The summer holidays are over and a new era begins at the Puchheim grammar school: the school is experiencing its first change in leadership in 20 years.
Monika Christoph takes up her post as the new Rector.
Puchheim
- Starting a new job in the middle of the holidays sounds absurd at first.
But teachers officially don't have any holidays, only lessons-free time, and so the Puchheim grammar school experienced its first change of leadership in 20 years on August 1st: Monika Christoph has been the new headmistress and successor to Georg Baptist, for whom she herself still gave the farewell speech would have.
For the past three years, the 46-year-old teacher of mathematics and Protestant religious studies has already been the deputy director.
Math and religion is an unusual combination, but in her own words she has taught both “body and soul” so far.
On the one hand there is the exact, sometimes strenuous and difficult science, on the other there is life itself, talking to the students about God and the world.
She did her doctorate in theology, however, with a dissertation on a chapter of Romans in the New Testament.
After completing her apprenticeship, she remained loyal to the grammar school in Kirchheim (district of Munich) for almost 17 years before a new challenge came up.
Puchheim was known to her through the regular school development workshops introduced there and through the middle school plus.
Since moving four years ago, she has not been disappointed with her expectations: an innovative team that nevertheless sees the limits of what is possible, cooperative parents, a committed development association and, of course, students who are willing to learn and responsible, but who also value life in school .
Christoph sees the new position as an opportunity to change something at the school - "of course not immediately", as she immediately adds.
At the moment the virus has priority anyway.
"After Corona, the school will not be the same as it was before," she is convinced.
A lot will have to be reorganized, redesigned and rethought.
Digital forms of teaching and learning would not replace face-to-face teaching in the long run, but they would have to complement it.
The new director not only has experience as a deputy, but is more or less prepared by the family.
Her husband Robert heads the Max Born Gymnasium in Germering and advised her to move to the top.
Her two 16-year-old twin boys attend a Munich grammar school, so that experiences from three educational institutions can be exchanged at the family table in Untermenzing.
Not endlessly, though: “At some point, school is also good,” she says.
Skiing and horse riding, among other things, provide balance in the leisure time, which is likely to be scarce.
She does not have her own horse, there is no time for that.
But she keeps other animals.
And: your bees in their own garden “can take care of themselves”, says the amateur beekeeper.
Olf Paschen
You can read more news from Puchheim here.
