The Traveling Teacher

Professional development...not so professional poetry...

2012-01-29T18:56:00.000+01:00

This weekend I attended the Association of German International Schools (AGIS) Conference in Hanover, Germany. It was a lot of fun getting to meet more of my colleagues and making connections with teachers around Germany in the other international schools. We had a lot of great professional and not-so-professional conversations and laughed all weekend.

My friend (and teacher twin), Lauren, and I presented about using critical thinking strategies in formative and summative assessment. In went well and we were even given an offer to present for a technology company's annual meeting in September in Berlin! WAHOO!

On Saturday night, they had a dinner for everyone and then asked each person or group of people, to write a little something about the AGIS conference for the 10th anniversary of the organization. They suggested limericks or haikus. Well, to be honest, the minute I hear the word limerick, I think of...

There once was a girl from Nantucket....

So, I wrote it down as our first line and as you'll see, our poem just degenerated from there. The organizers read it out to the whole conference and as we had "anonymously" submitted it, we weren't too known for the composition except by our own ISD colleagues!

None of this is actually true...by the way.

**I must quickly explain that my Nana used to work at a really fancy restaurant and people would come in and order Merlot and pronounce is as Mer-lett or Mer-LOTT. I had just told Lauren this story on the train to Hanover and she busted out the word Mer-LOTT to rhyme with A LOT!...this is similar to calling Filet Mignon as Fill-lett Mig-Nann.***

Awkward Emergencies...

2012-01-23T22:10:00.000+01:00

A few weeks ago, my friend Kendra had a blog post about awkward moments.

Click here to read it because it is super funny.

But, on that note...I have to add one of my own that JUST happened but it was so uncomfortably awkward that it warrants immediately writing about it.

I was just finishing up some school work and went into my kitchen to make some tea when I noticed that my kitchen sink was completely full with dark blue water. Like that color. It was close to 9 pm and I wasn't sure what to do. So, I did what I always do in house emergencies...I called my mom. She suggested plunging so I tried. But, the water just kept getting higher and I was freaking out. I turned off the washing machine just in case it was that. (By the way, washing machines in Germany are often in the kitchen. Mine is directly next to the kitchen sink and was well into hour two of one load. Yes, you read that correctly...hour two for one load.)

Next, I called my friend Keith because he has lived in Germany for 7 years and knows what to do in most situations. He told me to go get my Hausmeister (which is like a building superintendent). As I was talking to him the water started getting higher and higher. I was taking my coffee pot and filling it with icky blue water (it was the first large receptacle I could think to grab) and then dumping it in the toilet so that I wouldn't have water spilling all over my kitchen.

I scrambled to put on my shoes and started to run out the door. BUT WAIT! I can't just run out the door. I have no idea how to say BLUE WATER IS FILLING UP MY KITCHEN SINK! IT IS STARTING TO OVERFLOW EVERYWHERE in German. I can get as far as Ich habe ein gross problem....I have a big problem...and then I can't explain the actual problem. So, while I can hear the water starting to go down the side of the cabinet, I was trying to google translate and write down as fast as I could so I would be able to explain when I got to his door.

The Hausmeister lives in the building next door. So, I ran (after waiting in my super slow elevator...it takes a full minute to go down 7 flights...I should have taken the stairs!) to the building next door in my complex where my Hausmeister lives. I rang his buzzer and of course the minute he says hello, I start speaking French. HA! My brain went right to it. I couldn't even remember to say "Herr Hausmeister," I said, "Monsieur Hausmeister."

So, I waited about two minutes for him to come to the door and showed him my quickly scribbled note. He's in his late 70s- I would guess- so was probably not really prepared to suddenly run next door. We went to my building and entered the elevator. Now, here's where it was super awkward. It is a tiny elevator, it is slow, and I can only say things in German like Was kostet der Drucker? which means "How much does the printer cost?" which unfortunately was not the right sentence for this situation! We both just awkwardly stared at the wall of the elevator until I tried to act out what was happening in my apartment with my arms and very broken German. Yeah...like that helped.

The water had gone down a little bit when we got into my apartment (YAY) but he was able to plunge it enough to get it to go down. I opened the stopped washing machine and took out the soaking wet clothes, and what do you know...blue water filled the bottom of the washer. Something plumbing-wise is backed up between the washer and the sink. But, why the hell was the water blue? I was washing nothing blue except for a pair of old jeans that I had washed like 50 times.

So, now my soaking wet clothes are hanging on the line on the balcony. And, given Germany's damp climate, they'll be dry sometime next week. I was being proactive and washing my favorite jeans tonight so that they'd be dry by the weekend. Yes, that is the kind of pre-planning one must do when one doesn't own a dryer in a damp climate. Once they stop dripping I can hang them next to the radiator (which, btw, was not working until this morning when it miraculously decided to work and heated the room up to a billion degrees...Celsius...this is Germany!) and they'll dry in like two days instead of five.

But, through all this, (all this, as if I have just been through a trauma...I'm a bit dramatic), the thing that i like the best is that I can call a landlord to fix things. I do not have to try to deal with it on my own. It made me, once again, glad that I no longer own a home. I just don't think I am cut out for home ownership...too many things go wrong that I don't know how to manage. I love that I can call someone tomorrow and have someone else pay to have things fixed. Delightful.

So, there it is. My awkward, google-translated "emergency." I'm laughing to myself about what a dumb-ass I am at German as I write this. I wonder how long it will take in my brain until French is not my automatic go-to foreign language?

Well, until then, at least I've got google translate.

2011: Life lessons from a crazy year.

2012-01-15T20:28:00.002+01:00

Out of all of my adult years, 2011 was probably the most random so far. Over the course of the year, I lived in 4 countries, spent 8 months unemployed, and had some pretty cool adventures. Reflecting back, I learned a lot. Below are some pictures and the "lessons" I learned.

Lesson: You can turn anything into a French tarte with a little egg, cheese, and cream. (Hey...I didn't say these lessons were going to be profound.)

I started the year with a three month stay with a family in France “teaching” them English. Mostly, I became their friend, cook, nanny, space-taker-upper, and errand runner. It was a really fun time and as my blog indicated at the time, made me realize the true importance of Love and Logic in parenting and teaching.

The Louaisil Family. My "French Family" for three months.

I learned a lot trying to teach English as a second language.
Sang lots of songs and realized a lot of idiosyncrasies in American pronunciation when teaching to people who had studied British English in school.

I spent a lot of my time in France baking and cooking for the family.
The boys, Steven & Léo had a MAJOR sweet tooth.
They LOVED my American sugar cookies for Valentine's Day.

Lesson: Make choices you feel good about when you can.

In January, I attended a job fair and got to make the decision between a job in Kuwait or a job in Germany and as I’ve said before, the option with pork and alcohol prevailed and I moved to Germany. The job fair was a refreshing change because everyone there spoke my “teacher language.” After teaching in England last year, I was ready to quit being a teacher. So, going to a place where they understood me really renewed my hope that I could be a teacher again. Not wanting to be a teacher made me a little (a lot) lost. It is part of who I am. Being told everyday that I was so bad at it also made me think that it wasn’t for me. Fortunately, I’ve managed over the last few months to “uninternalize” my horrible teaching reviews and to regain my self-efficacy in the classroom.

A quick afternoon layover in Paris on my way to the JOB FAIR that changed my life.

Lesson: Surround yourself with positive people. (Alternative wording: There are grumps everywhere...stay away from them!)

My new school is not perfect, but I’ve come to realize that nowhere is and that I need to find the people who share my passion, my philosophy, and devote my energy to them instead of trying to fight the people with whom I don’t see eye to eye. This was something that I had figured out how to do at CBMS, but I’d lost sight of. I’m working on it.

The results of the job fair.
It was "on a wing & a prayer" then but feels like home now!

Lesson: Unless I win the lottery, I need to have a job at least just for entertainment purposes.

At the beginning of April, I headed back to Chesham (or “Crapham” as I like to call it) where I awaited my various visitors. My first visitors were my parents and we had a really fun time around England. There's a reason I've turned out to be such a nerd...it is inherited! We read a lot of history while on our trip AND even downloaded a 2-hour National Geographic video on Stonehenge to watch the night before our visit. Though it was so much fun having people visit, the times in between were some of the hardest. I was unemployed, in a small, absolute shit-hole town with no car and no money, and I was living with a roommate in a 500 square feet flat who had canceled our internet and tv while I was in France. I had many, many, many visits to the public library and spent many-a-day in Starbucks using their free internet. I also took extremely long walks pretty much everyday. One would think that it would be fun to just have endless time to do nothing but when you’re by yourself in a foreign country and can’t spend any money, it just isn’t.

