This school year we got the opportunity to meet Miss Martinez in our school lessons. Miss Martinez was born and raised in the UK. At the age of 10 she went to France where she went to school. Her parents’ friends had sent their children to a school in France and they had really recommended it and had said good things about it which is one of the reasons she attended school in France, too, but also because her parents wanted her to go to a traditional Catholic school and that option doesn’t exist in England.
However she did study in the UK. She studied multiple subjects such as Biology, French, Chemistry, Classics (study of Greek and Latin and the Ancient World in general) at Durham University and many more. But before that she did the French Baccalaureate which included German, Philosophy, Greek, Latin, History, Geography, Science, Sport, French and English.
“When I finished school in France, I decided I wanted to become a doctor”. But when she met a brain surgeon at an Oxford University event, he told her that when you become a doctor, you will be responsible for at least six deaths in your life. This made her think and she couldn’t take that step without thinking carefully because it was such a big step to take. She wanted to gain experience and become more mature in order to decide whether she wanted to become a doctor.
When I asked her how she found our school and why she chose our school, she answered that she actually knew a teacher here and also had some friends in the area and that our school had a good reputation. I asked Miss Martinez what differences she had noticed in Germany compared to the UK and France and she said that the people here tend to be “more blunt and straightforward“ than in the UK where the people aren’t as direct. However, she thinks that the British mentality is closer to the German mentality than the French. Germany is also very well organised – something she noticed when she was flying over Germany.
“It looked like someone had drawn the fields with a ruler, in England they were all higgledy-piggledy”. What does Miss Martinez like about Germany? She really likes the friendly people, the bakeries, the architecture and the fact that we are so close to the mountains. She is really excited to visit the mountains. “The houses and their architecture look like they came out of a fairytale. I could see how they could have been part of the inspiration in German fairytales.”
She loves the German language because of the cool expressions you can use such as “Wortschatz“ (vocabulary or literal translation: word treasure) or “Fingerhut“ and the “Vorführeffekt”. It is also very interesting that her father is Spanish hence where her surname actually comes from and her father is called Martin. Miss Martinez is looking forward to meeting more people and really likes it here.
Interview/Photo: Schahesta D.
