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Until end of June 2001, I was one of ca. 1100 pupils at the Emil-von-Behring-Gymnasium in Spardorf near Erlangen, a grammar school with emphasis on mathematic and scientific topics and modern languages.

The school was founded in 1970 by the county of Erlangen (now: Erlangen-Höchstadt) and lastly almost 100 teachers had to look after the pupils. There have been a lot of offerings so that we were not bored. Besides many working groups – one of them was about creation and maintenance of the school’s website, to which I have contributed a long time (from 1997 to 2000) – there have been all sorts of activities, like for example the summer festival or project days at the end of a school year. When the weather played nice we had two hiking days a year, otherwise less. Every year the graduates called attention to themselves with their senior prank. And last but not least, I have to mention our school magazine called BOMBE (in English: bomb). Most of all the teachers’ quotations and the entertaining yet informative articles livened up the everyday school life a bit.

Whit holidays in 1997 and even more in 1999 were a special experience for me: 2 weeks holiday language course with Jürgen Matthes in Eastbourne at the English south coast (on the map). The weather was fine, the trips interesting and fun, the overall climate relaxed and comfortable… I enjoyed it that much that I would have stayed another 2 weeks. Here are some photos that I have scanned from paper prints:

(10 years later, in June 2009, I was in Eastbourne again, this time as stopover to my holidays in Cornwall. The photos from there can be seen in my photo gallery: unclassified.de/go/uk2009)

And then, all of a sudden and with no warning came the “Kollegstufe” (12^th/13^th class). The information event at the end of 11^th class was totally confusing to me and my hope in having chosen the right courses for me was incredible right from the start. My decision on maths and physics as advanced courses was based on my best subjects until 11^th class. It was very practical that I got my driving licence in that autumn – with those bus connections (3 times into and 4 times out of town per day!) and those teaching times (for example with 4 hours break and ending at 18 o’clock).

In April 2000, the school celebrated its 30^th anniversary. As part of that open house day, the Knoff-Hoff show (named after a famous German TV science show from the late 80s, from the English “know how”) took place, organised by the physics advanced course, and it was a huge success! We showed several experiments on the topics of colour theory, inertia, vacuum and electrostatics that we came up with ourselves. Here are some pictures from our video recording (unfortunately a bit small and blurry):

My term paper in physics was about “Water level measurement through capa­city changes in a capacitor”. Therefore I built a system that measures the water level with a large capacitor (pictured), converts the variable capacity into a frequency and calculates the water level using a C-Control single board computer. This depends on the effect that the capacity changes with the dielectric, and water has a large effect on that.

Well, some time in the middle of 13^th class I finally understood the points scheme and found that while my situation was hopeless, it was not as serious as I had feared. After the Abi-Zeitung (sort of a yearbook) was almost done I could eventually prepare for the A levels (“Abitur”) and fortunately finish this phase in my life successfully.

Website of Abitur year group 2001 at the EvBG

On our Abi website you can find almost all contents from the Abi-Zeitung (see above) and additional colour photos, also from the Abi-Streich (senior prank, see above) where it was sold at. For a while, the discussion forum (one of my early PHP developments) was fairly well frequented. At this school, we were the first year group to publish their own website on the internet, probably not least because of my commitment for it. The following year groups also followed our example, but their sites are long gone by now.

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