On safari in the school biotope

The parents

The committed

She tries so hard. The dedicated student sits at the parents' meeting with a worried face, she is at the end of her tether. «We've got another B in English, and we've learnt so much!» she desperately complains to the teacher. The dedicated student is usually a full-time mother and sees her child's development as part of her self-realisation.
And so she crams formulae, dates and vocabulary with him and, if necessary, goes over the presentation for the next day during a night shift to improve it. Any failure at school hits her just as hard. With all this commitment, the only hope left is to be able to justify the poor grades with ADHD, dyslexia, dyscalculia or unrecognised giftedness. But the only thing that psychologists and doctors can attest to your child is average laziness and above-average spoilt-ness.

Once the child has graduated from school, the volunteer has to cure her burn-out.

When planning the summer party, the volunteer takes on more tasks than everyone else, and of course she claps the loudest at the theatre group's performance in the gym. When the child finally graduates from school, the volunteer first has to cure the burnout she has ignored for years. Once this is behind her, she gets involved in the church community instead and waits for grandchildren so that she can repeat the same programme in an optimised form.
Favourite teacher: the idealist. She swaps cake recipes with him at the summer party, and he is also the only teacher she can call on her mobile phone at any time if she gets stuck with her child's homework.

The passive

The passive is usually a male parent who wears either a business suit or a tracksuit, as he prefers to appear at the top and bottom of the social strata. Regardless of whether they are smart or slovenly, what passives have in common is that they take very little interest in their children's school education. Passives see parent-teacher conferences as a punishment that their wives force them to attend every few years.
The passive parent knows roughly where the school building is, but not how to pronounce the three-letter abbreviation of the school name. And whether the child is in 9a or 9b is, in his opinion, absurdly detailed knowledge. He also has no idea which century his child is currently studying in history, but at home he occasionally pats the child hunched over his exercise books on the shoulder and says encouragingly: «Very good, keep up the good work.» If the child causes problems at school, he reacts with a helpless, overwhelmed shrug and replies: «What can you do, that's just the way the child is.»
If he accidentally gets caught up in the planning meeting for the school summer party, he sits in the last row and just before the tasks are distributed, he scurries off to the toilet, mumbling apologies. By the time he returns, the committed person has taken over all the unfinished work. Not much changes for the passive person after the child finishes school. The fact that his offspring is now at university and studying something to do with «...sciences» is something he registers favourably, however, in that no one ever forces him to talk to teachers about it again.
Favourite teacher: Oh, that one there, Mr What's-his-face, the one with the jumper and the hair, he seemed all right.

The accuser

The accuser type is also more common among fathers than mothers. Professionally, he is usually in middle or upper management. He regards teachers as subordinate staff who are paid with his tax money to take over the education and upbringing of his children. His tone at the parent-teacher conference is correspondingly bossy. The child is often disruptive in class? «That's your job, not mine,» he tells the teacher. If the child's promotion is at risk and the teacher doesn't respond to his productive suggestion to improve the results a little so that the child's school project can be brought to a positive conclusion after all, he likes to become choleric.
As he is stupidly not authorised to fire the teacher for incompetence, the only sanction he can impose is the threat of «legal repercussions». When planning the summer party, he brings his laptop and uses a projector to throw a presentation on the wall explaining how the same work can be done more effectively by fewer people. Once the child has passed his A-levels despite the incompetent teaching staff, the accuser is relieved. From now on, everything gets better: the son is channelled into his father's former student fraternity, and from then on, the father's old men and business partners make sure that his career runs smoothly.
Favourite teacher: The idealist, because he is so easily intimidated and has taken out expensive legal expenses insurance out of sheer fear of the accuser.

