lunarbadger

I'm curious, why a private Realschule?

Thanks, @Marone. Yes, the variation is a huge issue for us, especially given the difficulty of escaping a bad teacher, who temporarily gains the ability to rule/ruin your child's life. I think our own situation is largely due to a bad teacher for grades 3-4, which of course includes the Übertritt. "Pech gehabt."   I wonder if that's more of a risk with the tenured (Beamte) teachers in the state schools than in a private international school?   Another option to consider, besides private school, would be, as Panda said, to simply move to another Bundesland where the system is more "easy" (his words—I would say more "modern" 😁). Seems extreme, but if we're talking about the quality of life and future opportunities for our kids...   Sigh. Figuring this out is pretty much all I think about these days. 

This is an old thread, but I feel compelled to add something that I feel is missing in all this talk about the utility of a good IB score vs. a good Abitur score: it's the degree of psychic harm done to a child along the way.   One of the best predictors of resiliency and success in life is, in my opinion, self confidence. More and more I'm getting the impression that the German system crushes that in all too many children, all too often producing meek people who underestimate themselves because of what some outdated, narrow-minded system arrogantly classified them as—especially in late bloomers and children with German as a second language.   I get so tired of hearing prideful remarks about how hard the Bavarian state school system is. It reminds me of a predictive computer model that has been overfit on a limited range of data and consequently generates massive numbers of false negatives. That those "false negatives" are human beings with unfairly reduced life opportunities is not something to be proud of; it's something to lament. And it's why you should never base admissions on test scores alone, let alone funnel young kids early in their development into entirely different school paths (executive skills don't fully mature until mid 20s—there's simply no way to know at age 9/10 what a kid is suited for and much of what the German school system is doing is creating self-fulfilling prophecies).   As someone who picked up an IB diploma along the way, what I remember from my own education was a time largely lacking in (unhealthy) stress and pressure, in which supportive teachers, whom I remain in touch with today, helped me to love to learn and to have the self confidence to tackle problems in life optimistically and with good humor. We focused on creativity as well as accurately regurgitating facts. No doors closed to me during my education, neither in next-step opportunities nor, crucially, in my mind.   My family has its share of doctors (PhDs/MDs), and I have no doubt that my own child is capable of achieving the same if they want. What I do doubt is whether the German system would agree. We're considering an IB-based international school because, in spite of the cost, our child would hopefully have a well-balanced, modern curriculum with supportive teachers. They hopefully will be able to focus on learning because they won't be constantly stressed about failing out of the school from the relentless barrage of tests that seem to be an obsession here (in the US people lament "teaching to the test", but here that aspect seems to have completely calcified and all other tissue of the beast washed away with acid like in a Körperwelt creation... I'd love to hear someone say something about genuinely loving their time at Gymnasium academically because all I hear makes it sound so joyless and punitive, like marines talking about bootcamp—constant pressure with little time outside of studying).   If an IB with a probably-decent score doesn't get my kid access to a German medical school, and my kid nonetheless decides against all good sense  to try for being a doctor, then they can go to another country (where medical schools are often better)—that door remains open with an IB just as it does with an Abitur. I'm more concerned that they enjoy their education along the way and leave the system believing in themselves. I will gladly fork over a chunk of my wages for that.   Am I wrong? @MikeMelga @fraufruit may I ask how the stress levels were for your kids at the BIS? I wouldn't expect an easy ride by any means at all—challenge is necessary—but is it healthy or unhealthy stress? Do your kids like school?

Thank you, PandaMunich, for taking the time to write such a rich reply! We have already scheduled a visit and I will go through all the links you gave. 

Has anyone here put a kid through the Orientierungsstufe school on Quiddesstraße? How did you find it? Did your child improve in their grades or was it just more of the same? Was the environment high pressured?