Born To Be A Teacher, Familial Expectations Be D***ed!

When my mother was a young adult in the 1950s, in Germany, she only got permission from her family to become a secondary modern school (Realschule) teacher, not a grammar school (Gymnasium) teacher.

It wasn’t even her parents who were the driving factor of this restriction but an aunt of hers. I never found out why that nosey aunt had so much say in the matter. She certainly didn’t pay Mum’s tuition. It was really none of her business in any way. But she represented what “people would be saying”, as it were: Mum would marry anyway, so an expensive advanced education would be wasted on her.

Okay, then. Mother obediently went to University and took teaching classes in French and geography — both subjects that a teacher might well teach in a secondary modern school at that time. However, geography was just a decoy subject; she also took classes in Latin, so she could become a grammar school teacher for French and Latin.

And when that came out at long last, immediately before the final State Exams, things really blew up at home. “You’ve known that all along! You have deceived and betrayed us!”

So, that’s why my mother had to do one and a half times as much work for her studies as her fellow students did. In the end, she was a licensed teacher for three subjects instead of just two as is customary for grammar school teachers in Germany.

And she actually did “marry anyway”; she married another grammar school teacher, and both of them taught in a grammar school after their studies all the way until their retirement age.