My parents came to visit and we managed not to back our car into Stonehenge like the Griswolds.

Lesson: It is possible to have a sore face from laughing too much.

But, in between the down times, I had three amazing trips with friends! Nicole came to visit and we traveled to the Scottish Highlands and then walked our legs off in London. We laughed so hard and so much that a few times, our guide told us that we were not allowed to laugh on the bus anymore! Scotland was beautiful and Nicole and I were perfect travel partners due to our extreme nerdiness for things like Tudor history and the other English/Scottish monarchs and conflicts. We took every available audio tour and thought it was funny that we could reference historical events and people from watching “The Tudors” on Showtime. I will definitely never forget “divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived.” (Those are the fates of the six wives of Henry VIII!!)

The Scottish Highlands with Nicole. Isle of Skye.

"The Highlander" Castle.

Trafalgar Square. One of my favorite views of London.

Gordon was my next visitor. We rented a car and drove around England and Wales. Gordon's family immigrated from Wales to Pennsylvania and his grandmother's church songs are even still sung in Welch. It was a beautiful country and we had a great time jetting around in our Fiat "Panda" rental car. Gordon drove. I was too chickenshit to drive on the the other side of the road but I am an awesome navigator (especially with the GPS really doing the work!). We didn't have a super-specific itinerary and would often just see something in the book, set the GPS for it and drive there. Most entertaining for us was trying to decipher the Welch language. I'll never forget the word "araf" which means "slow." It is painted on all of the roads since most of them were windy and one-car wide. A few times we had to back down a road because another car/tractor was coming the other way and it was too narrow to pass.

Tinturn Abbey in Wales with Gordon.
This isn't on the "Top 100 Places to See Before You Die" Lists but it should be.

Welsh Castle with Welsh Man.

London! THE picture.

My last visitor was Natalie. We were power tourists like I've never seen. We saw more in five days in London and Paris than most people see in several weeks. My favorite part of our whole trip was sitting at sidewalk cafés in Paris and looking at each other every few minutes saying, "OH MY GOD. WE ARE IN PARIS!" I've been before several times, but it never gets old and being there with Natalie awesome. We also learned a mini-lesson while there...we are not fine dining people. We spent a lot of money eating at a very fancy restaurant and realized that we're much more suited to a baguette, a wheel o' brie, and une bouteille de vin! We also laughed really hard every single day. All day. Even the trip home on the plane was fun. Literally, even single minute of this trip (even while we were sleeping) was fun.

I made Nat do it too!
We had SO much fun on our trip!

Eiffel Tower at night with Natalie.

Lesson: Colorado rocks.
I went home to Colorado for the summer. It was needed (for one thing, I was unemployed and poor). But, being away makes you appreciate what you've left. Besides the people, which is obviously the number one reason it is hard living elsewhere, there are aspects of Colorado that I just didn't appreciate enough when I lived there. The sunshine is just different in Colorado. You never know how much you need the 300 days of sunshine until you live in a really cloudy, high-latitude place and it gets dark in the middle of the afternoon and doesn't get light until well after 8 am for several months at a time. Yes, the summer days are longer in Northern Europe, but it isn't worth it for the super short winter days, if you ask me. Damp, raininess sucks. I think I could live in rainy England or Germany my whole life and never stop complaining about the weather after living the majority of my 33 years in Colorado. It was funny teaching about the seasons in a place that has so little seasonal variation.

In my Colorado memories, the quality of the sunlight is different depending on what time of year the memory occurred. When I think of CSU homecoming or football games, I think of how the light is in Fort Collins in the fall when the leaves are all yellow. In summer memories, I think about the sun being directly above filtering through the trees in Old Town Fort Collins (specifically the trees that used to perch above my house that were so tenuously held up that sometimes I wanted to sleep in a ski helmet lest one of them bisect my house!). This is not something that I can relate to after two years in Northern Europe. Isn't it that Jonie Mitchell song that says, "you don't know what you've got 'til it is gone!" It is true. I've never been one to have moods affected by the seasons...but, duh, I kind of doubt that problem even exists in Colorado.

Summer with family and friends!
German restaurant the night before leaving for Germany.

Courtney, Megan, and I had some fun times!

My Tiger Girls!

Painted with Mom.

Lesson: I have a lot of crap/Mexican food sucks in Europe.
Moving to Germany was like leaving for college all over again in terms of getting all of my junk there. I had shipped three boxes from England and checked 3, 50-lb. suitcases and had two extremely heavy carry-on bags. Each time someone comes to visit me and each time I go home and come back to Europe, I have to pack and repack my bags in order to get everything I want back with me. This is a combined lesson because a lot of the stuff I bring over are ingredients for making Mexican food...specifically lots of green chilis. One would think that one could live without them, but one would be wrong. It is worth it to have all of this luggage each time, because truly, I just can't give up Mexican food for dinner on a regular basis. Sounds trite, I know. But, sometimes, you just have to do what you have to do.

Moving to Germany.
What you can't see is that the plane could barely get in the air due to my immense amount of luggage.

Lesson: The socio-economic status of middle schoolers is irrelevant to their need for relationship-driven classroom management.
At my school in England, I was not allowed to take the time to set up my classroom rituals and routines the way that I know is important. In finding a new school, this is something I continuously asked about during interviews. So, when school started this year, I spent the first week and a half in the exact same way that I did at CBMS. My school now has a completely different population than CBMS in pretty much every way imaginable, except for one thing...they are still all middle school-aged kids. The kids at my new school have responded extremely well to all of the expectations we set at the beginning of the year. Love and Logic works on them the same way it works on any other kids I've met. Because I was allowed to take the time to do this, my job is fun again. The other day I was just sitting working in my room between classes and realized that I am having so much fun again as a teacher. I know that there are many extraneous factors that contribute to that fact, but being allowed to do things the way I know they should be done makes a huge difference. We have fun in my class, me included. That's a good feeling. (Sidenote: I believe even more now in the book Drive by Daniel Pink. He says that people need autonomy in order to be motivated. I am a walking example of this. When I had extremely limited autonomy in how I did things in my English school, my levels of motivation and self-efficacy plummeted. If you haven't read it, you should.)

Poster-maker in my living room.
Classroom management is important no matter who you teach!

Lesson: Metacognition is important.
I've talked so much about this before that I won't belabor it again now. But, I have learned again and again that being able to name how/why/in what ways you are thinking is really important. More than ever, I believe that kids need to be good critical thinkers...especially when you consider that the entire internet is basically in our pockets now with smart phones. Kids need to be good information sifters. Humans need to be good information sifters.

Teaching "The Thinking Strategies" to my new students.

Lesson: Sometimes the simplest things are the most important.
There are many many contexts where that last lesson can be applied but I'm sticking with my own classroom for the purpose of today. I learned a new "Thinking Routine"this year for helping kids construct scientific explanations and it has literally changed the way I structure almost every assignment. It is the crux of what science is about. How I've managed to get through seven other years of teaching without doing this is now beyond me. Giving kids (or adults) a specific framework in which to put their thinking really allows them to understand content instead of getting lost in format. Because kids are getting so good at using this framework, we can really focus on their claims and how scientists use evidence to create theories. (I sure could have used this in the past when I had parents come in and tell me that a) they didn't want me to teach about global warming because they "didn't believe in it in their family" or b) they wanted me to teach evolution as only a "theory." I could have given them a lesson in this thinking routine so that they could understand that I WAS TEACHING EVOLUTION AS A THEORY...a SCIENTIFIC THEORY BASED ON EVIDENCE!)

The "Thinking Routine" that has changed my teaching.
I'm a teacher dork no matter where I live.

Lesson: If your family is far away, create a new one.

I have made some really great friends since moving to Düsseldorf. Living in a foreign country where you don't speak the language is sometimes quite hard (don't get me started on how I now view the plight of immigrants to America...that is another post...but I've gained some serious empathy for them while living here!). Having new friends with which to laugh, commiserate, drink wine, etc. makes all the difference.

My Düsseldorf "Family," the Brydens.
Thanks to Rachel Larimore for connecting us!

Dressed up for the Christmas party.
My very own Linda Richman. Lauren from Long Island.
I'll give you a topic. The peanut is neither a pea nor a nut. Discuss.
Ralph Finnes is spelled as neither Rafe nor Fines. Discuss.

