They brought back indelible impressions from St Petersburg, where, from September 29 to October 12, they lived in the families of fellow students of »Goethe School« and shared their private and school life.

Read what they did during their stay and see the four pages with photographs!

It was a multi-faceted event that pupils, parents and teachers had organized for our »International Day of Languages« on October 15. Check out the programme …

… and feel the atmosphere that pervaded the afternoon and evening by looking at the photographs taken there.

What will the issues and events of the school year be? Thirty active members of the FSG student body plus two alumni spent the weekend of November 14 to 16 planning and discussing the agenda for the coming months. Student body counsellors Karl-Heinz Graas, Torsten Kramer and Martin Loer helped the students – of which only ten showed up for a walk and a photograph in the woods around the traditional »Haus Neuland« venue, near Bielefeld – to shape ideas into concrete plans.

Among the plans discussed was the programme for our »Acitivities Week 2004«: It will revolve around the Middle Ages. For that purpose, a moat will be dug around FSG, and a drawbridge will be installed. The part of the Knight in Shining Armour, however, has not yet been assigned, and it is quite doubtful if our thirteenth-formers will regard their final exams – due between April and June 2004 – as the modern equivalent of the pursuit of the Holy Grail.

Birte Rudolph – formerly of Form 10a – left our school at the end of last school year, albeit for a few months and for a special reason: She had organized her own four-month foreign exchange with Salford, Lünen’s twin town in Northern England. Read Birte’s report.

A group of pupils from »Insitution Jeanne d’Arc«, our twin school in Etampes, near Paris, visited FSG between November 26 and December 3. Read the programme and look at some pictures of their stay!

On Saturday, November 29, FSG alumni celebrated a reunion party after taking part in the Alumni Volleyball Christmas Tournament. See the photographs!

The redesign and relaunch of our website have just been »finalized«, as the knowing say. We hope our new method of navigation (to be found not only at the bottom of each page, but – more conveniently – at its top as well) and our use of cascading style sheets will facilitate our visitors’ use of the site.

We have also tried to revamp our website structurally by adding to the index page a more precise headword now called »Schulprojekte« (scholastic projects), thus indicating that projects described here have to do with more long-lived educational intentions at FSG. Accordingly, short-term projects will now be displayed in »Fächer«, a headword leading to news from the subjects.

If you want to see what this website used to look like before the redesign, click here: In our »Chronicle«, pages will remain as they were uploaded at the end of each school year.

Any comments or suggestions? Please mail us.

…writes Ms Tanya Drozhina on behalf of the staff at »Goethe School«, our twin school no 515 in St Petersburg, »we send our most cordial season’s greetings and our best wishes to our good friends at Freiherr vom Stein Gymnasium. Thank you so much for the great present that Ms Scholle and her pupils brought on the occasion of their visit: a DVD player! We have already watched the film Good-bye, Lenin! and will certainly be able to put the player to good use in future as well. Thank you very much! We wish you happiness, joy, good health and success in your work!«

»Are we all dumb? Or what was PISA all about?« Issue no 43 of our students’ magazine Steinzeit (»Stone Age«) addressed itself to this terrible question, thereby giving an appropriate answer of its own.

»PISA« stands for »Programme for International Student Assessment« – and it is the most comprehensive study of scholastic achievement ever conducted internationally. Undertaken in the year 2000 under the guidance of OECD, the »Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development«, the study showed that German pupils did no better than the average pupils in all the other countries. Since then, a discussions has been raging in wide parts of Germany’s public on how to improve learning and education.

Two years ago, Matthias Buyken, Dagmar Hampel, Kirsten Jepp-Fabritz, Barbara Koloska, Stefan Rehfeuter, Nathalie Schneider and Abel Varga started their teacher training at FSG and at Dortmund’s teacher training seminaries.

Now, on Tuesday, January 27, they left FSG after having taken their »State Exams« (Frau Hampel and Frau Koloska had already concluded their training courses successfully at an earlier time).

Staff and pupils were loath to see the young teachers go. In this situation, the fact that two of them, Frau Schneider and herr Varga, will continue at FSG for another semester, gave some comfort.

It is almost thirty years that Frau Antje Vega started work at FSG as one of our school’s rare Arts teachers. On Friday, January 30, colleagues, parents and pupils said good-bye to her when she was pensioned off officially by headmaster Dr Czischke in a ceremony and reception in our school hall.

Frau Vega was first trained to be a Graphic Designer and then took up studies at Duesseldorf’s renowned Arts Academy. During the three decades that she worked as a teacher, she continually organized exhibitions showing her artistic diversity. It is that line of work she will pursue exclusively now once she has moved from her flat in the gatehouse of Cappenberg Manor House to her new abode in Bavaria.

Norbert Bathe	Sven Battenfeld	Ute Hirsch	Dorothee Klinger	Sebastian Knauf	Anastasia Willems

On Wednesday, February 4, six new student teachers started their training course at FSG and the affiliated seminaries in Dortmund:

• Herr Norbert Bathe (History and Religious Education for Catholics)
• Herr Sven Battenfeld (Sports and Social Sciences)
• Frau Ute Hirsch (German and Russian)
• Frau Dorothee Klinger (Religious Education for Protestants and Educational Science)
• Herr Sebastian Knauf (English and Political Science)
• Frau Anastasia Willems (English and Russian)

Headmaster and staff gave the new colleagues a cordial welcome.

Frau Barbara Höpping is an editor at one of our regional newspapers, Westfälische Rundschau. On Friday, February 6, she paid a visit to Form 8c, one of the three eighth-grade classes participating in a regionwide journalistic project carried by »WAZ Publishing Concern «, the owners of Germany’s largest regional newspapers Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, Westfälische Rundschau and Ruhrnachrichten.

Under Frau Höpping’s direction, hundreds of pupils in and around Lünen will spend the next four to six weeks studying the newspaper business, spending field days at the »WAZ-Konzern«’s printing centre and similar places of interest, learning about newspaper journalism and writing for Westfälische Rundschau. Every morning, they will each receive a copy of Westfälische Rundschau and analyze it in class, they will learn about writing all types of journalistic texts and will pursue their own journalistic project, which – ideally – in each case will lead to a publication in the newspaper.

We publish four Letters to Parents per year: one at the end of each half-term, and one in the middle of each half term on the occasion of either of our two »Parents’ Consultation Days«. In those Letters, we inform parents of recent events and developments at FSG. Read our Letter to Parents

• of Wednesday, December 03, 2003

… to the second half-term.