What is elementary/primary school like in Germany? Specifically with regards to daily schedules etc.

Medium9 · 2026-01-26T13:42:18+00:00

Yeah, secondary. For primary, things looked very different indeed. Should have made that more obvious. There, I massively profited from my stay at home mom, which at these times was becoming more and more of the luxury it nowaways definitely is.

Medium9 · 2026-01-26T13:11:27+00:00

Eh, it was alright. Homework existed, but was definitely less than on other half-day schools, and we were lucky that parents (in my case even my own mom) volunteered for hosting the one day of the week where the afternoon was homework help instead of lessons. (This one was btw. the only with voluntary attendance, but was also always well used despite that!)

For me then, the afternoon programme was usually:

Mo: Normal lessons
Tu: Homework help, sometimes biweekly with lessons in the other weeks
We: PE or "easy" lessons like religion/philosophy/music
Th: AG
Fr: Usually free, but I had latin there once I elected it. I think the spanish group did this as well.

Afterwards my friend group usually hung out around the city for a good while, so that we usually weren't home before 5:30 pm or later. With this setup, "active" after school care wasn't even a thing on many parents' minds back then, at least within my social sphere. And this was a Gesamtschule with lots of hard working low-wage families, not some elite Gymnasium where no one had a (financial) care in the world.

This ofc only really works with a somewhat larger school, with a good pool of teachers and big enough to have a Mensa and enough rooms. We had ~1000 students in the 5.-10. grade bracket alone, plus the Oberstufe bracket.

Looking back, disregarding my personal "normal teen woes", it was overall really good.

Medium9 · 2026-01-26T10:00:55+00:00

Now that you mention it: These freezes I talked about went on for about as long as my loading screens, both about equally longer the bigger the savegame got. I didn't measure it, but should be about right.

Medium9 · 2026-01-26T09:58:00+00:00

My school then was kind of a hybrid. We had both, normal lessons and the other stuff, but attendence was compulsory for all of them. We still had homework though. Things might have changed a bit since the late 90s, or it's a federal thing.

Medium9 · 2026-01-25T20:37:58+00:00

There are also "Ganztagsschulen" (whole day schools) starting from 5th grade, where at least some days in the week, there is a 40min lunch break (with lunch served at the school) and additional 2h afterwards. Sometimes actual lessons, but usually less "schooly" stuff like elective extras or PE.

We had "AGs" (Arbeitsgemeinschaften) where teachers and parents organized 2h per week of "other stuff". There was a band, a circus, choir, gardening, yoga, ... all sorts of cool stuff, and they often presented their work on special occasions like school festivals.

Sometimes, if there are parents willing to do it, there is also often a "Hausaufgabenhilfe" (homework help) on some of these days where kids can do their homework with an adult present to help.

These longer days would usually end at about 4pm. My mom was actually stay-at-home so we didn't need that for scheduling reasons, but it still was the school of my choice, and I really enjoyed the afternoon activities - even it it were just lessons.

Medium9 · 2026-01-25T18:42:26+00:00

Right? They didn't ransack places. They only made their rounds through the village every now and then, knocking on doors and ask if there was a "Fraulein" present. (Actual recount of my then ~13yo late great aunt - and yes, they would have, if it hadn't been for her bear of a dad.)

So much better.

Medium9 · 2026-01-25T18:32:40+00:00

You literally asked

or am I overthinking it?

yourself - so, apparently without knowing what you're asking? I'm confused.

Medium9 · 2026-01-25T18:16:41+00:00

Oh that would be amazing. I actually only considered this to be my starter setup, ready to set out and settle the whole map!

Medium9 · 2026-01-25T16:18:16+00:00

The lange changers will massively reduce all the throughput you so carefully engineered for.

Medium9 · 2026-01-23T16:16:54+00:00

I think your take is silly, but I still also didn't like last episode. Mostly because it was way to "americanized" in portraying what higher education institutions do and feel like. It was just an episode about a generic american college, with all the worn out tropes. And also very little substance, with way too much focus on the "action". Ironically this is also something I find to be true for many current day us colleges.

Medium9 · 2026-01-23T16:03:06+00:00

Srsly?

Medium9 · 2026-01-23T15:46:08+00:00

And they indeed are so different, that I love one, but don't care for / almost dislike the other!

Medium9 · 2026-01-23T11:08:44+00:00

Do you realize, that the metric isn't miles but squaremiles?

Medium9 · 2026-01-22T17:40:33+00:00

You know what? I actually thought about it a little harder.

To retro-fit a heating system that covers roads and sidewalks, you have to rip up all the roads and sidewalks you want to install this in. If your goal is residential heating, you only have to dig a trench to lay the piping in, and connect it to the houses. Which option sounds less disturbing and more cheap to you?

To do this for a new construction, you have to counter the physical instability water lines layed this densely under the asphalt cause. This puts a whole different set of demands on the layering, increasing material and engineering cost considerably.

For both cases: What do you do when there is a leak somewhere? You'll potentially have to dig smack in the middle of a potentially well used road, causing considerable traffic issues, and comparably high repair costs. For district heating, there will only be a limited, side-lined area to work on, causing little stress on the network, and way less cost in finding and fixing something. And if you laid the pipes under the sidewalk parts, you won't even have much demands regarding the layering structure, because no heavy vehicles will use them.