I found costume-loving friends here too!
YAY! Can't wait for Carnival in February!

Lesson: There is a gene for silliness in my family and it goes back many generations.

I had another fun visit with my parents this fall when they came to Germany. I also got to go to Denmark twice to visit my cousins there. Every visit to Denmark is so much fun because we laugh so much. Every trip with my parents is also a lot of fun! This time I took them to Amsterdam and we discovered the small town in Germany from which my mom's side immigrated.

I will not lie. It is pretty cool to do things like this.
I had one foot in Germany and one in France!

Parents visited again.
Weather was great.
Beer was cold.
Great time!

Mosel River. Such a great trip!

My parents are ALWAYS willing to do the dorky tourist pictures.
Makes traveling with them just so much fun!

Got to visit my AWESOME Danish cousins twice this year!
Terese & Nina are obviously related to me due to their love of ridiculous pictures.

Lesson: Given enough time and effort, even an Easy Bake Oven can create Thanksgiving dinner.
(And see lesson about creating your own family when your's is far away!)
Everyone likes stuffing their face on Thanksgiving...even if it is your first one because you aren't American (or Canadian!). Everyone learns pretty quickly. I may not have made as many side dishes as I normally would, but I am DAMN proud of that enormous meal in my ridiculously tiny oven.

Wonderful Thanksgiving dinner with friends cooked in an Easy Bake oven.
International crowd for my current international life.

Lesson: Christmas lights and mulled wine can really take the sting out of a short, Northern European winter day.
Experiencing German Christmas Markets was one of the main highlights of living here so far. And, since being back from Christmas vacation, the streets in downtown Düsseldorf feel empty and sad without the stands of yummy treats, warm glühwein, and cutesy items for sale.

Christmas Markets in Germany have been one of the highlights of living here.

So there you have it. 2011 in a nutshell. I wouldn't say that I made any super-amazing, profound, Earth-shattering discoveries, but overall, it was a pretty good year.

2012. New year. New experiences. Pretty exciting prospects.

Frohe Weihnachten! Markets, Parties, & Glühwein...

2011-12-18T21:18:00.000+01:00

Before I talk about the super fun Christmas Markets, I must finally post a few pictures from Thanksgiving. It was an international Thanksgiving to go with my current position at an international school. We had 7 Americans (it was OUR holiday, after all), 2 Spaniards, 1 German, and 2 Canadians. We laughed a lot and it was one of my most fun Thanksgivings ever. My cooking skills were put to the test because my oven is so incredibly small.

I precooked turkey, stuffing, and cranberry sauce and then stuffed them inside a pastry shell (store-bought because I'm not a masochist!) to make Turkey Wellington. It was really delicious and a pretty good idea for leftovers (or the main meal if you cook in an easy-bake oven!).

So, here are a few pictures from our 'Merican Thanksgiving. Our biggest issue was not enough chairs. Fortunately, right before the dinner began, there was a random chair out in the hallway of my apartment building. Ask and ye shall receive, right? HA!

Lauren working on the mashed potatoes. No messing up the manicure!

The German version of my Thanksgiving Wellington before cooking.

The American Version. Was pretty good. Still needed gravy though!
This was my first time making gravy! Didn't even have to call my parents for guidance...just a quick pre-cooking phone call! Pretty proud of myself!

Our lovely international party!

Dessert begins and the laughs continue.
I love this picture since something must have been REALLY funny!

The last month in Germany has been quite delightful, once the narrative report cards were done. I will admit that I have had complete ADHD since they were due and have been only mildly focused on my job since then. Instead, I have entertained myself with trips to the Weihnachts Markt...the Christmas Markets.

The lighting of the tree back in November.

Glühwein is mulled red or white wine. It is delicious, especially when a bit of Amaretto is added. Standing out in the cold is so much better with a mug of glühwein in your hand! I am really going to miss them after Christmas is over since it is so fun to just pop downtown and walk through the lights with a mug of glühwein.

Everything is lit up for Christmas.
This sign says "Welcome to the Old Town."
Not too different from downtown Fort Collins when you get right down to it!
(Big difference...Fort Collins wasn't blown to pieces in WW2!)

Light that hangs all over the "blue" Christmas market.
All of the stalls are lit in blue at this market.

The beautiful lights of one of the markets right in downtown Düsseldorf.

The markets go from the last weekend in November all the way through to Christmas.

Drinking from a boot with Lauren!
PS- I got about 7 inches cut off my hair a few days after this.
No more braids for me!

Opening night of the markets with Takayo and Tina.
After a few of these glühwein, one feels the need to do some teeth brushing since it is quite sweet!

Besides the glühwein, I love just walking around and seeing all of the crafty stuff for sale. I'm not religious but I sure love Christmas decorations.

German village replicas. So cute!

Frohe Weihnachten means Merry Christmas in German!

You can see why I love going to the markets so much! And, these were only the ones in Düsseldorf! They are literally everywhere. But, I am not very motivated to walk around the outdoor markets when it is really rainy...the Colorado in me hates rain so I didn't quite make it to another town...there's always next year.

Last weekend, our school had the annual Christmas party. WOW! Working at a private school sure is different! The party was at a ballroom at the Radisson hotel. Basically, it was like going to someone's wedding but without a wedding. It was great fun and we all danced the night away to pretty much the worst band of all time...or the best band if you like cheesy, terrible musics from the 70s & 80s. Or, it would have been perfect music for the third wedding of two people in their mid-50s!

Another occasion to wear my favorite dress!
Our "office" Christmas party!

So now, I have 2.5 days of school left. I fly back to the good 'ole USA on Thursday. I cannot wait for some free diet coke refills that are filled with ICE! Last weekend we went to the movies and my giant drink had no ice. I think that I could live in Europe for the rest of my life and never get over the lack of ice in drinks!

Of course, I am SUPER excited to see my family and some of my friends. It will be a short trip home but I'm really looking forward to it!

Evil Narrative Report Cards Lead to Blog Post Thievery!

2011-11-30T22:25:00.001+01:00

I've gotten home from school at about 9pm every week day for the last two weeks due to my school's requirement for narrative report cards. This means that after I have graded the kids' work (sometimes multiple times due to revisions), I have to write several paragraphs about each kids' achievement level toward the standards. Ugh.

Anyway, not to belabor. But, it is time consuming.

It was also Thanksgiving. I had 14 people over for dinner on Saturday and basically prepared a Thanksgiving dinner (modified creatively) in an extra large Easy Bake Oven.

I haven't had time to blog about it. But, my friend Barbara wrote about it on her blog...so I invite you to read her blog entry so I don't have to write one!

Please click here to read it!

Some day soon (after Friday) I will have time to create my own blog and not have to mooch off others'. Counting down the minutes!

Trip to Denmarkia to visit my Denmarkian relatives...or wait, maybe they're Dutch?

2011-11-15T21:32:00.001+01:00

You might think that Copenhagen (Kobenhavn in Denmarkian) is the capital...
but nope, it is Kebabenhavn...or maybe that is just a kebab stand! HA!

This past weekend, I traveled to Denmark again to see my cousins who live there, the Lauritzens. As always, we had a really fun time with lots of laughs! It has been a long time since I'd seen them all in the same place because Terese was studying in Massachusetts when I was visiting this past April. I saw her in June in Colorado but this trip was fun because everyone was together.

Both Nina Camilla (19) and Terese (16) have spent a year of high school in the US. While there, people always asked them if they were from Denmarkia and if they spoke Denmarkian. Or, they just thought that they were Dutch! So, all weekend, we made references to this.

The weekend started with a little craziness...as I was on my way to the airport (I take a tram and then a bus and the whole trip is like 25 minutes), I realized halfway there that I didn't have my passport. AAH! I jumped back on the tram and then literally ran as fast as I could in clogs with a rolling suitcase back to my apartment. I grabbed a taxi back to the airport and made it to my flight with about 15 minutes to spare. But, the kicker was...NOBODY CHECKED MY PASSPORT or asked me for any form of identification at all since I'd checked in online. All that panicking was for naught! At least I only live 10 minutes by car from the airport! This seems to be a constant problem for me as the last two times I've left Germany, I have forgotten my passport.

