First day of pre-school

Yesterday was Amy’s first day of pre-school, but since it didn’t start till 12:00 and their day is over by 13:00, today was her first “real” day—children didn’t have to bring all their supplies (folders, pencils, etc.) yet and it was more a get-to-know-each-other, show-you-the-classroom thing.

Parents came at 12:00; the two classes in second grade put on performances, and the children were called up by their teachers and left into the classrooms. All that was over by about 12:15, after which the parents were free to have some coffee and cake (served by the PTA) and wait till 13:00 to take their children home again.

Most of the children had school cones; some smaller, some larger. Amy’s was smaller than “standard size” (what first-graders typically get when they start school), but it was still among the larger ones there—I guess pre-school typically calls for an even smaller one. Ah well. But hers wasn’t the biggest present, either, so I suppose that’s all right. And it was good that she had one, I think, because the majority of children did—I had expected a ratio of only about 50% of children with school cones.

I had taken the day off to be there.

Today, I walked to school with Amy and Stella; she seemed quite happy to be dropped off there, which is good. I hope she’ll have fun.

One bit of good news: Stella asked whether she should pick up Amy at two, after the mandatory remedial language instruction they had put her down for in the acceptance letter, and the teacher said that Amy wasn’t on the list for that after all, so we could come at one o’clock. So that’s good, I think, because I wasn’t sure whether she really needed that.

Addressing a postcard in shorthand

Today, I sent a postcard to my shorthand teacher, addressed entirely in shorthand. Edit 2010-09-10: it arrived!

I used the Verkehrsschrift (basic grade) of DEK (German Unified Shorthand) for the sender and recipient addresses, since if any postal employee learned shorthand at all (which is what I’m wondering, and which is the point of this experiment), it’ll be DEK. The message itself is in Aufbauschrift II (commercial grade?*) of Stiefografie, which is what I learned.

I used a DEK dictionary to help me compose the addresses, since (a) I never formally sat down to study it, and (b) I find it rather complicated, and its abbreviations—even in the lowest “grade”—fairly numerous.

Brownie points if anyone can “decode” the addresses, the message, or both. (Or point out any mistakes I made, especially in the DEK bits.)

---

* The basic grade of Stiefografie is a lot simpler than that of DEK: it has no abbreviations at all, only a few signs for certain consonant combinations (nd/nt, ng/nk, st, sp, pf). Personally, I find that the second grade of Stiefografie is roughly comparable to the basic grade of DEK, and the third and highest grade of Stiefografie to the second/middle “commercial” grade of DEK. This, based on the number and kind of abbreviations used (which are very often very similar: I suspect that Helmut Stief used DEK Eilschrift as an inspiration in deciding what forms to abbreviate and how to do so). So Stiefografie has nothing to compare to DEK’s highest “speech” grade, suitable not just for dictation but for notating spontaneous speech.