I never understood why I wasn’t allowed to sleep in on Saturdays.

Normally, when one is five years old, wake-up times would vary on Saturday mornings, and a slow getting out of bed would be followed by what was called Saturday morning cartoons. The whole idea never made much sense to me, why would anyone have time to watch TV if everyone had school on Saturday?

I was two years old when I started my Saturday German classes. My parents, upon deciding that becoming bilingual would be the best way to spend my time on Saturdays, enrolled me in a class with the Deutsche Sprachshule (translation: German language school) and had me awake at 7.00 every Saturday for me to finish homework, conjugate some verbs and name objects around the house in German as well as their articles before the descent to hell began.

Of all things, there was nothing I hated more than the 15-minute drive to German school every Saturday. From the age of two up to the age of sixteen, I would sit in my mum’s average-size Toyota with nylon seats, waiting for her to park in the main entrance of some massive building and we would walk in together, hand-in-hand, as though I was going to forget where my imminent death had lain.

The cold tiled floor and the open, large foyer that lead into the school did not provide me the atmosphere of learning that one could define as comfortable. The foyer, splitting into three hallways, smelt in the summer of bleach and lemon cleaning product and was only lit by the large windows that encompassed the door. In the winter, there was little light and the smell of damp shoes would fill the space- one would find it preferable to hold one’s breath when walking in. To the left was the only hallway that – to my knowledge – actually existed in this large rectangle of a place that, when I learned to read, was called “Winston Churchill High School.” Not understanding what any of those words meant altogether, I continued my lessons, agitated by the smallest of things: pens tapping on desks, kids who read out loud, and worst of all: people who rubbed the square, multi-coloured puzzle mats that you see in kindergarten classes together to create static, which would magically attract dirt for no reason whatsoever.

The floors often felt grimy and were just as cold as one would imagine the temperature outside to be in the middle of January. The desks were oddly attached to their chairs which often had baskets underneath (“They are for the children who attend class here over the week” my first grade teacher, frau Schertzinger [translation: love singer] explained). Still confused by the fact that there were people who would willingly go here during the week (I could barely survive one day), I stood up from my place on the floor and went over to the windows. It had started to snow in mid-November that year, and I was only thinking about the hot chocolate I would get when I got home.

That’s not to say that the lessons hadn’t paid off.

By the time I entered kindergarten, I was reading in both German and English, and, to the delight of my mum and the fear of my father, preferred to converse and write in German.

If German school was confusing, the concept of Kindergarten was like rocket science. “Why am I going this way?” I would ask my father as we waited for the sun-coloured school bus to pick me up in the morning.

He asked me to repeat the question, in English this time.

I kept my mouth shut. It wasn’t important anyway.

Walking down the short and narrow corridors of yet another school, the only thing that shared any resemblance to my weekend hell was the tiles on the floor. The finger paint, the sensation of sand between your nails and recess were all alien to me. Was I allowed to come here every day? Where was the signs with impossibly long words on them? Where was frau Eeble yelling at me to colour between the lines? Why was my name written on a coat hook and on a spot on the floor? Where were all my friends from German school? Were they late?

I soon realized that everything I liked from German school wasn’t allowed here. I couldn’t pass notes to other students (because they couldn’t read them) and I wasn’t allowed to leave morning circle to look out the window to the trees and the seemingly never-ending street outside. My day was structured, boring and predictable. Soon I got tired of not talking to anyone and took to the limited bookshelf that stood often untouched in miss Iaccobellis’ classroom.

The teachers called my father into school one day and invited him to “observe Johanna’s day-to-day actions within the classroom”. I remember him staying for about ten minutes, then asking if he could talk to my teacher, followed by him leaving.

The next day, I was taken out of class and put into, what I now understand as, an ESL course. When they found out my mum came from a non-English speaking country, they figured the German influence was so large at home that it was hindering my success as an English speaker, which would explain why I didn’t talk to other children or respond to anything but my name.

Little did they know I understood perfectly well what was going on and I chose not to respond. One of my strongest memories was walking up the cold, salt-smelling stairs, holding the cold handrail, making my way up to the small classroom that was to be my ESL class until I convinced my imposing teachers that I was able to comprehend their mindless nattering and gossip.

ESL began to remind me of German class. Nouns, verbs, flash-cards galore, the only thing out of place was my teacher, miss Scenge. With grey hair as crazily wound as she was catholic, she stood about four feet tall and wore the most hideous of black shoes that could have possibly existed on earth. She would take me and my fellow classmate, best-friend-to-be, Brandon as well as a couple of first and second graders and have us sit in a circle as she droned on and on about how some words sound the same and how some words rhyme with other words. She would continue by going impossibly slowly through the alphabet and explaining how the letters s and h together make the sound “shhhhhhh” and would put her finger over her mouth. 2004’s teaching tactics required visual stimulants to otherwise boring and self-explanatory concepts.

After the second month of ESL, I had memorized the layout of the room. Scenge refused to turn the light on (something about the grass colour really inspired her), so the single one-meter by one-meter window provided minimal light to the narrow, white-walled, green-tiled floor that occupied what was now the most boring half hour of my life. There were days when I wished I could go back to German school, knowing that I would have a considerably more entertaining time, should I be there as opposed to here, in which desks that were too high and a woman reading the same alphabet book over and over and over again to occupy my time.

One day, miss Iaccobellis came into the ESL room and asked to see if Brandon and I were progressing at all.

“Johanna?” Scenge called my name, slowly. Ringing out every single syllable as though she was trying to spell out a word like flachswichser (translation: flat wanker) which would be a word that, if I had known it at the time, I would have liked to call her. “Would. You. Like. To. Show. Miss. Iaccobellis. You. New. Reading. Trick?”

Anything to get you to stop talking to me like an idiot, please.

I grabbed Scenge’s alphabet book and read it. It wasn’t a read, moreso than I reciting of lines from a plat. “The cat is C. The cat goes meow” flip. “The dog is D. The dog goes woof” flip. I cared so little about the words or the content of this book that I kept flipping the pages before the one I had just read hit the other half of the book.

Scenge grinned; she probably thought that she was an accomplished ESL teacher. I let her have her moment.

Miss Iaccobellis smiled at me. “You have a real talent for reading, Johanna. Well done.”

“Thank you, mith yak-o-bell-ith.” The lisp was something that ESL couldn’t help me get rid of.

The two teachers exchanged a look.

I didn’t have to go back to ESL the next day.

Balancing kindergarten with German school became a struggle. I still didn’t talk to any of the other kids in my kindergarten class (except for Brandon, but he still didn’t understand English very well so our conversations consisted mostly of pointing and gestures, as well as nods and headshakes.)

With my mum arranging a custody agreement between the two languages, I spoke English on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, and German on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but Saturday was the most German filled of them all. Sunday, I stayed in my room after church and re-wrote renditions of Little Red Riding hood, in which the wolf was actually a bunny and that Little Red was very afraid of the forest and would imagine big, scary things trying to eat her. Both German and English versions were available, of course.

Time would pass that my German would slip away, but my hatred and resent for German school would not. Regardless of how many months have gone by since my graduation, my heart sinks when I wake up automatically at 7.00, but the power I feel when I can shamelessly roll over is incomparable when I can waste my Saturdays away, never needing to step out of bed and face the horrible world of schoolwork and activities that would cause me to do otherwise.

Fertig.