Die sechste Stunde faellt aus.

"The sixth hour fell out", Z explained to me over his cell phone.  "I don't know when the bus comes, can you come and get me?"  "What the heck are you talking about?", I asked.  "The sixth hour fell out.  I have to come home now!  School is ending early."   "Oh... now I get it."   Of course, this was exactly as I was headed out the door to get J, so I had to pass him off to M, secretly jealous that M could take the car and I had to put on two pairs of pants, two sweaters, cuff warmers, ear covers, hat, gloves, scarf and boots to walk the 1.5 km to J's school.

So, 'faellt aus' or 'ausfallen' means 'fall out', when literally translated into English, though it is a German idiom for 'cancelled'.  We giggled quite a bit over it, but in truth, classes falling out is a big problem here in Schlesswig-Holstein.  So far, it is not clear to us whether the cancellations are increasing, or simply that parents are getting annoyed by it and just starting to complain.

We have noticed it too - Z has had 3 classes cancelled since the new term started last Tuesday.  Two cancellations were due to teacher illness, and one was due to teacher unpreparedness:  The art teacher didn't know that she was supposed to teach them that day (for a two-hour period), so they watched "Vorstadt Krokodile 2" in its entirety.

The day that Z phoned, I was very happy about 2 things: 1) I was warned by another parent who spent a year in Heidelberg that the schools will let out early without any warning and without contacting parents and 2) Z has a cell phone.  I really don't know what he would have done without it.  The bus only stops at the school once per hour before the official end of the day, and he had missed it by 5 minutes.  Did I mention that there is snow everywhere here, and the temperature is well-below freezing?  (If you are wondering what the other kids did, most of them bike to school, so they just leave and probably they have a key to get into the house.  Or perhaps some also called their parents using cell phones.  What is clear is that the school feels no responsibility to make sure the kids get home!)

Wondering if, for 5 euro, we might just get a cell for J too - just in case anything falls out of the Grundschule.