Welcome German Visitors
by Stephen Keith Sagarin, Faculty Chair - 27 Oct 2008
They missed a flight from Philadelphia to Hartford, but otherwise our visitors from the Munich-Schwabing Waldorf School had a smooth trip, arriving around 10 p.m. last night (Sunday, October 26), when German teacher Ursula Wirth and a contingent of Waldorf school German students met them. They returned to the high school to meet their host families and were in bed by 1 a.m.—7 a.m. German time.
The four visiting students and their chaperone, English teacher from the Munich school Sylvia Hochleitner, made it to school by 10 a.m. this morning, tired but happy, and were instantly swept up in greetings—a bagel snack for Elizabeth Orenstein’s Sweet 16th birthday, and enchiladas with salsa verde from the Spanish students’ weekly food tasting.
Julia Thamm, Marie Sophie Schiebl, and Tanja Engelmann, tenth grade, and Damian Thoenges, 11th grade, will spend three weeks with us, living with American families, speaking English, getting to know western Massachusetts, Boston, and New York, and going to school. The German students will join Great Barrington Waldorf High School students in grades 10 through 12 in an intensive 3 week seminar study of the U.S. Consitution and Bill of Rights with Peter Elliston, a Georgetown law school graduate, around the time of the presidential election. That study began today and will end on November 14. The German students will return to Munich on Sunday, November 16.
The German students’ visit is sponsored, in part, by the German American Partnership Program (GAPP), which assisted students from Great Barrington in traveling to Munich last spring. The German American Partnership Program (GAPP) is a non-profit high school exchange program between schools in Germany and the United States, sponsored by the German Foreign Office and by the US Department of State. The main objective of the Program is the integration of students into the everyday life of host families and into the classroom activities of host schools to provide them with a coherent intercultural experience.
This visit is the fourth since 2004. German students visit Great Barrington every other year, and, in alternate years, students from Great Barrington travel to Germany.
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