Academic career: After gratuating from high school in 2002 (Abitur) Moritz Meyer chose not to join the army, but to fulfill his duty by doing social work, as one of them is cumpolsory to german male citizens. In order to do this, he went to Tamil Nadu, India to be an assistant teacher. For one year, he was part of a class teacher team and gave lessons in sience for grades five and six.
Furthermore he designed and gave lessons for German and English for adults. After coming back to Europe he started his degree in psychology at the University of Amsterdam. After having completed the first part of his studies he changed to the University of Hamburg. He is focusing on counseling and training. At present, he is working on his final thesis (Diplomarbeit) concerning how teachers can evoke and benefit from respect.
Business career: While attending school Moritz Meyer worked as a moderator in a projekt for pupil participation. He was trained and supervised by the teachers further education board in hamburg (LI) in order to give seminars that enable student represantatives to do a better job. In the last semester break he administered tests of academic potential in class five (Kess 5) for the same
board.
Personal statement: I made my first conscious experience with respect when I was 13. I attended training in puplic speaking which was meant for adults in the business world. At the beginning I felt quiet uneasy among all those respected persons. But then, I realised somewhat to my surprise was treated with a degree of respect I had never encountered before. I was not just treatet as a boy, but peceived and regarded as the person I was. In this course I flourished. I had not had this experience at school and until then I had not missed it. Later on I became increasingly aware of how I was treated at school. I became an pupil represantative and launched diffferent (more or less) succesfull projects. I then held the above mentioned seminars and finally
became a teacher myself during my social work in India. Although I did not realise it back then, introducing and practicing respect seems to be one of the motives for all those activities. I am pleasantly suprised that I will have the opportunity to analyse this motive from yet another perspective through working on my final thesis concerning „Respect in the school context“.