A selection of Grecian/Roman noses! (And two Denmarkian ones!)
Terese (left) and Nina Camilla (right)

On Saturday we went into Copenhagen and went to an art museum that is owned by Carlsberg brewery. Since my cousin, Lisbeth, works for Carlsberg, we mostly got in for free. They were having a Gaugin exhibit (not pictured above, obviously) which was pretty cool to see. Gaugin certainly got around the island circuit and after going to the Van Gogh museum, it was fun to see more works of Gaugin. Apparently the two of them were friends and had had a fight when Van Gogh cut off his ear. Gaugin was so freaked out by the craziness that he left and that was the end of them living and working together in Arles, France. Our favorite on Saturday was a painting by Gaugin that had a pooping pig. We're obviously very sophisticated art aficionados.

One of the Queen's horses. He was in love with Nina and worked his head over the
bars so she could pet him.

After the museum, we also walked by the Queen's Stables. These were all beautiful (and huge) horses used for fancy-schmancy ceremonies. Copenhagen is such an enjoyably bike-friendly city. There are bike lanes everywhere that are SAFE and divided from the rest of the sidewalk and from the street. It is possible to be a bike commuter without the constant fear of vehicular manslaughter, which is excellent. Düsseldorf has some bike lanes, but in the downtown area, there aren't any and you have to be willing to ride with cars and trams, which I am not.

Roskilde Cathedral.
All of the Danish Royals for the last 1000 or so years are buried in here.

The Lauritzens actually live about 30 miles outside of Copenhagen in a town called Roskilde. It is right on the fjord and their house has a view of the water and only about a five minute walk down to the edge. We went for a walk in the morning and it was very cold but still pretty sunny! Roskilde is also home to a very famous viking ship museum and so there is always a bustle of activity at the water's edge. For pictures of that, please see my last blog post about Denmark. Click here to read it!

I cannot lie. I love that I am only an hour's flight from visiting Denmark. It took less time to fly to see them than it does for me to fly from Denver to Omaha. I just can't get over that. Maybe someday I will, but for now, it is still a completely amazing and awesome novelty to get out of a car, plane, train in another country and you're IN ANOTHER COUNTRY! My logical brain understands it, but the rest of me does not.

Shout out to the Viking heritage!
I've been informed that I'm a bad Viking descendant because I don't like pickled herring.
That's okay. I really like pillaging so maybe that can make up for it!

It was a great weekend! I can't wait to visit again...and it is so easy and cheap that I likely will! They will be coming to Germany next though so I'm looking forward to hosting!

And now for a wee bit o' teacher talk...

If you are a science teacher or you know a science teacher...GET THIS BOOK!

My friend Melissa Botteicher, a PEBC staff developer and science instructional coach, recommended this book to me and I've been blown away by it. It is so simple- teach kids a framework (or Thinking Routine, if you will) to talk about their scientific discoveries. Practice using the framework. Have kids' evaluate each other's use of the framework. Create/construct understanding around the framework. And then, step back and watch as kids become so much more sophisticated in their scientific reasoning skills. In ONE WEEK since I've taught this, I have seen improvement.

My "anchor charts" for using this thinking routine.

This framework takes out the "well, I watched this tv show about blabbetty blah and so I know that blabbety blah is true," and forces kids to really evaluate data they've collected. I want to throw this framework in the face of the evolution haters but because it is so based on evidence, reasoning, and logic they probably won't understand it anyway! They'll just keep quoting their "scientifical" evidence**.

**(For those who don't know, a mom of a student a few years ago tried to "convince" me that there is no "scientifical" evidence for climate change and that they don't believe in it in their family and therefore I shouldn't talk about it in my class. I responded with the fact that I would be teaching evolution in a few weeks too. She said that as long as I don't teach it as fact and only a "theory." I reminded her that gravity is also a "theory" and we've put people in space based on that "theory." Ah, religious nutballs. Good times.)**

Anyway, I'm really looking forward to seeing how my kids' grow as scientists using this framework. If Danny Birmingham is reading this, tell the author (he meets with him weekly at Michigan State) that I would like to thank him! You could also show him my anchor charts, I wouldn't be sad!

I've got about 1 million papers to grade and report cards to write (significantly longer process when there are no numbers involved and everything is a narrative!) so I should end this!

Christmas is right around the corner and I'll be back in Colorado soon! Can't wait to see everyone!

A Visit from the Parental Units...

2011-10-30T18:01:00.000+01:00

This week my parents came to visit in Düsseldorf and we did a mini-road trip of the Mosel Wine Region, our little homeland town, Langenfeld, and a short excursion to Amsterdam. It was a really fun week and with a little help from my parents, my apartment is starting to look less like somebody else's leftover junk and more like my own place!

Marv and me in front of Jan Wellem in the Düsseldorf Marktplatz. It was COLD!

We then took off for the Mosel River Region in our rental car. I'm definitely getting the hang of the German Autobahn and think I got into the 90 mph region this time. Our car was a stick shift this trip (automatic last time) and I was nervous that I was going to be stalling my way through Germany. Turns out I only stalled twice and it was within 20 seconds of each other after I'd already been driving for a few days.

The Parents on the Mosel.

But, not surprisingly, for how much we all like wine, our relatives emigrated from just down the of another major German wine region...the Mosel Valley. It was beautiful and sunny and full of delicious Halbtrocken Riesling (Half-Dry, that means...I'm fully a wine snob at this point...but would drink out of a box if necessary, so not too snobby!). I bought another 12ish bottles of wine and am getting quite desperate to buy a wine rack!

Another adorable view of another adorable wine region.

Berg Eltz. The only part without scaffolding.

We also got to visit a few castles. But, this was further proof that I actually have a curse. The castle was like 1000 years old or something, but wouldn't you know it, it was covered in scaffolding. What? They couldn't wait a few more weeks until I am not there? It was been standing for 1000 years...surely it could have made it a few more weeks. This is the same thing that happened to me when I went to see the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, the Acropolis in Athens...cursed. Cursed I tell you.

A relative on my mom's side immigrated to Michigan from Langenfeld in the mid-1800s.
It is now a town full of giant vacation homes in the hills. I am pretty sure our illiterate farmer ancestors were not the owners of one of them! It was a twisty, switch-back filled drive to the top of the hill but I did not stall!

A few of Langenfeld. Really steep hills everywhere around the town. You can see why a bunch of farmers with huge families had to leave, there just wasn't much farmland to be had.

The Catholic Church in Langenfeld. It was not there when the immigration occurred but was quaint and pretty nonetheless.

There was also a castle down the hill from Langenfeld. This is probably where our family would have worked as poor peasants and not as actual inhabitants of the castle!

No scaffolding but also closed for the day randomly.
It is a curse.

In conjunction with our visit to Langenfeld, we also visited the city of Koblenz. Apparently, Koblenz means "confluence" in Latin and wouldn't you know it...it is the exact spot where the Rhein and the Mosel Rivers come together...a "confluence" if you will. We stayed over night here and spent the morning freezing and walking through the town.

This monument is at the "Corner of Germany" where the two rivers come together.

With the heat blasting, we drove back to Düsseldorf. I had asked that we devote one day with the rental car to making large purchases that I cannot manage on the tram. I needed to buy a ton of stuff at IKEA. I've never actually set foot in an IKEA until now and I am sold. I can see why people were camping out at the one in Denver before it opened. They have EVERYTHING and it is seriously easy to spend a lot of money there. I got all new kitchen stuff so that I didn't feel like I was living in a college apartment anymore and also finally got some curtains which my mom then spent about 6 hours hemming so that they would fit my windows! (THANKS!!!)

My friend Chris was not nearly as excited about IKEA as I was.
I love how organized it is...so much better than American Furniture Warehouse in Colorado because you don't have to see every item at the same time, making it way less overwhelming. Plus, they serve meatballs in the snack bar....take that Jake Jabs. (This will only make sense to Colorado people!)

We spent the day getting lost in downtown Düsseldorf, even with the GPS as I am not accustomed to driving around here. I'm much better on foot, buses, and trams. It was actually pretty stressful having to drive around downtown because I am forever scared of sharing the lane with trams. My house looks much better now though thanks to all of this scary downtown driving. And, when I have Thanksgiving at my house, people will be able to use matching silverware AND plates. Yahoo!

Our next adventure was a 2.5 hour train ride to Amsterdam...or Hamsterdam as a partially-illiterate, stoner 8th grader whom I used to teach, called it. He told us that school wasn't important because he was going to move to Hamsterdam and sell weed. Good luck, buddy. The law is changing and only Dutch citizens will be able to buy it. And here I thought that he'd might have actually made it there...NOT. (His dad also liked to remind me in some super tactful, but regularly sent emails that his tax dollars paid my salary. I wanted to remind him that my tax dollars paid for drug prevention programs that were obviously not working either.)