The eco chick

The ecotussi is simply the better person, and she likes to show it. She has left her wild, rebellious youth, the Castor protests and sit-in demonstrations behind her. Now she cultivates a chic, ecologically and politically correct lifestyle, which she celebrates with great arrogance.
Her child was called Emil before the name became hip again, he wears his hair long and only has to comb it when he feels like it. After her child got two Ds in music, she suspected a vein of water under his seat. Emil does his homework sitting on an ergonomic kneeling chair - but only if he feels like it. If not, she writes the teacher an explanatory email about free personal development. When planning the school festival, she argues in favour of food stalls with strictly regionally produced organic food, and the coffee should please be «fair trade».
The eco-chick's always morally correct demeanour makes all the other parents feel bad and guilty because it makes them think they don't really care about their children and the world they will one day live in.
Favourite teacher: Also the idealist, of course. She discusses with him that a bus with a hybrid engine should definitely be hired for the next school trip.

The teachers

The senior teacher

There was a time, the good old days, when the head teacher could still be addressed like that. «Yes, Mrs Headmistress,» the pupils used to say to her. The head teacher smiles tiredly when she thinks back to this.
She is often tired anyway, that's resignation. She has given up trying to teach the pupils anything like respect, they don't learn on their own anyway, and she is no longer allowed to discipline them. Instead, she is now supposed to do less frontal teaching and more group work in her Latin lessons. Pedagogy like in kindergarten, she thinks and silently hands out the exercise sheets. While the class discusses noisily, she keeps calculating in her head how many more of these lessons she will have to endure before she retires.
When the head teacher meets parents, she monotonously reads out the child's grades and only says the bare minimum. Most of the time, the parents don't attach any importance to her information anyway - she has now realised that it is socially accepted to perform poorly in Latin. She usually sits alone in the staff room because she can't relate to these young, committed colleagues. Her lunchbox contains a slice of grey bread with beer ham and an apple every day.

The idealist

The idealist did not study to become a teacher because a secure civil servant job with long holidays beckoned afterwards. No, he wants to educate young people, accompany them on their path to adulthood and be a role model for them. He wants to be an advising friend to his pupils. Which, of course, they realise and comment behind his back with «Hey, that guy's a real victim». Instead of shouting «Quiet!», he says: «Hey friends, come on, let's concentrate a bit more and then you can go to break five minutes earlier, is that okay with you?»

The idealist wants to be a counselling friend for his students.

As a trainee teacher, the idealist once took his guitar to English lessons to sing his pupils' favourite songs. After they asked for gangsta rap with banned lyrics, he discarded this teaching method. In order to at least get through to the pupils to some extent, he sometimes resorts to bribery: he brings home-baked cakes or lets the pupils watch a film. In the staff room, he has set up a discussion group with his young French colleague and the skateboarding biology teacher trainee, in which they try to understand the thoughts of today's kids.

The nerd

The nerd doesn't care about pedagogy and didactics, he is primarily interested in the beauty of mathematical formulae. He doesn't even know why he studied to be a teacher in the first place. With his back to the class, he immerses himself in arithmetic operations across all the wings of the blackboard, saying: «... multiplied by x to the power of three, minus a b squared, divided by ...» When he has the solution after 45 minutes, he turns around and sees: 21 students are asleep, two are typing on their mobile phones, one student is painting her fingernails. Only one is staring enthusiastically at the blackboard.
During parent-teacher conferences, he sits there at a loss, not knowing what to say. He often calls in sick, which isn't even really a lie, because the thought of such interpersonal encounters really makes his stomach ache. In the staff room, he sits giggling with his jumper-wearing IT colleagues - when he's among his peers, the nerd feels at ease.

The eccentric

He is the terror of all pupils. When he approaches them in the corridor, they shyly press themselves against the wall. The pupils are not afraid of him because of his sternness or authority, but because they suspect he might be a psychopath. Even in summer, he wears a long green loden coat, which is why he often smells a little harsh. His hair is tangled, he has a strange look, and he drives a strange rusty car.
In class, the eccentric often has strong mood swings, sometimes explaining things objectively, then suddenly becoming loud and angry. He teaches chemistry and often forgets to take off his safety goggles after the lesson. Colleagues avoid him, which he doesn't even realise. The wildest rumours circulate about the eccentric. Finn from year 8b swears he once saw him on the street with a dead cat in his hand. The eccentric has no contact with parents of pupils - they also know the stories and don't want to be in the same room as him.
Pictures: fotolia.com
This article was published in «Schule & Familie». Reprinted with the kind permission of ZEIT-Verlag.