Lessing-Gymnasium (Berlin)

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Lessing high school
Lessing High School 2008
type of school high school
School number 01Y08
founding 1882
place Berlin-Wedding
country Berlin
Country Germany
Coordinates 52 ° 33 '26 "  N , 13 ° 20' 38"  E Coordinates: 52 ° 33 '26 "  N , 13 ° 20' 38"  E
carrier State of Berlin
student 734 (2019/2020)
Teachers 82 + 11 trainees (2019/2020)
management Michael Wüstenberg
Website www.lessing-gymnasium-berlin.de

The Lessing-Gymnasium is a high school in the Berlin district of Wedding ( Mitte district ), which is named after the German poet Gotthold Ephraim Lessing .

The institute looks back on an eventful chronicle , which began at the end of the 19th century. Once a humanistic grammar school for the better-off, the school is still committed to values ​​education . The present day pedagogical work results from the socio-cultural environment in the Wedding district and the need for differentiated teaching and learning methods.

After more than 60 years in Pankstrasse am Gesundbrunnen , the grammar school has been located in a listed building on Schöningstrasse since 1945 .

history

principal
1882-1914 Johannes Quaatz
1914-1921 Rudolf Meyer
1921-1924 Karl Schmeing
1924-1934 Otto Friday
1934-1939 Johannes Reiske
1939-1945 unknown
1945 Wilhelm Wendisch
1945-1958 Willy Werdermann
1958-1973 Rudolf Müller
1973-1988 Werner Lehert
1988-1989 Udo Gerrmann (acting)
1989-1990 Herbert Klauß (acting)
1990-2006 Anita Mächler
2006-2007 Manfred Heimberg (acting)
since 2007 Michael Wüstenberg

1882 to 1945

Seal of the Lessing-Gymnasium Berlin (used between 1850 and 1923)

The Lessing Gymnasium was founded on April 17, 1882 as a municipal Progymnasium for the districts of Wedding and Gesundbrunnen with six classes and 113 students. In the first years the grammar school was housed in the existing 118th community school in Pankstrasse 7/8 and in rented private rooms. From 1884 to 1887 a building complex was built a few blocks away for a total of 562,000  marks according to the specifications of the city planner Hermann Blankenstein . The investment included a class building for 316,000 marks, a gymnasium for 76,500 marks and a director's residence for business and private use for 100,000 marks. The new building was occupied on August 1, 1886, and at Easter 1887, when the Prima opened under the name Lessing-Gymnasium, it was initially recognized as a humanistic gymnasium exclusively for boys. The first headmaster was Johannes Quaatz, whose special interest was due not least to his dissertation De conscientiæ apud Kantium notione on Immanuel Kant's philosophical topics, published in 1867 . Quaatz, characterized as strict, died in January 1914, and was succeeded by Rudolf Meyer.

Up to the First World War , the number of pupils rose continuously to 400 to 500. On the occasion of the 25th anniversary, the school was given a marble bust of its namesake in 1907 . The work comes from his great-great-nephew Otto Lessing , a well-known sculptor of historicism, and is now on the front of the auditorium . In 1922 the then director Schmeing added a secondary school branch and an advanced school to the grammar school. The latter should enable talented “elementary school pupils” to take the final exams after six years of elementary and high school. Girls were also admitted to the advanced branch from around 1927, and from then on the Lessing Gymnasium was recognized as a “particularly important school”. At Easter 1928 the first eleven senior primaries of the secondary school passed their Abitur. The 50th anniversary of the director Otto Freitag coincided in 1932 with the 100th anniversary of the death of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe .

The development of the school from 1933 to 1945 was shaped by the political environment of National Socialism . Girls were no longer admitted to the advanced school branch, schooling was only twelve years and the grammar school branch had to be converted into the "main form" in 1937 by the then director Johannes Reiske on the instructions of the main school administration. This loss of importance went hand in hand with the meanwhile renaming to German High School for Boys.

Despite damage, the buildings in Pankstrasse were spared from destruction during World War II, with the exception of the sports hall . Nevertheless, the Lessing High School was relocated to its current location in Schöningstrasse in 1945. First the second girls' middle school and a little later the first three classes of a secondary school moved into the dilapidated houses at Pankstraße 18/19 . On February 6, 1956, in the presence of Herbert Hoover's son, it was named the Herbert Hoover School .