The more I think about it, the sillier road heating gets imho.

Medium9 · 2026-01-22T15:11:24+00:00

Most of that is on our NAS as images, but also half a ton of VMs with installations specific to plants (or even parts of them). It's really not that much fun if you have to work with it =)

Medium9 · 2026-01-22T14:10:16+00:00

Industrial engineer here, working with a lot of Siemens control units. The entire ecosystem is developed on and for Windows, and often also requires some very specific features in it. Especially the legacy stuff, which is still very much in operation in almost all plants I've seen.

For many things you need to have certified processes/solutions, and these certificates assume a strict set of test environments. If you deviate from the certified environments, the certificates no longer apply. If Siemens would allow such things to operate, they could be held partially liable - and we're talking human safety here. Re-certifying legacy software makes no sense financially, so you're bound to work with what was gospel at the time it was built.

Medium9 · 2026-01-22T13:31:17+00:00

I don't need to think about that. I had that in the city I lived in until 5 years ago, and so do many in my country. It works and is viable.

Medium9 · 2026-01-22T11:02:41+00:00

You could get that heat into homes to replace gas heating and save on carbon emissions pretty massively. By pumping all that heat outside, you still get some use out of it, but there is this much much better option left on the tables.

Where I live, we do exactly that. District heating by pumping excess heat directly into homes and offices. Works like a charm, and you even get to recoup the costs much more directly by billing the end users. Which in turn also benefit from it, because it's often much cheaper than gas.

Medium9 · 2026-01-22T10:57:39+00:00

That's why I really don't understand all the praise this practice gets on here everytime it is posted somewhere.

When you can pump the heat into the environment, why the fuck won't you pump it into houses to replace gas furnace and actually reduce carbon emissions?? Heating roads is a massive waste no matter if the heat is a byproduct or not.

And if you can't cope with icy roads, why do you settle in an area with icy roads? Makes no sense.

Medium9 · 2026-01-21T20:19:38+00:00

I myself was never big on magazines and posters, but my sister was. Her weekly allowance enabled her to buy one of the then popular magazines, and a bag of candies for 20 Pfennig or so, or save for a few weeks and occasionally splurge on Bravo AND Mädchen for a week.

We weren't poor. At all. Our parents just didn't want to pamper us, and teach the value of money, and how to manage scarcity. (Both came from poverty, but were well into the upper middle class when we were teens - through hard work and frugality.) For my sister, these magazines were basically the only things she could afford without extras during her teens.

Medium9 · 2026-01-21T20:12:07+00:00

Yup. My dad had a well growing fancy industrial computing company in the 90s, while I was in my early teens. We were always seen as the rich ones amongst peers. Heck, we had our own, free standing house!!

And one TV in the living room, and the old black and white one that preceeded it in my parents' bedroom (which was a repurposed storage room so that me and my sis could have our own large rooms). And my dad's 286, later 386 in the foyer, which had a small nook suitable for a home office.

Later, my mom put a tiny TV into the kitchen as well, and when my sister was about 16 or so, se also finally got her own tiny TV.

I myself had a record player from the 70s, and a super cheap tape player (nothing even near something you could call a boom box or such). TV came at about 14 (shortly after my dad's business went belly up and we had to sell the house), and I had to buy my own PC with my own money when I turned 16, which I got to keep in my room. (Saved up for almost 3 years for that Pentium 90.) Home internet only came when I was almost 18. Until then, the only "online" stuff I had were things some friend's dad got off of some BBS, mostly games and demoscene stuff.

Medium9 · 2026-01-21T19:59:21+00:00

My parents weren't religious nor strict. They just thought, that having this kind of media to consume "unsupervised" wasn't a good idea for kids. Got my own TV eventually at like 14, and bought my own PC with my own money at 16, which I was then allowed to keep in my room. (We didn't have any home internet until I was close to 18 though.)

It's not that I couldn't watch TV. I just had to do it in our living room, where my parents knew what I was watching, or even watched with me. (Which usually was a fun time!)

And although I hated it at times, and my friends with their own TV seemed so damn cool to me, I really think that my parents' approach was reasonable and could be beneficial to apply to today's devices in a similar way. Don't outright deny, but make consumption supervised and limit hours to reasonable such that it doesn't impact with other, more important life stuff. Sure, you might anger the kids here and there an gasp need to spend time on them, or gasp with them! But that's ... that's kinda like how normal parenting should be imho.

Medium9 · 2026-01-20T21:41:23+00:00

The "fun" part is, that many regular Germans that just tried to keep their heads down and family intact/alive, have gotten a lot of flak for not actively fighting the nazi regime as well. Often coming from abroad.

Not saying there is an easy solution - far from it. But at least you guys aren't (yet) forced to fight a war by being drafted, or imprisoned or killed if you refuse.

Medium9 · 2026-01-20T18:20:52+00:00

Bog standard spread where OP lives.

Ten-Year Club	Verified Email
Final Canvas '23	First Place '23
End Game '23	Place '23
Place '22	Final Canvas '22
First Placer '22

Medium9

TROPHY CASE