Winter Returns

After the almost spring like weather of the past few days, winter is now making a comeback.

Right now it’s snowing outside and we have maybe one or two centimeters of snow. It’s probably not going to last, but it is rather nice to look at.

And considering that my hayfever already started acting up those past few days, I’m not sorry to see winter lasting a little bit longer.

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9 Responses to Winter Returns

  1. Estara says:

    I’m visiting my parents tomorrow and hope the roads are okay.
    Did you see this link yet? I like the intro especially – wonder if I could use it in the classroom.
    http://www.slate.com/id/2283467

  2. Cora says:

    Well, South Germany is supposed to have milder weather, so I hope you’ll be okay. I don’t actually have to go anywhere until Monday and I doubt the snow will last till then.

    Thanks for the link. I hadn’t seen it yet and it’s very interesting. I don’t know how things are at your school, but at mine we have a lot of digital involvement – the kids are all on SchülerVZ, they use Skype, play videogames, are constantly staring at their cellphones, etc… – but we also have many heavy readers. Mostly girls, but also several boys. There’s one girl whom I always see sitting in a corner during the break with her nose in a book. She’s into YA paranormals and manga and writes fanfiction, too.

  3. Estara says:

    I teach at a boys only school, so the few readers are very, very rare. But there are some ^^.

    • Estara says:

      Also, while we had huge amounts of fog, the roads were free of ice at the weekend ^^.

    • Cora says:

      I have some boy readers in my Gymnasium class, not so much in Real- and Hauptschule. I also have a neighbour kid who is a big reader. He’s in 8th grade and even tries to read in English. I sometimes hook him up with boy and ESL student friendly YA fantasy.

      • Estara says:

        Yes, I had one of those pupils, too, and was amazed.

        We are a Realschule – a very old, traditional, Catholic one run by the Schulwerk of the Bistum Augsburg. Heh.

        • Cora says:

          I teach at a Kooperative Gesamtschule, i.e. Gymnasium, Realschule and Hauptschule separated, but under the same roof.

          Single sex schools are rare in North Germany, probably rarer than in the South. I only encountered single sex schools in Vechta, when I taught at the university there, and they were also run by the Catholic church (Vechta is a Catholic enclave in largely Protestant Niedersachsen).

          • Estara says:

            I do a bit of pr occasionally for the school on myheimat.de and one guy from Niedersachsen commented how amazed he was that we had a single-sex school ^^.

            Donauwörth doesn’t have a state-run Realschule, just the one for the boys and the one for the girls, both originally run by monks and nuns – we still have some of those as teachers.

            • Cora says:

              I suspect that guy from Niedersachsen has never been in the Vechta, Cloppenburg, Emsland region.

              The situation in Vechta is pretty similar. There are two Catholic single sex Gymnasien for boys and girls respectively, run by nuns and monks, a Catholic mixed sex gymnasium (a former convent school that was once attended by a beatified cardinal), a Catholic mixed sex Haupt- und Realschule and a state-run mixed sex Haupt- und Realschule. Even the university was founded by and originally run by the Catholic church. It’s state run now, but the link is still noticeable, e.g. crucifixes on the walls and on campus, a pretty large faculty for Catholic theology and a nun as a professor of mathematics.

              By contrast, Bremen – which is a lot larger – only has one private Catholic and one private Protestant school respectively, neither of which are single sex.

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