1945 to 1982

Entrance sign in Schöningstrasse

After the end of the war, the Lessing Gymnasium at Schöningstrasse 17 was combined with the Schiller Lyceum (later: Charlotte von Lengefeld School ) and the 6th Oberrealschule (later: Mackensen School ). On May 3, 1945, Wilhelm Wendisch took over the supervision of 263 students and 14 teachers in ten classes. The cleanup took nearly a month before regular classes could begin on May 28th. Two days later the number of classes had already increased to 13. Wendisch died at the end of 1945. The new director, Willy Werdermann, then led the school through the post-war years, which were characterized by further development and consolidation measures . The number of students rose to over 1,000 during this time.

On April 1, 1953, some of the teachers and students moved to Lütticher Straße 47/48. They thus formed the personnel basis for the Ranke grammar school as a new educational institution, which was later moved to Putbusser Straße 12-15 and merged with the Diesterweg grammar school at the beginning of the 2001/2002 school year . 19 classes with 583 pupils and 21 teachers remained in Lessing-Gymnasium, with the admission of the 2nd elementary school (Goethepark School) the number of classes increased to just under 40.

One year after the 75th anniversary on May 27, 1957, the climax of which was the performance of Lessing's Minna von Barnhelm as a student play, Rudolf Müller took over the direction. During his term of office, an important decision was made: in the framework of the Conference of Ministers of Education and Cultural Affairs in September 1960, the Saarbrücken framework agreement led to a reduction in the number of compulsory subjects and opened up new options for students with the aim of specializing. These approaches were put into concrete terms in the Stuttgart Recommendations in 1961 and led to the Reformed Upper School with a course system in the 1973/74 school year .

From 1964 to 1966 the school building was repaired and modernized as well as a gymnasium on the opposite side of the street, the inauguration of which took place on December 19, 1964.

In 1969/1970, the director Eberhard Fechner shot the two-part television documentary Klassenphoto - Memories of German Citizens, in which the coming to terms with German history based on the personal lives of former Abitur graduates from Lessing-Gymnasium since the final year 1937 was discussed.

After Müller retired in May 1973 and Werner Lehert was appointed director, further renovation work began in April 1977 and was completed in the summer of 1979. One year after the 200th anniversary of Lessing's death, on April 21, 1982, a ceremony was held to mark the 100th anniversary of the grammar school in the Carl Friedrich Gauß Hall of the Technical University of Applied Sciences in Berlin . In the presence of the then school senator Hanna-Renate Laurien , the district mayor Erika Heß and the old Germanist Peter Wapnewski , scenes from Emilia Galotti , among other things, were performed by students of the performing arts course .

Since the 1990s

After the renewed renovation in 1987, the situation in Berlin changed as a result of drastic events, which in particular included German reunification in 1990 and the Territorial Reform Act of 1998 as part of the administrative reform . Due to increased immigration , the proportion of migrants in the school increased to over 60 percent in the new millennium. Was the high school on the occasion of the 125th anniversary celebrations of Education Senator Jürgen Zöllner and District Mayor Christian Hanke praised even on 3 May 2007 for his exemplary work, several rectors from the district center were forced in January 2009, in a public urgent letter to To point out deficiencies in Berlin's education policy. Among other things, the Lessing-Gymnasium demanded reliable framework conditions for coping with the problems of integration in so-called “problem neighborhoods ” as well as the provision of sufficient financial means for the renovation of the partially dilapidated building fabric.

In the course of the "strategic reorientation of the school experiment to individualize the high school education program" (fast-learning classes), the Lessing-Gymnasium has been offering an education program beginning with the fifth grade for intensive learners, which is enriched with additional offers, since the 2011/2012 school year. In the so-called enrichment area, two courses are compulsory for all pupils in the fast-learning classes in the fifth year, the content of which is designed by the departments and adapted to changing conditions such as pupil interests and equipment. Talented and highly talented pupils are supported according to the principles of acceleration and enrichment without having to skip the 8th grade. In cooperation with primary schools, the Lessing-Gymnasium has been coordinating a network of participating schools in the Mitte district since 2009 for the promotion of gifted children. All measures for the promotion of gifted children have been tried out since 2004 as part of the school experiment "Regional gifted groups in the afternoon". Starting with the 2013/2014 school year, the previous school trial was converted into a standard offer at the Berlin school.

architecture

Dock parapet
Relief ( tripod )

The listed building on Schöningstrasse is the result of an urban development measure from the beginning of the 20th century. At that time, the population in the residential area north of Seestrasse rose rapidly. City planning officer Ludwig Hoffmann then had two new school buildings built at Schillerpark as the 262nd and 276th community schools in the years 1909–1911 .

