On Wednesday, July 6, teachers handed out report cards to their pupils and then congregated to the teachers’s staff room for a final staff meeting to discuss matters relating to the end of the term and to say good-bye to colleagues posted to new schools, and, of course, to each other.

For pupils, the new school year will begin on Monday, August 22. For teachers, it will begin on Friday, August 19.

FSG’s school hall was the venue on Tuesday, July 5, for parents and teachers who wanted to be informed by our ninth-formers of their work experiences gained during their fortnight as interns in social and ecological institutions of the region. Most of the presentations – some of them using the most advanced computer technology – were well-prepared and highly informative.

Interns had previously decided on who would represent them to the audience.

The organizers: Teachers Ms Frauke Jahn (right) and Ms Monika Pesch

Remembering the rather acrimonious protests by concerned parents before the introduction of this new type of work experience, one could only wonder at the degree of professionalism and at the intenseness by which the pupils related their experiences.

Our Deputy Head Teacher Mr Suckrau reports:

At FSG, MAFIA means: Mater et filia or La madre e sua figlia.

The second time after last year’s first, numerous eighth-formers learning Latin last semester also tackled the Italian language in an extra-curricular group coming together in Friday’s seventh period – ordinarily an unpopular time to convene. Two groups consisting of twelve respectively 13 boys and girls got a head start in Italian under the tutelage of Mr Suckrau and Ms Thamm. All 25 passed the final test, translating an Italian letter into German, some of them »magna cum laude«!

Congratulations to the 25 – bravissimo!

Nearly a thousand FSG students flocked to Cappenberg Public Outdoor Swimming Pools on Monday, July 4, to celebrate the end of the school year in a spirit of fun and relaxation. Several events marked the day: concerts by our school rock bands, sports contests, a fashion show by our grades 5-8, and a Guinness Book of Records attempt at building a hill of caps – the literal translation of Cappenberg. The caps were later donated to »SOS Peace Village« at Oberhausen.

All of them good readers: Lara, Olaf, Olivia, Lukas, Verena, Marie und Till (from left).

»Shock your parents, read a book« – the subtle defeatism of this (at best) semi-ironic motto did by no means apply to the seven participants of this year’s fifth-form reading contest on Wednesday, June 29.

The candidates had to read two texts: One was a text of their own choice, the other one was wholly new to them, an excerpt from Uwe Timm’s prize-winning The Treasure on Pagen Island. The panel of judges – consisting of our fifth-grade German teachers and of the owner of one of our local bookshops – assessed not only the technical reading skill of the contestants but also their ability to put their own excerpt into the larger context of the book and to relate to the audience.

All contestants were given recent pocket-book publications as prizes, and the best three among them received hard-cover books on top.

Traditionally, our younger pupils spend a week at »Schwennauhof« – a former farm long converted to a youth camp – on Flensburg Bay, right opposite the Danish coast. On Monday, June 27, 119 boys and girls returned safely from this year’s stay.

Read the illustrated »Glücksburg Diary« und our report.

From left to right: Leo, Christina, Larissa, Hannah, Friederike, Jonathan

This is what happened on Thursday, March 17: 160 FSG pupils pondered the 30 mathematical problems set to them as part of the nationwide »Kangaroo Day Maths Contest« in which 334,217 participants from third to thirteenth grade tried to find the one correct solution (among five).

4100 schools participated in this contest which is being organized by Berlin’s Humboldt University since 1995. Our Mathematics teacher Ms Ursula Schmidt explains how this contest differs from similar events:

Participants must solve a large number of problems in a relatively short time. To do that, they must sometimes guess – and luck must be on their side, too: Points are deducted for wrong answers! First prize was awarded to Leo Ostrovski of Form 8a. Only about 1 % of all participants got a first prize.

That’s what many asked who passed the display cabinet opposite the entrance to our sixth-form counseling office. Read the answer here – and look at more pictures and objects from this semester’s arts classes.

We do not usually show pictures like the one on the left in our website, but since it is for a good cause we thought you might put up with it just this once.

The novel Doing It and seventy more books were reviewed by FSG pupils and teachers. Ida Szenasi, for example, a student of our twelfth grade, had this to say about Melvin Burgess’ novel:

By only reading the first two pages one soon gets the answer what the author Melvin Burgess wants to say by calling his book »doing it«. It can actually be said that the first three phrases are enough to understand.

You’ve become curious now, haven’t you? To read more, click on the frontispiece of Doing It!

A ninth-form Computer Science elective course has just finished this html show. »It’s all hand-programmed,« the boys and girls claim. See for yourself if that is true by clicking on the image of their index page.

Ernst Levi was in ninth grade when in 1937 – as one of the last Jewish pupils at our school – he was forced to leave FSG and managed to emigrate to Palestine. There, as Yacov Levi, he trained to be a carpenter, later worked as a teacher in vocational schools and with handicapped children and, after his retirement in 1988, started another career as a painter. He has just opened his Internet gallery and has invited visitors of the FSG website to take a look at his work there.

A letter of April 28 by the organizers of this year’s National Geographic Knowledge Contest made it official: Our ninth-grader Ilhan Kahraman won the North-Rhine Westphalian state contest and will travel to Berlin to take part in the finals on June 4.

Classmates and teachers congratulated Ilhan und Ms Julia Bielicki, his Geography teacher, on this achievement and wished Ilhan good luck for the last round.

Photo: Abel Varga

… when in the evening of April 13 school bands, choirs and instrumental groups played to an enthusiastic audience. A detailed report adorned with photographs is to follow soon.

Ten teams of pupils presented their projects to parents, teachers and other guests on March 16. They had been allowed six months for this extra-curricular work prepared under the tutelage of teachers invited by the teams.

Former teachers Ms Charlotte Ullrich and Ms Nadine Schneider, who in their FSG years had been active supporters of »EinStein«, were among the guests of honour and members of the panel of judges selecting the prize-winning projects.

The ten projects were all remarkable, even though only two could be awarded a prize in the end.

These boys and girls from Year 7 were awarded a prize for their presentation Our Planets.

Six weeks of researching and writing dozens of articles and of taking as many photographs for Westfälische Rundschau, one of our local newspapers, came to an end on March 16 when three Year Eight forms helped stage a two-hour »Good Bye« talent show in the auditorium of Luenen’s »Lippe Vocational College«.

The journalism project is organized annually – and at no cost to participating schools – by »Westdeutsche Allgemeine/Westfälische Rundschau Publishing House«, the major press group in the Ruhr region. Educationally, the project is well structured and designed. The idea behind it is to make pupils aware of the principles, the possibilities and the responsibilities of writing for, producing and selling a local newspaper – and, of course, to acquaint them with the habit of reading a newspaper regularly: No easy task in our age of proliferating electronic media.

At quarter past eight, Technical Director Mr Gerd Beiderbeck welcomed the boys and girls to a guided tour of the theatre’s workshops, its dress stores, shoe stores and general equipment stores and showed them the intricate technology involved in using and lighting the two stages of Bochum’s »Major House« and »Minor House«.

A two-phase, three-hour seminar conducted by Ms Sandra Anklam, one of Bochum’s two drama teachers liasing with schools, allowed the pupils to try out elements of the actor’s work of communicating a character’s status by means of his body language.

In the evening, the pupils were able to see on stage some of the acting principles they had tried out themselves: In The Parasite, a comedy on the downfall of an 18th-century careerist, nationally renowned actors like Michael Maertens and Felix Voertler used many of the body language symbols the pupils had learned earlier in the day.

The day ended when around midnight parents collected tired teenagers at Luenen’s Central Station. But then, who is to complain – »the arts are a lot of work!«

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