I thought Spring Break was in Mexico?

So today marks the end of another week of school here in Hannover and all in all I'm feeling pretty happy with my current situation.  While some of my students originally were quite shy towards me and sometimes even borderline rude, they have really begun to respect me in a certain sense.  I think I owe a lot of this to the teachers at my school, who really do treat me in many ways like an equal to them and as another member of the teaching staff--my students see this on a regular basis and now view me in that light.  I'm also lucky because since I'm not a full-time, normal teacher, I don't have to worry about some of the formality and professionalism that they must maintain, and I'm able to forge more personal/friendly relationships with students.

It's funny because for a while I was afraid to speak German with my students outside of class because I thought if they realized I don't speak perfect German, they wouldn't respect me in their English lessons.  They don't even seem to bat an eye at me when I misconjugate a verb or use a wrong tense--I guess they realized what I should have realized a lot sooner: I'm here to teach English as a native speaker and to learn German as a foreign language and they don't overlap as much as I thought.  What I mean is, in the US if a teacher or teaching assistant, even in a foreign language class, couldn't speak English that well, students automatically stopped paying attention and would give awful evaluations that they were an awful teacher.  If you are teaching German or French or Spanish it shouldn't really matter whether your English is perfect or not (with the possible exception of introductory courses) but that you know the language you are teaching.  Hell, I taught German to third graders at an elementary school in downtown Columbia, and we weren't even supposed to speak English.  It forces you and the students to communicate and understand each other in the new language which not only promotes learning but also reinforces the usefulness, efficacy and functionality of the new language.

I thought today I would answer a question I get a lot when I talk to family and friends back home--how does the weather in Hannover compare to the weather back home?  Of course, I needed to do this as scientifically as possible (why use words when you can use scientific graphs!).

 

According to the climate comparisons tool on weather.com, it shows that the average temperature in Columbia, SC is 18°F warmer than the temperature in Hannover, Germany.  I think it's interesting how the temperatures in Columbia seem to vary more than in Hannover--there seems to be a bigger difference between not only daily highs and lows but also summer highs to winter lows in Columbia.

Since on numerous occasions I've referred to this year in Hannover as just a "halfway home" before moving to Chicago next year, I decided to check out the climate comparison between Hannover, Germany and Evanston, IL (home of Northwestern University) as well.

 

I thought this comparison was possibly the most interesting.  If you just read the facts on the results table the climate comparison tool gives you, Evanston is on average approximately 1°F warmer than Hannover.  However, if you look at the graph Evanston not only gets significantly warmer in the summer, approximately 8°F, but also a bit colder in the winter.  Pretty interesting, right?

Last but not least, the title of this post refers to a question posed to me by a student this week.  One of my classes had an exam this week when I would normally teach the class, so I went to a different class with my host teacher Martina (one I'd never met before).  I did a short intro of myself and then we had a Q&A session about myself and America which I've become quite adept at here in Germany.  Of course Spring Break, like always, was brought up because through things like Girls Gone Wild and MTV's Spring Break programming, they think Spring Break is some mythical place in Mexico where there is always free alcohol and tons of hot college girls taking their shirts off.  I don't like to completely burst their bubbles, so I started off slowly with the explanation that there is no city called Spring Break, Mexico or anywhere for that matter and it's the same thing as their Spring Break.