Yay for sun! This is the first trip here where I've seen blue sky!
You can totally understand why Van Gogh freaked out the first time he went to the South of France and saw the sun!

I LOVE THIS CITY!!!

We had a great time in Amsterdam, stayed at a wonderful hotel, ate delicious sandwiches (twice from the same place they were so good) and went out for AMAZING Indonesian food with my friend Jonathan who lives there. I could totally live there. We did all the typical stuff...Anne Frank House Museum, Van Gogh museum, canal walks, and of course, a canal boat tour (where, as usual, I fell asleep just for a quick second....it is just so warm and rocks you, I cannot help myself.).

And, most importantly...WE FOUND THE SHOE!!!!

It is so dorkily touristy but WHO CARES! It is so fun!

Amsterdam is such a great city. I've been three times in the last year and would go back tomorrow (but annoyingly, I have to go to work instead!).

Nice hat.

The Swansons also LOVE cheese.

Dutch Milkmaids are We!

Our new shoes. They just don't pack well, though.

$10,000 Delft Tulip Vase. I bought three.

Dutch Mini-Van.

SUNFLOWERS! Van Gogh needed some meds...badly. Who knows if his painting would have been as good, but he might have lived a bit longer. Poor guy.

Cheap Heineken at our fave sandwich shop.

My dad and I have eaten Magnums across Europe. THEY ARE THE SHIT.
They are also probably a billion calories. We didn't eat any on this trip. Sad day. I'd have to run a few miles before and after.

If you thought I was a wine snob now...I'm not. Plastic cups still do it for us!
We did bring our own bottle on the train, though! Always thinking.
Score again for Germany!

It was a great trip. We had a fun time and I'm looking forward to Christmas break when we go skiing in Vail. Oh, my life is rough!

Deutsche Weinstrasse...German Wine Road!

2011-10-03T19:37:00.000+02:00

This weekend was a three-dayer thanks to it being German Reunification Day...meaning...the day East/West Germany came back together in 1990. Four of us girls from school, (Lauren, Rhonda, Kendra, and I) went on a road trip to the Deutsche Weinstrasse- the German Wine Road.

The Wine Road is a 50 km stretch of road in southwestern Germany where there are hundreds of wineries and vineyards as far as the eyes can see. We were incredibly lucky and had AMAZING weather. It was cloudless and 75 (don't ask for the Celsius, I don't know!) the whole weekend with low humidity. PERFECT.

We rented a car and so I got to drive on the Autobahn this weekend. It wasn't really that exciting to tell you the truth. Maybe if I had a really nice car that was really smooth at 100 mph then I would like it. But, our rental car was a Chevy Cruze, there were four of us and we had about 40 full wine bottles in the trunk...not exactly optimum conditions for driving without a speed limit. For me, it was more stressful than fun as the Germans I encountered were massive tail-gaters, non-turn signal users, and there was often traffic that would stop rather suddenly. I guess next time I will have to rent a really expensive, fancy car in order to take full advantage. Driving in Düsseldorf in the dark on Friday night was probably the most stressful part of the drive as there are construction projects, trams, bikes, and many pedestrians everywhere and I don't know where I am going even with a GPS! But, now that I've rented a car once, it won't be so bad in the future. It makes me feel like an independent, real person unlike last year in England where I was too chicken-shit to drive and also I didn't have easy access to renting a car anyway.

Being that it is 2011 and who doesn't like to be connected, we had plenty of technology with us!

Two i-pads, one kindle, 4 digital cameras, 3 smart phones, 3 ipods, a GPS, and a good 'ol-fashioned road atlas got us through Germany! Guide book....schmide book!

There are bike paths and walking paths everywhere in the area. We could just walk right into the vineyards, and so, of course, we did!

Creeping through the grape vines!

There were still a few grapes left of the vines. Yummy!

There were some delicious food options too! The traditional food for this time of year while tasting wine is called a Zwiebeln Kuche....which is basically like a piece of bacon/onion quiche. It was delicious and very cheap everywhere! But, most excitingly, there was Black Forest Cake and lots of it.

Before....

Twenty seconds later...
All for only 1€!!!

Now, I have passed by the world's largest ball of twine in Kansas before but if you want to find the world's largest wine barrel, you will not find it in Napa! Instead, it is right along the Deutsche Weinstrasse!

I feel like our car's trunk was actually carrying this much wine! At least that is what it felt like when I tried to "step on it" while on the Autobahn. The lack of pick up might have had to do with the cake we consumed too!

The Weinstrasse's best wine (at least in our opinion) was a Halbtrocken (half-dry) Reisling. We visited a castle and sat in the sun on the castle's patio enjoying a glass of it. It was one of those moments that really made you feel lucky to live in such an interesting, new place (and made you wish you'd worn more sunblock!)!

Lauren with our new favorite wine.
Castle walls, delicious wine, gorgeous weather, and amazing scenery.
Great weekend!

Yum.

There was also another way to get around the Weinstrasse...a wine-o chairlift. Being a skier, I sure do love chairlifts! We didn't even get to ride it but I am obsessed with the sign for it. When you don't speak German (well, I know about 60 words now), you often just figure things out from the picture or you watch to see what everyone else is doing!

This picture was easy to guess! A wine-swilling chairlift!
DEEEELIGHTFUL!!!

The view from the castle was also quite beautiful! Hambacher Schloss- it was called.
We now know that "Schloss" is the German word for castle.

When my parents were visiting Germany in the 1970s, they were standing about a block from the Rhein River but couldn't see it. They were asking everyone around them "Wo ist der Rhein Flusse?" which means "Where is the Rhein River?" and people were really confused about what they were asking since the river was within spitting distance. So, we now like to ask where things are when we are literally standing right in front of them. "Wo ist der Schloss?" was our question while sitting on the patio of the schloss/castle. Maybe it was the delicious Reisling that made this so especially funny! :)

The little hike up to the castle.

Remember that I could have been living in Kuwait this year!
I am betting that there are not any Kuwait Wine Roads where they serve bacon-filled snacks!
Score again for the land of pork and alcohol!

Though the Wine Road was only about 25 miles long, it took us two days to get down it. Part of that was because there were so many little places to stop and part of that was that we didn't plan ahead and get hotels. So, because of that, we had quite a drive to our hotel (and I say "hotel" loosely...we stayed in a boarding house which was like living in the dorms again!). Next time, we'll plan a bit ahead when traveling on one of the biggest travel weekends of the year. So, we spent a long time in the car. But, I always love a good road trip!

I like big bottles and I cannot lie. Baby got bottle! (Thanks, UT!)

Finally, we got to the end of the Wine Road where there is a Wine Gate. The Wine Gate was built in the late 1930s in order to celebrate German wine over French wine. I remember hearing SOMETHING about Germany being a bit overly-patriotic in the late 1930s but I can't seem to remember many details...oh, wait. The Wine Gate is only about 150 feet from the French border.

Rhonda "coming in for a landing" in front of the Wine Gate.
I know it is blurry but it looks like she fell from the sky and landed right in front of the gate!

So, because we were within feet of France..(Wo ist France?) we had to go there! And, you can't say you've gone somewhere (according to my cousin Terese in Denmark) unless you've had ice cream there. So, we hopped across the border and had a McFlurry! We were tempted to also order "Le Big Mac" but just being able to say "Le Big Mac" wasn't worth actually ordering one!

Standing on the Germany/France border.
"Ich bin in Deutschland" and "Je suis en France" on the other side!
In two countries at once!
That's a first for me (although I've been in 4 states at once!)!

Last night we stayed in Heidelberg because it was the closest hotel we could find. Heidelberg was about an hour from the end of the wine road and about 3 hours from Düsseldorf. Today we visited Heidelberg Schloss. It was very pretty and at the top of a giant staircase...that's okay, we needed to work off the cake, wine, and McFlurrys!

View from Heidelberg Schloss.

We, again, cracked ourselves up "looking for" the castle while standing directly in front of it.

The French blew up the castle in the 1600s and it hasn't been the same since!

This was such a fantastic weekend. When you get into the daily rut of school, workout, dinner, laundry, etc. (Notice that house cleaning is not on that list because I GOT A CLEANER!!!) I forget why I am living so far away from everyone I love when I'm just going through my routine. I like to remind myself why I'm living so far away by having the kind of weekend I just had.

If you're keeping score...and I am...