The four-storey building consists of a main wing and two side wings that enclose the interior of the three schoolyards. The central driveway runs under the three-story teachers' house, which has a stone facade with classicist and late baroque elements. Architecturally significant, in addition to superior limestone blocks on the ground floor and pilasters with Ionic capitals , Docks railings on the windows on the second floor, the mansard roof in baroque style and a classical-sounding dormer with pediment . The reliefs between the windows were made by the sculptor Josef Rauch based on an antique tripod .

Course offer

The lessons are spread over a five-day week. In the school year 2014/2015, the open all-day operation (OGT) with numerous additional offers in the afternoons was introduced at Lessing-Gymnasium.

The Lessing-Gymnasium awards two school-leaving certificates from the State of Berlin:

eEducation

The Lessing-Gymnasium is a model school in the eEducation master plan. The investment program approved by the Senate Department for Education, Youth and Sport in September 2005 provides selected Berlin schools with extensive IT equipment. Contracts with external companies ensure "technical IT support" for maintenance and operation. In addition, specially trained teachers are available to advise the entire staff in the design of IT-supported teaching concepts as "pedagogical IT support".

As of May 2008, the school has around 90 workstations spread over an IT and multimedia room, additional classrooms and specialist rooms, as well as a laptop pool with 30 devices. For mobile presentation are available projector ready. Eight kilometers of network cables run through the building, and six wireless networks enable Internet access in all rooms. During the 2009 summer vacation, interactive whiteboards were installed in place of the green chalkboards in all classrooms and several specialist rooms. In November of the same year, a project was started to improve teaching methods by using netbooks in a netbook pilot class.

Internal and external platforms such as the school's own content management system SchulCMS 2007 and the learning space in Berlin schools based on the Moodle course management system, also developed as part of the master plan, form a “virtual classroom”. The approx. 170 existing learning rooms (as of early 2014/2015) enable teachers and students to create and document course content and materials and to work collaboratively on projects.

Specialization and foreign languages

In addition to the “classic” disciplines, the school offers special elective subjects such as economics, computer science, social sciences and performing arts. The compulsory elective area from grade 7 is divided into two tracks, from which there are several possible combinations.

English is the first foreign language, French is the second. Complementary electives are Latin from grade 8 and Russian from grade 9. Russian is also offered in the upper school level and can be chosen as an examination subject in the Abitur. In the fast-learning classes, which have replaced the earlier fast- running classes, supplementary enrichment courses are offered, some of which are bilingual (English Drama in Class 6, English History in Class 7 and 8, Cinéma Francais in Class 9 and English Physics in Class 10) .

Many middle school students have been taking part in The Big Challenge , a European foreign language competition, since 2008 . Starting with the 2015/16 school year, the Lessing-Gymnasium TELC partner school and those interested in this partnership will prepare them for external language certificates (“The European Language Certificates”).

advancement

In addition to the regular lessons, the Lessing-Gymnasium has a staggered supplementary offer depending on the talent of the students.

Gifted children benefit from additional afternoon courses in "expert groups" that develop additional material from various subject areas such as natural sciences, mathematics, foreign languages, history, theater, art and music. Funding also takes place parallel to morning classes in "expert lessons". There is also the possibility of acquiring a science driver's license for the three natural sciences biology, chemistry and physics in grades 5 and 7 . This half-year course teaches basic scientific work techniques for more safety and caution in laboratory work.

The Lessing-Gymnasium works with the North Berlin Schools Association to promote cognitively gifted pupils and several primary schools in the Mitte district. Under the patronage of District Mayor Christian Hanke, a cooperation agreement was signed with the Anna Lindh School on January 28, 2008 , which is intended to ensure continuity in the transition from primary to secondary school. Highly gifted students in the same group are taken on by the grammar school, which means that bonds, friendships and expert knowledge are maintained.

The promotion of pupils with a migration background, especially in deepening German language skills, takes place in the 5th to 10th grades as language promotion in split lessons. The focus here is on conveying the technical language required in the classroom.

Since August 15, 2012 the Lessing-Gymnasium has been part of the school network Association of Mathematical and Scientific Excellence Centers at Schools (MINT-EC for short). An independent jury certifies high schools nationwide that are characterized by a special school development in the subjects of mathematics, computer science, natural sciences and technology (MINT).

Working groups

There is a wide range of extra-curricular activities (AGs) for students:

The youth choir lesSINGers TC has been organizing music, cabaret and benefit evenings since April 2006. The ensemble consists of over 50 students and has a musical repertoire of different styles. A separate stock corporation was founded as a school company on December 11, 2008 for the marketing of fan merchandise, among other things. Since 2010 there has also been an adult choir called hearTChor made up of teachers, parents, former students and other external parties .

