Teaching 6000+ miles away

Some of you may know that I did a couple of Skype webchats with some 6th graders last year. One of my best friends, Genie Scruton, transferred to Mill Creek Elementary this year and has asked me to continue the webchats. With the support and approval of her new principal, John Bartel (another former colleague), we started again this year. I got the opportunity to talk to the kids about my experiences here in Egypt, how schools compare, what food is like (I can get McDonald's delivered 24/7!), and insights into Egyptian culture such as Ramadan (holy month of fasting). We even made the front page of the Shawnee Mission School District's website for a couple days! You can see the article by clicking on this sentence. Check out the pictures - I've never been on a big screen before - must have been kinda scary looking!! Anyway, I had a great time talking to the kids and look forward to more. Thanks Genie & John!!!

Volleyball Tournament

I'm leaving today with my Girls Varsity Volleyball team to our EMAC tournament in Doha, Qatar. Wish us luck. It will be interesting, since we only had 2 1/5 of practice due to school closure, but the girls have been great and have learned so much and improved a lot in that short time. GO FALCONS!

Canadian Thanksgiving

This past weekend, all the resident staff were invited over to our fellow teacher, Debbie’s house, to celebrate Canadian Thanksgiving together. She cooked two turkeys, stuffing, and pumpkin pie; plus, every year she brings back canned cranberries just for Thanksgiving. A lot of us brought over side dishes so we had a huge feast with lots of “family” and a joyful celebration.

Open Water Dives

This weekend Seth and I did our Open Water Dives for our SCUBA class.  We did them in the Mediterranean Sea at the Montazah Palace.  Montazah was the summer residents of the Egyptian Kings when Cairo got too hot, it is still used today by the president.  We’ve been here several times with friends who own private beach houses here and there are huge lovely gardens to walk about.  It was pretty exciting to be scuba diving in the Mediterranean with the Kings Palace in the background.

We spent two days in the water working on our open water skills.  The first dive did not go well for me (Kristal), but I kept at it and the rest of the weekend went great!  From our starting class of nine we were already down to four by the time we got to the water skills.  After our first open water day, Seth and I were the only ones that returned for the second day.  Hopefully, the other two will try to complete the class next weekend.  In addition to the skills we had to perform, Seth did five open water dives and I did four.  Unfortunately, the visibility was horrible; but we have officially passed our class!  We are now certified Scuba Divers!  We’re so excited and can’t wait to go dive in the Red Sea or do an archeological dive here in Alex.

Swine "Flew" --when pigs fly

After three long weeks, the school is opened again!  It's so good to see our students smiling faces again and hear their laughter during lunch.

They actually apprciate us now after having to learn on thier own on-line and have their parents constantly on their backs to get thier work done.  Also the parents reeaally apprciate us.  We were constantly getting phone calls from parents telling us how hard it was to try to teach their kids math that they didn't understand, trying to modivate their kids to do thier work, and also just plain begging us to open up the school because after weeks with their children they were really get on their nerves.  Hopefully they can remember that they appreciate us for atleast a little while.

Scuba

Seth and I are taking scuba diving classes.  We've wanted to do this for awhile and I had contact with a Dive Center here in Alexandria though my After School Activities Coordination, so I set up some classes for us.  We initially started with nine teachers interested in getting certified, but in just a few days we are down to only four of us.  Since last week was our last week without students, we hurried up and got through all the classroom knowledge.  Then, on Friday we spent several hours in our pool doing our confined water dives.  It was a lot of fun and we are loving it.  We'll do our open water dives this weekend in the Mediterranean and then we'll be done and certified.