Hi there and thank you for your emails and good thoughts.

Since Thursday 30th of August , we bring our children to school every morning. One of us will accompany the children to the headmistress , she welcomes us and invites the children to go to their classrooms. It depends from the children, what will happen then. On Thursday,  Moritz decided to return with Tilman right away, while Thomas went to the classroom and agreed to stay there for 1 hour, because they had a rehearsal there for the school enrollment on Monday, and he found that interesting. After  this, Tilman returned and took him back home as agreed with the teacher ("Why didn’t you come earlier?"). On Friday, both children went into their classrooms, and Moritz told me that he solved some arithmetic problems there. After one hour both children independent from each other returned to the headmistress and asked to "phone home" as agreed before. Tilman was still there in conversation with her, so they could cycle home right away. On Monday,  both children told me that they would not enter the classroom today. But the headmistress asked them to at least say hello to their teachers and the other kids. How difficult it is for children to resist the will of an adult! Thomas succeeded in saying hello and telling the teacher that he did not want to stay, but perhaps would return at half past ten to see the enrollment show they had the rehearsals for. (I stood there waiting and he was able to ask me if I would bring him for the enrollment ceremony. Otherwise I am sure he would have ended staying there without wanting to.) Moritz was accompanied to the classroom by the headmistress, and when I saw him the next time he sat in the morning circle, looked at me rather unlucky, but didn’t move.  I hesitated if I should help him, but decided that this was his special training. It felt awful to leave him there, but I knew that his teacher would not try to force him to stay, since she had been in good contact with us, monitoring Moritz for one school year.

So I left with Thomas. 20 minutes after we arrived at home, the phone rang: "This is Moritz. Please come and pick me up." (Since the children must be in school, we have to pick them up so that they are under surveillance. Otherwise it could be difficult if something happened to them, a traffic jam for example. Children are not supposed to run free during school times.) He then told me that it was hard to rise and resist to the teacher’s proposals what he could do and what she had prepared for him, because she is friendly and he does not want to hurt her feelings. She’s one of the very engaged and really  cordial teachers, as Thomas’s teacher and the headmistress, too. (After all, this is a model school project of the government with a collection of especially motivated teachers! I am convinced that many children without any chance to learn freely love to go there. Anyway, I would prefer this school to many schools I know. Only that our kids prefer to stay at home) But Moritz found it still harder to convince the head mistress. She told him, "But you’ve been there for only 20 minutes. This is too short t o learn anything." She is right from her point of view, but I think, there are two points to this: 1) His motivation to be there wasn’t to learn something but to avoid 6000 € fine or jail for his parents.  2) I think he learned a big lecture that day, and he was really proud because he succeeded in insisting on this own will instead of  accommodating politely.
Today, both children told the headmistress they did not want to visit the classroom but return immediately, which they did. Both children are blithely and this minute no their way to the children’s choir and soccer training after that - this is the aspect of schooldays they love. Nevertheless, Moritz has got skin problems around his mouth, always his first  symptom of being stressed.
We hope that this will not last for years, because it is not the kind of starting the day we prefer. On September 17th, a national tv-program about Homeschooling in Germany including our family will be broadcasted (Focus tv). How will the news about us will be?

Dagmar Neubronner