Building land in the middle of nowhere with the house prices?!

The Referendariat is what, for other theoreticians who have just graduated from university and have never been in professional life, is the onboarding. Anyone who comes straight from university and is immediately supposed to plan a bridge and coordinate the project will fail if no one shows them how and occasionally keeps an eye on them.

And just like during the Referendariat, one is also evaluated by others. Unlike a teacher, even throughout their entire life and not just once at the end of the Referendariat...

But does a teacher need 5 years of master's studies and then another 1.5 years of teacher training? No. Someone who was really good in their two subjects in the Abitur could almost start teaching professionally right away. Why does teacher training have to take 2 years longer than a normal master's/diploma? Why not do "just" 3 years of a bachelor's and then 2 years of teacher training with "fair" (at least minimum wage) payment? That would actually be a way to counter the teacher shortage. Make the training cheaper and shorter (and thus indirectly cheaper again).

I have been wondering for years why every teacher has to develop their entire teaching material (apart from the textbook) themselves and spend countless hours creating chalkboard illustrations, worksheets, and lessons. I would find it much more sensible and efficient if, in the respective Ministry of Education, there were a group of experts for each subject who take care of this for the entire federal state, centrally develop these materials, and then distribute them to the teachers for use.

But then the ministry would have to stand behind what it messes up and could no longer hide behind vague competencies. Poor student performance could no longer be easily passed downwards.

It's called responsible schooling.

I would have loved to have teachers like my wife. She believes that language competence is especially important today to navigate the modern media landscape. She digs the old Shakespeare out of the mothballs and relates it to current discussions.

Poetry and I – we probably won’t be friends. But language as a tool for influence – that could be taken as a lesson for life.

Yes, language competence is important. Unfortunately, German classes completely miss adapting that to practice. No one needs to interpret a Schiller daily, and whether the author really hid 15 pages of meaning in 20 lines of poetry ... what’s totally missing in school is how to critically read a newspaper article or deal with sales arguments and spot the pitfalls in contracts. German lessons focus too much on outdated literature; spelling and practical language skills fall by the wayside.

It’s no longer like that, not since the switch to competencies in the curriculum. New teachers have caught on and this is what is taught at university as well. Regarding career changers: yes, they need to do the teaching internship but not many didactics lectures during university.

At work I was never put to the test as much at the start as in the internship, or does the boss, your supervisor, and the CEO of the company sit beside you and criticize everything you did? I doubt that. Of course, training is needed, but having your grade depend on just a few moments is really tough, especially since if you fail your whole degree is wasted. As a normal employee, you just move to another company. As a teacher, you can’t do that so easily.

We have the option that the posts on both sides go to the neighbors (they don’t mind because they will make a hedge there).

For us, it would look nicer if we have no posts in the garden.

That’s why I wanted to ask what advantages there are if the posts are inside on our side.

Posts on "my" side at least give me the feeling that it’s "my" fence and I’m showing my neighbor the boundary. I would prefer that.

That’s an argument, but since we’re buying the fence together, it belongs to both of us 50:50 anyway.

I forgot to mention, privacy slats will be put in the fence.

Our neighbors couldn’t care less about the fence posts.

On which side would you place the fence posts, on ours or the neighbors’?

Yes, language competence is important. Unfortunately, German lessons completely fail to adapt this to practice. No one has to interpret a Schiller in everyday life, and whether the author really hid 15 pages of meaning in 20 lines of poetry ... school completely lacks teaching on how to critically read a newspaper article or deal with sales arguments and spot the pitfalls in contracts. German lessons are dominated too much by outdated literature, spelling and practical language skills are left behind

On the one hand that is true, on the other hand, the difference between the old and the new colleagues becomes apparent. The "old ones" defend the "good, old humanistic" education with tooth and nail, the new ones are much more in tune with the spirit of the times. To be fair, one has to say: Whoever can understand the classics can also understand what you demand. But not everyone does, with a decreasing tendency since the introduction of shorthand through certain social media. How do you motivate today’s students to read something like that?

Regarding career changers: Yes, they have to do the teacher training but not the many didactics lectures in the studies.

And what difference does that make in dealing with students? Pretty much exactly zero. That involves many things you either have or you don’t. And what you can learn, you can only learn practically because it has to be practiced. I had a half crash course in theoretical didactics. What would I do differently today if I hadn’t had it? Nothing! Completely useless. But I can join in the super clever name-dropping with which teaching concepts are often seasoned. By far the most I benefited from was my years of work in the sports club and my expertise. The rest was learning by doing under the supervision of sometimes better, sometimes worse instructors.

You can definitely notice a significant difference when someone masters the subject didactics, especially in how they approach the problem. This is somewhat more noticeable in the lower grade levels, whereas in [Berufsschule] it is almost irrelevant.

I agree with religious education, but not with English.
English is a global language and it feels like the world is getting smaller. Children are already confronted with English in everyday situations.

I clearly disagree with both. A divided world in which the imams take care of the religious knowledge of Muslim children (and at the same time the state teachers make sure that the non-Muslim children have a blind spot in the same area) cannot be good. In a multi-religious country, every schoolchild needs a basic understanding of the cultural backgrounds of their classmates. And superficial English is just enough to translate comic speech bubbles. By the way, an unbiased look at the world map quickly reveals that you are understood in almost as many countries with Spanish ;-)
What is gravely lacking is foreign language teaching that is not limited to a single foreign language but promotes language acquisition competence. Students from village schools are somewhat less unfit in this respect, since in city schools bilingual dialect / standard language is not spoken.

I have been wondering for years why every teacher has to develop all their teaching materials (apart from the textbook) completely on their own and spends countless hours creating board layouts, worksheets, and lessons. I would find it much more sensible and efficient if there were an expert group in the respective Ministry of Education for each subject, which would take care of this for the entire federal state and centrally develop these materials and then provide them to teachers for use.

You are just as out of touch with reality as the responsible ministry bureaucracy. There have already been teachers for quite some time who have discovered the internet as a resource exchange for teaching materials.

Anyone who was really good in their two subjects in the Abitur could almost start teaching professionally right away.

I never understood why nobody in Germany seems to come up with the idea of using high school students as tutors for the lower and middle grades. This "division of labor" with teachers as the sole transmitters of knowledge and students only as consumers is nonsense.

You can definitely notice a significant difference when someone masters subject didactics, especially how they approach the problem. This is a bit more noticeable in the lower grades; in vocational school, however, it hardly matters.

Unfortunately, this view is shared by those responsible for vocational school teachers and is largely responsible for the frustration of many vocational students. Trainees often have the impression of being worthless because no one is ashamed to present them with "junk" in the form of pedagogical complete failures as teachers :-(

Overall, one unfortunately gets the impression that German school bureaucrats have all seen too many teacher movies from the 1960s. It must be prevented that teachers who cannot handle students well are transferred to school supervision positions.