A normal day in a sidestepping primary school teacher's life in Berlin Mitte

I just looked up the word 'Quereinstieg' on the ever-fabulous dict.cc. I know, intuitively, what it means cos I'm like livin' it right now. It's not sidestepping inwards (as implied in my title) but officially known in English-speaking quarters as 'lateral entry'. Sounds like doing the limbo to me, and to be honest I often feel like that's where I've ended up. Here are two examples of what limbo-dancing looks like:

Although I do have to say that my limbo moves resemble more the latter (nothing to do with the suit).
I am a true intruder in the respected profession of teaching. Despite the fact that my colleagues are utterly lovely (when they are not gloomy and overworked which is 85% of the time) as well as supportive, I still feel like I SHOULDN'T REALLY BE HERE. Yet I've heard from the horses' mouths (i.e. the kids) that the content of the lessons are good, and that generally they are getting to know a lot more about English than they had done before, the problem is the NOISE LEVEL and general unruliness in the classroom. As well as Frau Fräulein's level and tone of voice on certain occasions. I'm the unfair-fair teacher.

Have you ever heard of Senator Sandra Scheeres? If not and you're currently wondering how someone could have such an incredibly alliterate name (including professional title), let me endow you with more knowledge. Frau Scheeres is Berlin's senator of education, and the lady that most of the people are pointing fingers at when complaining that Berlin's Brennpunktschulen (I'll come to that later) are full of sidestepping limbo artists like your's truly. Let me dig deeper into the translation of that wonderfully visual word 'Brennpunkt'. It's negative connotations outdo it, it literally means burning point, as in combustion, fire and flames, too hot, ouch ouch burny, and so on. It also basically signifies that a lot of people are gathered together in a miserable social situation and surroundings teetering somewhere between armageddon and acopolypse (causes: poverty, a bunch of unhappy foreigners who can't talk the talk, fighting, knifing, drugs, general misery and ghetto). Add children who go to school to all this and you've got a Brennpunktschule. The Brennpunktschule is probably not the school that your well-educated, cultivated parents are going to rush in droves to send their kids to. And its also probably not the school that the well-educated, cultivated, properly trained teachers are going to rush to teach at (though I don't want to generalise here).

Hi, it's me.

You don't know me, and to be honest why the hell would you.
I'm unknown, used to be, has been and so forth.

Actually I used to be British, then I used to live in Munich and then I used to be in Vienna.
Now I'm in Berlin. Actually now is an overstatement. I'm a Berlinerin. Not a new one, or an old one. Just one. One of the many, one of the few.

I came here fifteen years ago, and just now, whilst putting my daughter to bed, I had the sparklingly bright idea to start a blog and vomit all my tuppences about whatitmeanstobehere all over the world wide web. Or even just for a few interested parties. Who knows? The statistics might tell me but probably not.

My name is unimportant and probably better that I don't write it down. For now let's just call me Frau Fräulein. Or Betsy. Maybe Betsy is better. Nah, Frau Fräulein is good, cos it's got the umlauts above the 'A' before the 'U' that make many non-German speaking people mispronounce it. Like that brew Löwenbräu. Sorry Löwenbräu.

I'll try and summarise my skills in a two-liner. I can draw, sing and I can speak two languages. I can drive a car and I think I'm hilarious when I'm probably not.

Most of those skills have either got me nowhere or somewhere. For a while I was going to be a great artist, represented by all the top notch galleries and in every art fair that Saatchi has tatooed on his arse. Then, for a time, I was a staggeringly famous singer with my vocals lacing this and that pepsi cola advert or this and that catwalk. A while after that I was going to be a translator, equipped with fabulous language skills that nobody else could beat, not even the native speakers. And a while following that other while I was going to be an educator in art institutions and even run my own children's museum.

Now I'm a mother of two and today, right now, I'm a primary school teacher and am qualified to be neither of those things. But I'm doing them all the same. Here in Berlin, in the ultra cool center-point of slowly crumbling Europe, it's possible. Whoah cool! Berlin - do you love it? Do you own it? Nope, I don't. I own nothing, I love it even less.

Let's start with today. I missed the U-bahn by ca. 10 seconds. People used to hold the doors open for latecomers like myself. USED TO. Or maybe only at a certain hour of the day. Quite often I have the feeling that Berlin is constantly trying to trip me up. Show me up. Point out my failings and laughing at me. Other times, when I'm hurtling past it in an ICE train coming back home from another city, I feel all cool and howzaty when I breeze past the TV Tower towards Alex at a very odd diagonal that only an ICE can manage - a kind of laissez faire gaze at the horrors that await. (The horrors include a branch of Top Shop and TK Maxx for all those who missed their presence).

I had to wait 5 WHOLE MINUTES for the next train, at the peak going-to-work time of 7:30 am! It meant I had a mad dash to school, and just made it before the bell rang. My first lesson was with a particularly awful group of brats, sorry, children, who still haven't figured out that they've got it THIS good having a native speaker as their English teacher. Despite the fact I'm not a qualified teacher that is. But hey, this is Berlin! Anything goes, right?

This image pretty much describes a typical lesson with me. And that's on a good day.
Did I mention I'm a teacher in a particularly troubled area of Berlin with particularly troubled kids from particularly troubled backgrounds? Well now you know.

Most of these kids have names I don't even know how to pronounce, which makes me the laughing stock of the whole class. That doesn't bother me however, as I'm all adept at diversity, gender fluidity and wellness and the like. I always politely ask how I'm supposed to say the names. And then I try to copy what I've heard. Much like what the kids are doing when they are speaking new words in English, (mis)pronounced by me. Who can blame them, I'd have done THE SAME THING. Yet its not the same, all is different. These kids are 10 or 11 or 12 years old for hell's sakes. I was never that disrespectful of my elders back in the stone age. Or was I?

As the day draws to an end (believe me, Monday is an easy day), I feel like I'm losing my youthful good looks and they're being replaced by savage frown lines, sore gritty throat from shouting and the dust caused by the building site which is the school (more about that another time) as well as prematurely aged and strained skin from, well, premature aging and straining. All in a day's work.