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Education: Die Feder Meiner Tante

2 minute read
TIME

To fill a shortage of math and science teachers, the German state of Hamburg hit on a novel solution: it advertised in the U.S., where colleges turn out more teachers than the schools can employ (TIME, Aug. 9). Lured by promises that a knowledge of German was “preferred but not necessary” and that the work would involve college-level classes, some 500 Americans applied for jobs paying up to $850 a month. Hamburg officials signed 71 of them to two-year contracts.

Because German teachers were entrenched in most of the upper grades, however, the Americans were assigned to students aged 13 to 17. “They’ve recruited surgeons to do the job of butchers,” complained one Harvard Ph.D. The most basic problem, though, was that the students knew little English and the teachers less German. “You should have known that you would have to teach in German,” declared Wolfgang Neckel, superintendent of schools. “If I went to America, I would certainly be expected to teach in English.”

Agony. In one typical case, Bartow Gulp, a Ph.D. from the University of Delaware, shocked his principal at their first meeting by thumbing through a well-worn dictionary to put a German sentence together. By now Gulp can lecture adequately in German but still cannot handle the give-and-take of student questioning. So, like many of the Americans, he teaches only eight hours a week—one-third of the normal work load.

After parental complaints, some principals refused to let the Americans teach at all; others permitted them to teach under close supervision but not to give examinations or grades. Says Gulp: “The embarrassment of having to stand daily before a class knowing one is doing the job badly is agony.”

Hamburg education officials refuse to cancel the contracts—or to pay the disgruntled teachers’ fare home. Even so, 16 of the Americans have quit, and as many more say they would do so if they could find jobs in the U.S. Says Gulp: “I never thought that an administrative screw-up of such proportions was possible.”

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