Score: Last year- 0 This year- + 1 million.

Next up: Parentals visit in three weeks! I can't wait!!

Ich bin käse....

2011-09-25T11:15:00.000+02:00

It has been a few weeks since my last post and I have been busy, traveling, sick, and busy again. I have started my just over six hours of German classes per week and not getting home until 9 two nights per week is making the weeks go quite fast. I am glad I didn't have to go to graduate classes much during the weeks I was teaching otherwise I might not have ever finished my master's degree.

German class is going well and is actually really fun! It is fun being like a kid again and learning something for the first time. Usually when I go to professional development stuff in education, it is very cerebral... so it is fun doing something that is just basic. Don't get me wrong, basic does not equal easy!

To learn the alphabet, we had to dictate words to each other and spell them. After a long day of teaching and a few hours of German class, the spelling words degenerated into silliness. Brain fry = reversion to 7th grade. But, let's be honest, I'm never far off!

German grammar is not easy! And, there are more articles and pronouns than I know what to do with! I don't think this will be my last German class if I really want to learn the language! Just like when I was in Spain and we thought it was hilarious to ask "How is the bathroom?" instead of "Where is the bathroom?" we have gotten stuck on nonsensical phrases like Ich bin käse which means...I am cheese. But, it lets us practice the ä which is different from a regular a. Anyway, generally, by the end of the 3 hours and 20 minutes class after a long work day, I am delirious and a bit silly.

The class is through an adult/continuing education program offered by the city. It will go until December so I should have a decent foundation by the end of the semester. At least, hopefully, I will be able to speak to waiters and the check-out people at the grocery store without just staring blankly at them all the time. There are people from all over the world in my class, mostly business people who would like to learn German for work. There are also two teenage boys in the class with faux-hawks who talk the entire time. They don't speak English so our teacher warnings (there are six of us from school in the class of 22) fall on deaf ears. The German teacher told them to go home the other day. Ugh. But, comical nonetheless.

In other news...

Last weekend I went to Holland with my friend Rhonda (Canadian but taught in Norway the last three years!). We went to Rotterdam on Friday after school on the train. It took just over two hours to get there. Her aunt and uncle from Canada were there for work so we met up with them. In actuality, even though we stayed in Rotterdam, we spent the whole weekend in Amsterdam which is only a 40 minute local train ride away. It was a super fun weekend (except poor Rhonda got a wicked cold which I now have!).

OF COURSE WE FOUND THE SHOE!!!
(My mom and dad will be visiting the shoe in October...so stay tuned!!!)

I love Amsterdam (and not for the reasons everyone always jumps to) because it is a beautiful city. The canals and 400 year old canal houses are just gorgeous. Every single house is unique and I love watching people fly safely around on their bikes because there are bike lanes everywhere! We mostly just walked around but did take a canal tour. You know me, can't stay away from river/canal/harbor cruises. Actually, I wouldn't have done it again in Amsterdam had I not been with people who'd never been there. Don't worry, I will do another one when my parents come to visit next month!

This was the perfect scene of Amsterdam. Bikes, canal boat visible through the rungs, and canal houses in the background. So interesting...except when you have to carry 900 pounds of luggage up the winding staircase like I did last year when Courtney and I were in Amsterdam. We'd had the bright idea that it would be better to share one huge bag instead of two small ones. Wasn't such a bright idea!

Amsterdam and a weekend in Holland was also an opportunity to go on a carb bender! Except for a few beers here and there, I hadn't eaten sugar, potatoes, bread, rice, pasta, etc. for the last 9 weeks. The upside is that all of my clothes fit again and I got to tighten my belt a notch. The downside is that I live in Europe where there is SO MUCH deliciousness everywhere! So, I gave myself the weekend off and we started the minute we got to the train station!

They sell these delicious pretzels everywhere (brezel in German) and yes, I am drinking a Czech Budvar...I think where we ripped off Budweiser! I just like Pilsner, it has nothing to do with the label.

The other reason for the bender when going to Holland is the BITTERBALLEN! They are deliciously fried balls of deliciousness. There is no other way to describe them, really. They are some sort of meat stew which is then deep fried and you dip them in mustard. I went ape-y for them last year when I was in Amsterdam with Courtney and I decided that being able to stuff my face with them was a good workout goal to keep me motivated over the last few weeks. I wish I could be motivated by things like good health, etc. but no, fried food is what does it for me!

Rhonda with some beers and bitterballen. (I think the beers are Belgian but hey...Belgium is close!)

Amsterdam also has delightful small shops that are open on Sundays...unlike everything in Germany. There is no such thing as a relaxing Saturday because all errands have to be done on Saturdays as everything is closed (including grocery stores) on Sundays. In Holland, everything is still open so we spent most of Sunday shopping in the tiny streets of Amsterdam. Shopping however, was preceded by a viewing of the Canada vs. France World Cup Rugby match. Rhonda is a big rugby fan (and player) and so we met up with a friend of a friend in Amsterdam for some morning rugby watching at an Irish Pub. Cappuccinos instead of beers.

A men's shoe store. Not in Colorado anymore.

This weekend wasn't quite as eventful as I ran a lot of errands. Not having a car makes errands take a lot longer. I don't miss having a car most of the time, but for carrying groceries, or a quick trip somewhere, it would be nice sometimes. Yesterday we ventured to a store called Obi which is like Home Depot because I really need some new curtains and some other stuff for my apartment. It took two trams and a bus ride to get there but we found it eventually.

Obi = Germany's version of Home Depot. It is even orange!
My favorite part? They had the German equivalent of Depot Dogs....Bratwurst!

A lot of debacles and hilariousness often ensue when trying to buy things in a foreign country where you don't speak the language. There was a fair amount of sign language and pointing to buy some screws and don't even get me started on the curtain situation. That was WAY beyond my German vocabulary. Unless the German phrases needed are "What is your name? Where are you from? What languages do you speak? and What do you do for work?" then I am at a loss in most situations!

School is still going well. I still really like it there. And, speaking of, I need to end this post so I can do a little work...AND...study! I have a German test tomorrow! YIKES!!!

Beware..extreme teacher talk coming at ya!

2011-09-11T18:37:00.000+02:00

If you are one of my new ISD colleagues reading this, I am afraid you are about to see the extent of my teacher geekiness springing forth. If you've been reading my blog for awhile (or taught with me) none of this extreme dorkiness will come as a surprise. But, in my defense, I know a few people reading this are my twins in teacher nerd-ness!

As I try to get all of the IBMYP (reminder...that means International Baccalaureate Middle Years Program) stuff straight in my head, I am really continuing to ponder and mull over the importance of making things visible for kids. This is something I have been working on for the last few years in my instructional practice...I mean, really, on the Tiger Team, we were known as the poster makers around the school. We were all obsessed with our word walls and "anchor charts" and managed to fill every available space by the end of the school year.

My basic "anchor charts" are the same in this school as they were at CBMS. I've developed a little system for the beginning of the year that when given the time, I will ALWAYS follow. I wasn't allowed to follow this last year and I paid for it dearly with classroom management issues and by the number of times I was called a bitch by students!

Two summers ago I went to an institute called "Building Intellectual Character" that was focused around routines for thinking in the classroom. The institute was facilitated by Ron Ritchhart from Harvard's Project Zero who also has a book entitled "Building Intellectual Character." His latest book, and a heavy focus of the institute was on "Making Thinking Visible" which obviously, I (along with many teachers at CBMS, but especially the Tigers) had already bought into- as evidenced by the constant poster making. However, now, with the MYP, I am really starting to click with how entirely important that truly is.

Here are the beginnings of my implementation of "Making Thinking Visible." These are posters for each "Thinking Routine" that we have learned so far. After having my 8th graders write "Headlines" about the layers of the earth, I was EXTREMELY glad that I had taken the time to really teach the routine. "Start slow to go fast," is always true yet I am surprised every time for some reason!

The MYP at an international school is a different animal than in a regular public school. For starters, we do not have a mandated curriculum from a governing agency and therefore we are all curriculum designers (to which I say YAY because this is something I really enjoy but to some people, it totally sucks!) and our curriculum is a very dynamic thing. We are not able to just plan something (I know that public school teachers cannot do this either) and then do it year after year after year. The concept of "backwards design" is really taking on a whole new meaning to me and I am seeing how critically important well-planned assessment is to even beginning a unit. Because, how can you start a "journey" if you have no idea where you are trying to go?

But I digress...or do I?

