School 1 - Ödenburger Straße

Ödenburger Straße was my first school in Vienna. If you've read my first couple of blog posts you will know that I spent one of my first days in Vienna in hospital (which you can read more about here), so I didn't actually get to start school with the new term. But that was ok really, because I was going to be the new girl no matter what!

Here's a brief overview of the Austrian School System. It may be boring so you can skip this paragraph if you like!
It is compulsory for all children who are permanent residents of Austria to go to school from the school year following their sixth birthday, with their education lasting at least nine years. Primary education (Volksschule) lasts for 4 years. Lower secondary education lasts for another four years and at this level there are two streams of schooling to choose from - Hauptschule or Allgemeinbildende Höhere Schule (or AHS-Unterstufe). Both the lower secondary branches offer basic general education preparing students for their transfer to their final years of schooling in upper secondary education, however Hauptschule (as far as I can tell) teaches at a slower pace. Upper secondary school has a lot of options! Students start there when they're about 14, and education goes for another four to five years. At this point, students from the Hauptschule have the choice to study VET (Vocational Education and Training) programs with apprenticeship training and students attending AHS-Unterstufe will often branch into different specialist Gymnasiums (Yes, high school is called 'Gymnasium'!) preparing them for university study. Gymnasiums have focuses such as Languages (inc. Latin and Ancient Greek), Maths and Geometry or Economics (among other things). So now you are knowledgeable!

Ödenburger Straße is one of the biggest schools in Vienna and has 3 different streams within it - Languages, Arts and Maths/Science. I was in the Arts stream but I only attended this school for three very very cold, foggy weeks before moving!

A typical afternoon - my bus stop outside school

Every morning I had to catch the bus at 7:40am - still in the dark - which was about the same time I had to in Australia. School went from 8:10 until 1pm everyday which meant it usually went quite quickly and I always free afternoons! It is AMAZING the amount of subjects students must attend here and I found it quite strange because school hours were a lot shorter than in Australia and yet I had eleven different classes. Yes. ELEVEN. They were German, Geography, Psychology, Physics, Chemistry, English, History, Maths, Italian, Music and Religion. Students don't get a choice in which subjects they have, and the majority of subjects were only 2-3 hours a week.

A typical, foggy walk home from the bus stop

Now onto the general school and class. As I think most people know, it is very daunting starting at a new school. Everything feels so big and confusing and you don't know where anything is. Well, let me just tell you this: it is absolutely TERRIFYING starting at a new school, in a new language, with thousands of students, all the ones in your class having known eachother for the last 10 years or so, and with everyone you know on the other side of the world. The first day I started school I was totally bewildered with where I was and what I was doing. But to be honest this feeling stayed for the three weeks I was there! The first day I walked into the class with my new teacher and was announced to the class. I don't actually remember much about it and I didn't write in my diary that day (which I do regret now) because I was so overwhelmed. I know that from that day though, I was pretty well ignored by the teachers because I understood very little of what they were saying. I spent most of my days trying to catch words out of the air and pin them down in my memory after translating them. So. Many. Words.

My first (and crazy) proper snow fall! Walking up my street, home from school.

The class was ok. It seemed to me that none of the students really payed all that much attention to the teachers and would often do their own thing - playing on their phones or iPods, talking, doodling... but after thinking about it, there's always students doing that and even more so in the back row, which was where my seat was! I was incredibly shy so didn't really make any friends, plus they all always had work to do. That's another thing - we had only one 15 minute break between 9:50 and 10:05 in which I would usually just stare into space, scared out of my wits. A very productive use of time, even if I do say so myself! But by the end of the three weeks I was starting to settle in a little more and found some people in the class who were more like myself (rather than the outgoing back-row smokers, which of course are good in their own way... but who wants to go out into the snow to smoke every break?). And then there were the teachers. I don't remember all of them but here goes. My German teacher was also my 'class' teacher (like tutor group) and was the first one I met. She gave me her email address and phone number straight away (which seems to be pretty normal here!) so if I had any problems I could talk to her. She was pretty nice.
My English teacher was a bit of an old fart (sorry, but it's true!) and always came up really close to talk to you. He always had lots of questions for me which were often difficult to answer (such as how my school and grades worked EXACTLY. That's hard enough to explain to people living in Australia!). I remember a particularly interesting conversation with him one lesson while the rest of the class was taking a test. He was determined to try and teach me some German, which was very nice of him but his method of doing it wasn't really the best. This consisted of him asking me questions very slowly in German in a whisper, which made it even more impossible for me to understand! He wanted to know all about my life, and this particular exchange was about what I want to do next year at university. We resorted to English and I told him that I wasn't really sure what I wanted, but maybe visual arts, music, science or historical conservation. I told him I'd already been accepted into ceramics and glass making, to which he wanted to know what the point of that was. The cheek! His argument was that there is absolutely no purpose in being a glass artist and it gives no contribution to the world so why on Earth do it? I told him it's like any art, and all for the enjoyment of others. I asked him if he thought the same about music. His answer was no, that music actually contributed to society in a greater way and that we wouldn't be able to live without it. "But why?" I asked. I pointed out to him that we live with glass around us every day - windows, jars, glasses, computers, bottles... That everything we see was originally someone's art. I was getting really pretentious at this point but I would not back down! In the end I don't think he was really convinced with my argument and it never really got resolved, but after that point I would keep looking forward to English classes just so I could talk my native tongue, and maybe just wind him up a little...
The last teacher I remember was my physics teacher and was the EPITOME of mad scientist. He had this absolutely hilarious Austrian dialect and spoke really really slowly. He wore crazy woollen jumpers (sweatshirts or pullovers for those who don't understand Australian!), huge round glasses and pulled the craziest faces. He seemed to hold a certain delight in demonstrating crazy and dangerous pracs, and there was one particular lesson which he just spent blowing bubbles... I'm sure there was a point to it all, but as an outsider looking in without understanding a word, it was simply hilarious.

A beautiful, unusually clear sunrise at my bus stop one morning

So there you have it. My first school. I didn't get an overly large impression of it because it was really big and I only attended there for three weeks. New schools are always hard, but I was looking forward to leaving and starting at the next one... who knew what would face me there?