From the hail of bullets to the blackboard. This teacher, these students made it. Welcome to the new classes!
“When a bomb landed in front of our house, we finally decided to leave,” says Andrii Tsybukh (40) from the badly damaged city of Kharkiv. He was allowed because he has three children (2, 12, 15).
He was accompanied by his wife, mother-in-law, sister-in-law and cat – all of whom stayed with a host family in Rummelsburg.
“I love my city, I definitely want to go back. But who knows how long it will take,” says the German teacher.
On his own initiative, he found a job at the Max Planck High School (centre), teaching 14 refugee children in three blocks from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. Tsybukh: “Most of them couldn’t speak a word of German.”
He can’t say how traumatized they are: “At first we only talked about hobbies.”
Before the outbreak of war he taught German at a private language school for 15 years.
His colleague Oksana Skubak (36) started Tuesday at the Willi-Graf-Gymnasium (Steglitz). Her escape lasted three days, she came by train via Kraków and Warsaw and found accommodation with a friend from her university.
The two are among 30 teachers who have already signed a contract – 200 more are to follow.
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At first, many refugee students continued their familiar online lessons from home on their laptops. That’s decreasing. For example, a teacher in eastern Ukraine stopped his lessons because the sirens of the bomb alarms kept interrupting him.
Other children are dropping out because they are now in welcome classes: there are already 22 classes with 607 children, plus 748 children who have found accommodation in existing classes. 4000 school places have already been created.
Not only German is taught in the welcome classes. Some of the subjects such as music, art and sport are often held together with children and young people from other classes so that they can get to know each other better.
The contracts of the new teachers are initially limited to July 2023. “Everyone is so nice,” says student Anna Shevchenko (16). “But I also want to return home quickly.”