There is so much thinking that goes into the planning of a unit. There are a lot more parameters to plan around than I have been used to. For example, at CBMS, I looked at the content I was required to teach and I developed my units (with backwards design) around that content. But in the MYP, there are about a million (or at least it feels like it) considerations to make. For example, not only do I have to plan around a unit question, and a well-planned assessment, now I also have to think about my Area of Interaction as a lens for the unit, but also what the "significant concept" is that can link to any content area, and what "approaches to learning" I am also going to embed and use as a lens for the unit. See how complicated it is? It is a very muddy and muddled process but I am getting lots of practice.

Oh look, I digressed (is that the past of digress or is there some other form of the word that I am forgetting) again...but I'm coming back to my original point, I swear...

So my point is this...if we want kids to understand all this (and ourselves), I think that making it visual for them is absolutely critical. They are expected to be able to speak about their experiences with the Areas of Interactions in depth by the time they finish the MYP program in 10th grade. But, how can this happen if it is all muddled up in their teachers' heads, let alone in their own? So, for the last few weeks, I have been doing a lot of thinking about how to un-muddle for all involved parties. And, guess what I came up with? POSTERS!!! (You could probably guess, I love them!) We are not talking about the kind of posters you can buy in a teacher store or at Target, but those that I work really hard to make myself.

And, I have been thinking a lot about how to arrange things in the best way to make it clearer for kids. I spent a few hours the other day getting things put up, and then today, had a different idea that was precipitated by a bunch of ideas kids were having, and I had to unstaple and redo things.

Here's my current thinking...as of today....

This will likely change. However, I want to give a shout-out to Lesli Cochran and Natalie Dudley at CBMS who always had chart paper with their unit questions where they continuously had kids reflect on their current thinking in regards to the questions. AND, they added to it all the time throughout the unit- so I stole their idea! We've only been doing this unit for a few class periods, but already small bits of thinking were starting to happen. The kids told me that we needed another section for "Interesting Facts" and "Questions We Now Have." Kids are smart.

This post has taken me a few weeks to actually write. In the time since I started it, I have been thinking even more how important visual representations are. I have noticed my students starting to use the boards themselves and in my 8th grade class, we have had to add thinking on an almost-daily basis. Through inquiry, we just continue to ask more and more questions!

The more we learn, the more questions we have! And then, in the midst of our study of the earth, specifically regarding earthquakes, there was a 4.4 earthquake in Düsseldorf the other night! The kids came to school extremely excited about it!

Even though I have been an inquiry-based teacher for awhile, I am really starting to think about it differently through the way that I am structuring units this year. We have been using the summative assessments to drive the entire unit. I introduced the assessment tasks on the first day of the units so that kids can realize that everything we do and learn is related to answering our big unit questions and completing our culminating tasks. I feel like the kids are more engaged and also it has a relevance to them that I haven't seen before when I have structured things differently.

Inquiry in progress! I have been using lots of web-based text sources that I bookmark for the kids in advance! The best part of that is that they are interactive AND kids who don't speak English proficiently, can read about the science content in their native language!

As you can read, I am really enjoying getting to be a reflective practitioner again. I am able to actually reflect on my lessons and have the time to spend planning them in a quality way (unlike last year!). To be perfectly honest, I am really having a great time being a teacher again! YAY! That is a really good feeling after the soul-crushing year I had last year (dramatic? yes.).

I also now realize that I cannot have a classroom that doesn't know the language of the "Thinking Strategies." They have become such a big part of my daily instruction that even though I was worried that they would be just "ONE MORE THING" for the kids to know (in MYP we have lots of lists that the kids have to be aware of!), I realized that I cannot teach without them. I am not necessarily teaching them specifically for a whole unit, but when a kid uses one, I name it for them and I walk over to the posters and we look at how their thinking fit with one of the thinking words. I think this is the best intro I can have so far...merely naming it for them.

What can I say? They have just become part of who I am as a teacher.

If you want to hear a podcast that has forever sold me on naming thinking for kids....here's a link....

"Words" Podcast from RadioLab

On a fun note!

I have been on two field trips in the last two weeks with the 8th grade...bowling and canoeing. Bowling was pretty standard but canoeing was a definite adventure!

The weather held until we were getting on the bus to go home! Lucky us!

Yes, the kids are perpendicular to the river! They had some steering issues! It was pretty hilarious but nobody flipped their canoe- shocking for 8th graders!

I start my intense German classes tomorrow after school! They will be six hours per week until December. I think that maybe I will finally feel like I live in Germany once I start taking German lessons. Right now, because my job is in English and all of my friends are English-speakers, I just don't feel like I am in Germany. I am really looking forward to it! I feel quite inept that I cannot have basic conversations with people in German.

Next weekend I am heading to Holland with my friend Rhonda. We're going to Rotterdam and Amsterdam just for a quick trip. I have been working out as much as I can so I don't feel guilty about eating delicious bitterballen (fried deliciousness eaten with beer!).

This was a longun'! Sorry! I haven't written in awhile...mostly just lazy to be perfectly honest! I have been watching Netflix ever since I got my American IP address so my computer is generally occupied doing that!

Ciao!

Week 1 DONE!

2011-08-21T17:36:00.000+02:00

This week was my first week at the International School of Düsseldorf, and I have to admit, it was REALLY fun! For someone who has never read my blog before, you will soon see, that I am a huge teacher geek. For those who've known me, this will come as no big surprise. The relief factor is so huge, words cannot even describe it. I was so petrified and stressed out about starting school that even one of my friends here told me that she could see a difference in me after a week because I had chilled out significantly! PHEW!

It is so great to be at a school again that values my professional opinion in my own classroom and just leaves me alone to do what I need to do! I was able to spend all of my classes this week getting the relationships, rituals, routines, and BID-NESS taken care of that I know, especially as a middle school teacher, are so important to having a good year!

Part of this week included teaching "Thinking Routines" and I have decided to make a quick procedural poster for each one that we'll do. So, the next time we do one of them, I can just quickly say the name for it and the kids will know what I mean! This (naming the routines and making posters of them) is something new I am trying this year as I think about making things as transparent as possible for the kids. And, since many of my kids are English Language Learners, this also provides a visual cue for things that might be a bit abstract. I don't put the poster up until we've talked about it and practiced the routine.

Every day this week as I was getting excited about things and sharing my excitement with people, they would say "Welcome to an international school!" For example:

1. My largest class has 21 students. (Yep. You read that correctly. WHAT? I know.)
2. My kids ALL (and I mean ALL) say thank you when I hand them a paper.
3. Our cafeteria has a SALAD BAR and the food is actually cooked ON SITE!
4. I have an interactive white board, and asked for a document camera and VOILÀ...there it was!
5. ALL of my kids come with school supplies. (Even markers, scissors, glue, etc.)
6. Almost all of the kids speak AT LEAST three languages and have lived all over the world.
7. Kids seem a bit more accepting of differences because they're all inherently very different given that they are from/have lived all over the world.
8. The average stay at the school for kids is only about 1-3 years so they've all experienced being new and are extremely willing to help out other new kids, more so than I have ever encountered before.

Does it feel like I am cheating on public education? Yes, yes it does. I feel a little bit ashamed to share all this stuff with people who have had their class sizes increase to ridiculous numbers this year. But, this is what I am doing for at least the next two years, so I'll just apologize in advance if it seems like I am rubbing stuff in...I'm not trying to, just sharing my experience!

Our schedule is going to be hard for me to get used to from a memory standpoint. I cannot remember which class is coming in next, let alone what I have planned for that hour. I have toyed with about 5 different planning/organizing/documenting systems this week and think that I might have gotten one down. I had planned on trying to do it all in my ipad, but alas, I am a pencil/eraser girl.

This is my 9-day schedule. Instead of 5 day weeks, we have a 9 day cycle that goes by cycle day instead of week day. The thing that I really like about it is that because the day of the week doesn't matter but the day of the cycle does, I see different groups on the last period of a Friday pretty much every Friday! Ultimately, this seems like it will really improve my instructional capacity.

Now don't get me wrong, it has not been all roses. I am expected to unit plan with some people who are not super happy that our head of department is requiring us to start from scratch this year. I can see why this would irritate someone who has been teaching a long time, but for me, it is nice because I am never good at teaching from someone else's unit/daily plans (hence one of the many reasons that I was always having issues at my English school) and so I like that I am given opportunities to do backwards-design unit plans from the very beginning. I think I've come up with some cool assessment ideas but it is really hard to share them with people who are not constructivist in the same way that I am.

