Never Teaching in Germany Again?

As the 4.5 of you who read this blog know, I've spent many, many summers teaching in the German speaking regions of Europe. In fact, I bet that nearly a third of all the posts in the blog have something to do with things that have happened on one of my numerous trips. 

I have many wonderful memories and I have made real friendships with folks there. These are not just surface friendships but real ones. Despite my friendships, I decided against going back to teach in the summer of 2025. If I wanted, I could go directly to see friends there and not burden myself with the teaching part. Teaching never paid for itself and I always lost money but I figured that it was worth it. After all, I had just had a European vacation for a month and all it cost me was less than a thousand bucks. It was a good deal. 

So, what made me change my mind after more than 20 years of traveling back and forth? It was the students. This is an odd statement since I only teach students working on their doctorate or masters degrees. These were supposed to be more mature and intellectually curious people. However, Covid-19 must have done a number on these folks because in the summer of 2024, I did not enjoy them at all. 

I really enjoy teaching the material but June 2024 not very pleasant for me. The problem was the engagement of the students. I was teaching the latest techniques used in income distribution and inequality, but the techniques (after some boring basic statistics) could be applied to any type of distribution and not just income. I implored the students to talk to me about what it was they were working on in their Thesis or Dissertation so that we could talk about methods to apply things to their data. They could care less. 

It was always the case that the German teaching culture was rather stiff and students sat stoned-faced and never talked. Part of the reason that they brought me in was to expose the students to a different form of instruction where interaction was encouraged. They could have had a German teach them statistics but having international faculty could have given them a different world view or perspective on subjects.

You can loosely translate the German word for a lecture "Vorelsung" as "reading". Why? Apparently, in the old days, the professor would simply go before the class and read from their book. The professor was not looking for any engagement from the students. This all makes sense if you think about how their system of instruction works. A student doesn't sign up for a class but rather an exam which, by law, can only be 1-hour long. No other exams, homeworks or quizzes can count for the final grade. Thus, coming to class really didn't matter. If a student could teach themselves and then pass that exam, they passed the course. So why talk in class? Heck, why even come to class? Attendance didn't count either.

In my first year in Germany, I taught in Konstanz, Germany. It's a pretty town and I had a fun time there. You can find some pictures in my photo album of me there. The one where I have a woman's bra on my head will take some explaining. Hey, it's a thing they do. Anyway, I'm lecturing one day and going over some particularly difficult material so I pause to gauge the students to see if they are understanding. I then ask if anyone has questions. One student named Ferdinand is particularly annoyed with me. I ask him what is wrong. He responds that it's not my job to worry if students understand the material. That's his job to understand. My job is to simply give it out. Needless to say, I was shocked. 

I did learn from that exchange and made sure to be careful how I engaged the students. I also learned to encourage students to come visit me in my office hours instead of the class where they felt more comfortable. In addition, the class had to be taught in English but the office hours could be spoken in German. None of this seemed to matter with this post-Covid bunch I was dealing with in 2024. They simply didn't care. This was not about culture. 

I asked them what they were working on and all they asked was whether any of this would be on the exam. In essence, they didn't care beyond their class mark. I was so disappointed.

The final straw was the last two days of class. I went over the brand-new research that me and my math co-author had just completed which not only showed how distributions spread from the outside but what's happening on the inside. I even surveyed them on what they thought was the fairest type of distribution that they'd want to see in their country then showed how that worked in the model. I was really excited and asked them if they wanted to know more. They had only one question: could they use a calculator on the exam? I was deflated.

So, I thought I had better take a year off from visiting to give these students a break from me. Or maybe me from them. I wondered if perhaps a better job could have been done among the faculty there to encourage students to come to my lecture and engage the material. Who knows what went wrong. All I knew was that I was not flying 5,000 miles for some disinterested people who will soon be professors themselves and should care but didn't.

The odd thing was that the visit of 2024 started out so well when a colleague who teaches Statistics told me that one of his current PhD students said that the best class she had taken there in Hannover was mine in 2023. Things went downhill the rest of the visit.

Will I go back again? I believe so but 2024 was rough.