The Berlin clubs Ruder-Club Tegel 1886 , Wassersport-Club Havel ( canoe polo ), TTC Blau-Gold ( table tennis ), BSC Rehberge 1945 ( athletics ), TSG Nord 1983 ( basketball ), SC Borsigwalde 1910 ( women's football ) are involved in sport. and Berliner Turnerschaft Korp. e. V. ( floorball ) by providing sports facilities, instructors and coaches. In addition to the preservation of the sporting profile of the school, the development of competitive school teams is planned in the long term. In return, the clubs receive direct access to interested students via the sports teachers for the purpose of recruiting members.

The Lessing-Gymnasium has been working with the Berlinische Galerie since June 2011 , after the art department was already involved in joint projects. As part of this cooperation, the premises of the State Museum can be used as a learning location for teaching.

Academic connection and professional preparation

The Lessing-Gymnasium cooperates with Berlin universities and companies.

Since 2006 there has been the project for students aged 16 and over at the Technical University of Berlin . High-performing students are given the opportunity to gain an early insight into university life by taking part in courses and taking exams. The certificates of achievement are recognized in a later course of study. A program of the TU Berlin known as the Techno Club enables high school students to get to know natural and engineering topics up close in a combination of school visits by students and a series of events in the premises of the university. The Lessing-Gymnasium has been one of the official partner schools of the Technical University since August 2013.

The agreement signed with a credit institute as part of an IHK project in September 2006 provides, among other things, for support in vocational orientation and training. In addition to application training and targeted school visits, the company offers selected students an internship in the 10th grade.

School partnerships and social engagement

The Lessing-Gymnasium enables language stays and a project-related exchange of experiences in cooperation with the following partner schools abroad:

In addition, the school sponsored the J / Ilavalai RCT School in Sri Lanka in 2005 and has been organizing regular fundraising campaigns since then.

Personalities

Former teachers

Former students

literature

  • Lessing high school 100 years . School newspaper / commemorative publication for the 100th anniversary of the Lessing High School in Berlin-Wedding. Berlin 1982 (110 pages).

Web links

Commons : Lessing-Gymnasium (Berlin)  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b school directory. In: berlin.de. January 18, 2017, accessed December 29, 2019 .
  2. ↑ 100 years of Wedding. In: berlinstreet.de. Berlin Street, accessed January 18, 2009 .
  3. ^ Franz Kössler: Personal Lexicon of Teachers of the 19th Century: Professional Biographies from School Annual Reports and School Programs 1825–1918 with Publication Indexes. In: geb.uni-giessen.de. Justus Liebig University Giessen, September 26, 2008, accessed on January 18, 2009 .
  4. ↑ Class photo - a two-part film by Eberhard Fechner. (No longer available online.) In: eberhardfechner.de. Jannet Fechner, archived from the original on October 29, 2008 ; Retrieved February 7, 2009 .
  5. ↑ Education policy - Rectors in Mitte are sounding the alarm. In: Tagesspiegel Online . Verlag Der Tagesspiegel GmbH, January 12, 2009, accessed on February 1, 2009 .
  6. ↑ Realignment of the high-speed runners. In: berlin.de. Senate Department for Education, Science and Research, November 5, 2010, accessed on February 3, 2011 .
  7. ↑ Fast learner. In: lessing-gymnasium-berlin.de. Retrieved December 29, 2019 .
  8. ↑ One-time project for gifted people in Wedding. In: Berliner Morgenpost Online. Ullstein GmbH, January 30, 2008, accessed February 4, 2009 .
  9. ↑ Super User: MINT-EC. In: lessing-gymnasium-berlin.de. Retrieved December 29, 2019 .
  10. ↑ Techno Club. In: techno-club.tu-berlin.de. Technical University of Berlin, accessed on February 1, 2009 .
  11. ↑ Overview of TU partner schools. (No longer available online.) In: schulportal.tu-berlin.de. Technical University of Berlin, archived from the original on July 23, 2014 ; Retrieved November 19, 2013 .
  12. ↑ Berliner Sparkasse cooperates with Lessing-Gymnasium. In: berliner-sparkasse.de. Berliner Sparkasse, September 26, 2006, accessed on February 1, 2009 .
  13. ^ France - Tourcoing. In: berlin.de. District Office Mitte of Berlin, accessed on January 15, 2016 .
  14. ^ Central Administrative District - Moscow - Russia. In: berlin.de. District Office Mitte of Berlin, accessed on January 15, 2016 .
  15. ↑ Schools: Partners of the Future - Rabin School Elat. In: pasch-net.de. Federal Foreign Office, Department of Culture and Communication, accessed on September 27, 2012 .