His name sounded like an island, and in a way it was — an island for children who had arrived from somewhere else.
Every morning, as soon as we stepped into the classroom, you could feel a thin current of tension in the air. The question hovered above us: would Herr Alois be in a good mood today, or would something turn him upside down?
But the moment he switched on the slide projector and Harry Belafonte’s voice filled the room, we knew we were safe.
“Day-O… Day-O…”
His face would light up. His head would start moving to the rhythm. And we, barely literate in German, would feel warmth settle in our stomachs. A strange sense of order. As if, for forty-five minutes, the world made sense.
His method was disarmingly simple.
No dry grammatical torture. No spelling drills forced down our throats. That would come later. First, we had to feel the language.
The projector clicked. An image flashed on the screen.
Der Stuhl — chair.
Der Tisch — table.
Die Leiter — ladder.
“Louder! Louder!” he would shout, waving his arms like a conductor who had somehow ended up directing a refugee orchestra. “Language barriers are not broken with whispers!”
And so we shouted.
It was chaos — the good kind. The kind that teaches. Children from Bosnia, Croatia, Poland, Russia, Turkey, Vietnam, Somalia. An unlikely choir assembled by war and circumstance. All of us beginning from zero.
Sometimes he would turn the lesson into theatre.
He would sit cross-legged on the floor and pretend to be a confused tourist who had just landed on Mars.
“Was ist das?” he would ask dramatically, pointing at a piece of chalk as if it were alien technology.
If someone blurted out nonsense, he would throw his head back and cry out:
“Mein Gott, was habe ich getan?!”
We would burst into laughter — and through laughter, learn.
His theatrical despair over our mistakes was part of the ritual.
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“Is it possible that it’s DER Tafel?!” he would wail, covering his face in mock horror.
And we would shout back, triumphant:
“Nein! DIE Tafel!”
He would jump up and clap as if we had just won Olympic gold in grammatical articles.
He wasn’t gentle if he sensed someone drifting.
“You are in my classroom? Then be here with your head, not only your body!” he would say, tapping his forehead.
“Language is not mathematics! Language needs rhythm, music, energy! You cannot learn a language as if you’re solving equations. You must feel it!”
And we did.
Long after class ended, the words would echo in my ears.
At home I would repeat them under my breath:
die Tür, das Fenster, die Lampe…
Until my mother would finally tell me to quiet down.
Once, waiting for the bus, I caught myself saying out loud:
“Die Straße ist lang.”
It came effortlessly. As if a new room had opened inside my head.
Herr Alois didn’t just teach us German.
He taught us that we were capable of entering a new world.
When we complained — when we said it was too hard, that we would never speak like real Germans — he would look at us over his thick glasses and say:
“Oh, you will. Very much so. But not while you’re complaining. You’ll learn when you forget that you’re learning.”
His sentences stayed with me.
His methods — eccentric, unconventional — worked.
The world that had once felt sealed off began to open. Slowly. Carefully. But undeniably.
Even today, whenever I hear “Banana Boat Song,” I see him beneath the projector light. That slightly mad pedagogical genius who understood that language is not a collection of words, but a way of finding your place in the world.
