By: Chiara Dunson, Amrutha Juluri and Rebekah Tesfaye

“She is nice and caring,” said 8th grader Jonathan Elftman. Mrs.Neidlein-Dial is the eighth-grade Social Studies teacher. She has been teaching for twenty years, and this is her fifteenth year at Seven Hills.

Mrs. Neidlein-Dial originally came from Weingarten, Germany, and lived there until she was nineteen. She has three sisters and had a mom who was strict about school. Since she lived in the southern part of Germany, which was near Switzerland and Austria, she got to ski a lot in her free time.

 She then came to the U.S. to take a gap year in Virginia. She worked as a nanny and loved it, but then flew back to Germany after her gap year. In Germany, she did her undergrad and then came back to the U.S. for graduate school in 1996. While in the U.S., Mrs. Neidlein-Dial experienced many cultural shocks. “At first, I did, but the biggest cultural shock for me was the language,” she said. Although Mrs.Neidlein-Dial took English for nine years, she did not understand English for the first month she spent in the U.S., which confused her. “I had to connect in Boston, and I almost missed my connecting flight because they mispronounced my name, and I didn’t figure out that it was me,” said Mrs. Neidlein-Dial.

She came to the U.S. for many reasons, including that she wanted to improve her English and spend time away from her family, and the U.S. was a fashionable place to travel. 

From a young age, Mrs.Neidlein-Dial always had a passion for history. She was first interested in journalism or law school because she loved writing arguments, but she decided that it wasn’t the right career for her. In college, she grew a stronger passion for history and became a teacher in 1998.

Mrs. Neidlein-Dial has a particular style of teaching. She tries to adjust how she teaches because she knows her students have different learning styles. “I think it’s helpful that there are different things because it makes it more interesting,” said Emma Hassell, an eighth-grade student. She includes every kind of teaching style in her classes, “She can make the material accessible to all students all the time,” said Mr. Waskowitz, the Middle School principal.

        Mrs. Neidlein-Dial works closely with Ms. Clemens, the eighth-grade English teacher. They cross the curriculums when teaching similar units, such as WWII. One year, they even got to work in the same class together. “I enjoy her openness for collaborating, breaking the rules, and doing other projects,” said Ms. Clemens.

Mrs. Neidlein-Dial is very inclusive and possesses a strong passion for history. “You need to know the content of what you’re teaching. It’s hard to explain it if you don’t know what’s happening,” said Mrs. Neidlein-Dial. She continues to study history to make sure her students can learn in the best way possible.