swiss horn O candy and the report 

was even better: geography was fun and gym rocked because they didn’t have to wear shoes and got to hit each other with a giant carrot. The best for us was the German language homework and the German language packed schedule. Now if she just becomes best buds with the French or Thai kid we could get two foreign languages for the price of one. Keep your fingers crossed!