Acting Outside the Box: Unexpected Lessons in Resilience

Water damage on the second and third floors of the left corridor in the learning house required quick action and agility from everyone involved. The JVC school community proved its unity in October and November 2024: “Acting outside the box” in practice! While the affected rooms were emptied, Neptune, Uranus and Saturn spent an autumn day at the Hellabrunn Zoo, and Jupiter, Mars, Earth and Mercury spent the day at the Deutsches Museum.

After the fall vacation, there was a week of homeschooling. According to learning guide Peter Fiala, digital learning via MS Teams went very well: “I am surprised at how smoothly everything worked. Our team really worked together, and the learning partners completed their assignments reliably. This is due in no small part to the reassuring way in which Ms. Riedl and Mr. Hill Christine handled the situation. For our learning partners, it is basically about overcoming challenges, adapting to unfamiliar situations and learning for life. Recently, I saw a raincoat with the words 'No rain, no flowers' on the sleeves. That made me smile as it was so fitting to the situation. I’m convinced that when the learning partners are allowed to return to their usual life on campus, they will appreciate it even more.”

Then came the great news: from mid-November, our entire Grammar School could move into a previously empty wing of the newly built Messestadt Riem Bildungscampus. We’d have eight classrooms, a coaching room, an office, and an open learning studio with a learning guide area for our sole use. Thanks to the incredible support of, and cooperation with, the Head of the Grammar School in Riem, Dr. Günter Förschner, the Ministry of Education, and the City of Munich, this solution was made possible by quick responses and willingness to overcome all the considerable hurdles along the way.

The move itself was carried out over two and a half days by our facility team and our learning guides: we packed boxes, moved furniture and set up an entire Grammar School in no time. As fate would have it, the Bildungscampus also works with our cooperation partner Katerine, so our Oasis team quickly coordinated all-day catering at our “outpost.” A shuttle bus to and from Riem solved the transportation problem, and so things fell into place on many levels as if by divine intervention. At the welcome afternoon in November in Riem, a lot of positive energy was noticeable from the Heads of School, learning partners and parents. It became clear that the decisive factor from the outset was nothing other than the very thing we strive to develop at JVC: Resilience.

We wish our Gymnasium team and learning partners all the best as they settle into their new location. At the home site in Perlach, we hope that the renovation of the affected area in the learning house will even give us the opportunity to redesign the rooms so that they better suit our needs. This year we planned for time and space to dream, but what we got was an opportunity to think outside the box and learn flexibility and resilience. Sometimes the unplanned lessons are the most valuable. We would like to thank everyone involved for making the best of this unexpected situation.

Dr. Kerrie Elston-Güttler, Head of Learning House