Here's a link to a definition of Constructivism if anyone is wondering what the heck I am talking about....

Meaty Definition of Constructivism

Because I see all teaching/learning through the lens of inquiry, discovery, and constructivism, sometimes I have a hard time (and by sometimes, you will know that I really mean ALWAYS) planning with people who are not this way. I have been tested mentally already and am trying to apply some of my Cognitive Coaching strategies instead of just being a brat (like I would prefer to do though it is not very professional) and throw my hands up while saying "FINE! I'll just do it my own way and don't care what you want to do!" But, we are expected to do things together so I will continue to try. The good thing is though, I am FULLY supported by my head of department (UNLIKE last year...uh...just the thought of her makes smoke come out of my ears) and the school administration seems to think like me about assessment based on the book that they gave us at our staff training. And, just to demonstrate the extent of my nerdiness, you can know that, yes, I already read most of it.

So, as week two begins, I am trying to actually plan some real content lessons and creating/searching for a lot of resources because I will be teaching some things that I have never taught before. I do have solid amounts of time during the school day to get stuff done (those white boxes on my schedule) so I am really trying to use that time the best that I can.

And, don't worry...my week wasn't all about school! I have some workout buddies (FOR FREE) at school. A few of us are just moving the tables and doing some Body Combat-esque videos which is perfect for me as I am in the hole about $2 million after having been unemployed for so long. Not sure what my gym situation is going to be but I will wait a bit to figure it out. For now, I am really enjoying the after school workouts and am having almost as much fun doing it as I would at an actual gym! Plus, I don't have to go anywhere.

This weekend was pretty fun. Our administrators put €400 toward a bar tab at an outdoor café near school so we all went there after school on Friday. Saturday I did some farmer's market shopping, had lunch with my only non-school friends Barbara and Todd, got a pedicure, and went out to dinner with some new friends from school. The weather was DELIGHTFUL (like Southern California) on Saturday so I was out and about outside downtown a lot. Everyone else had similar ideas and it was very busy around town.

This was one of several "party bike" options that one can rent to ride around Düsseldorf.
HOW FUN!

If you want to drink any beer, there are literally options about every 2 inches (I should say centimeters since this is Europe but then it would be 2 inches X 2.54 centimeters = the distance one must travel in Germany to find beer!)!!

Another party bike! My Dutch friends said that is a Dutch invention that has since been banned in Holland because people would get wasted and fall off! If the Dutch are banning something, you know it must be dangerous! I think it still looks pretty fun. This is a bike/bar for about 12 people!

Yesterday, along the Rhein River, there was a random marching band. Hilarious.
Also hilarious is that my phone autocorrects the word "Rhine" to "Rheumatic!"
"Wine on the Rheumatic" doesn't have quite the same ring to it as does "Wine on the Rhine!"

Today I have been getting myself prepared for my week through the never-ending doing of laundry and lots of school-related activities. Not having a dryer SUCKS OUT LOUD! I really like my apartment. I can't remember if I have said this yet, but I do. Having my own place again is GLORIOUS! And, apparently, a lot of people here have a cleaner for hardly anything so (WHAT? WHAT?) I am hopefully going to have one too! What's not to like about that?!?

This is my room! You will notice the lack of any knick-knacks. That will come later.
I am still working on things like lightbulbs!

I have, at least, gotten a few frames and figured out how to print pictures so my house has some personal touches!

If you've hung in through this whole post, thank you. I have been really busy during the week but am going to really try to make sure that I get to it on Sundays! I would really appreciate it everyone I know could have a blog so I too can keep up with the minutiae of your life as well!

To all of my CBMS peeps...I will be thinking about you this week! I still do not like starting a school year (or really working in a school at all) without you! I miss "the gauntlet!!"

Let the fun begin (as if it hasn't already...)!!

2011-08-14T21:04:00.000+02:00

This was my final week of training before school starts with kids on Tuesday. And, to be perfectly honest, it has been quite fun for a variety of reasons. Now some of those reasons are definitely related to the amount of free booze provided by the school in this final week, but many of the other reasons are related to professional (and not booze related) factors.

This week we had a guided city tour as part of our training and part of that included a drinking lunch at a nice restaurant downtown. Oh, private school life, how different you are!

Teachers don't usually get to do the "drinking lunch" without
going to jail or something...so this one was pretty exciting!

Mostly I have just been hanging around with new teachers since we've only had one day back with the whole staff. There are 30 new people this year between the elementary and the middle/high school and so we've had a large group and gotten to know each other pretty well these last two weeks. The whole school has well over 200 staff members (including support staff, HR, etc.) and so there are obviously a ton of people left for me to meet!

Here are some other pictures from our city tour. We went up a giant tower (come visit and you too can go up a giant tower in Düsseldorf) and so we got some great views of the city!

Here's the giant tower! Fortunately there was an elevator to the top!

Our tour guide told us how Düsseldorf is a "young city" because it was only founded in the 1200's.
As a North American, this is just hilarious to me.

Another view of the church that will have a straight steeple only when a "true virgin" gets married there.
It was reconstructed after the war to look this way because this is how it looked before WWII.
The very top was so heavy that the original tower started to twist and since that was part of the church's charm, they reconstructed it this way.

Düsseldorf is known for cartwheels. Also, hilarious.
It has something to do with men coming back from war (like hundreds of years ago) and all the boys doing cartwheels to celebrate. Nowadays, there is a contest every year that just recently allowed girls to be involved too (that whole "dress" thing got in the way when doing cartwheels apparently until girls were allowed to wear pants!).

View from the tower.
Düsseldorf's on the Rhein River in case you hadn't picked that up yet.

There are six suspension bridges in this area that are all exactly the same.
The old bridges were blown out during WWII.
85% of the old part of the downtown (the Altstadt) was destroyed because the Americans were right across the river and this whole area of Germany was home to many munitions factories.

The one part of the city that wasn't destroyed at all during the war. This area is called Oberkassel and it is on the opposite side of the river from the rest of the city-- the part of the city where the Americans were launching the bombs into the Altstadt so it was spared. The tram goes right across the bridge in just a few minutes from downtown.

Besides the great city and the great people that I've met so far, I am really enjoying working on curriculum design at my new school. Basically, from what I can tell so far, not a lot was actually written down in terms of a scope and sequence until this year when the department head (whom I love so far!) decided to just get it down on paper for a jumping off point (and we have our IB accreditation this year in January!). The big difference between this school and other places where I've worked is that there is no governing agency prescribing a specific curriculum. There are very (VERY) loose frameworks provided by IB for the Middle Years Programme (grades 6-10 in the International Baccalaureate program which shall henceforth be known as the MYP in my blog) but it is relatively general and centered on the big ideas of science like change, systems, structure/function, etc.

This is super exciting and scary at the same time. It is about as opposite as you could get from what I was doing last year where the curriculum was prescriptive to the millionth degree. It is also quite different from what I've done in Colorado too, but fortunately I had enough freedom at CBMS that I was able to arrange my units in ways that I thought worked best for my kids, etc. so I am familiar with curriculum design to a degree. Having to plan things for three grade levels basically from scratch (while trying to work with other teachers and reach agreement...always a hard thing) is definitely going to test my skills in curriculum design, but, is also TOTALLY fun and lets me be creative!

I am so thankful that I have had the opportunity to use Understanding by Design for unit planning where you design the assessments first and then plan for understanding while you work toward those assessments. MYP unit planning is very similar to Understanding by Design but has an additional layer because we have "Areas of Interaction" that are related to everything being internationally minded. The "Areas of Interaction" are like the lens you put on each unit. They are Human Ingenuity, Health & Social Education, Environments, Community & Service, and Approaches to Learning (Metacognition) and this is going to be the super-new aspect of the MYP for me compared to what I've been doing so far in my career. To give an example of how these are used...my first unit for seventh grade is on human reproduction and factors that affect survival of fetuses, babies, and children. So, the Area of Interaction that we will use for this unit will be Health & Social Education and we will look at human reproduction/survival through the idea that different countries have different resources and that these factors often affect survival and health. I am sure that this is similar to "thematic units" that people did in the 80s/90s but the themes are just more broad and every subject area (including art, music, & PE) uses the same ones. I think it is super-cool and it is definitely pushing my skills and challenging me!

That being said, I do feel a high degree of self-efficacy so far because planning inquiry-based science units is one of my favorite things to do, professional speaking, and I am being supported here by my department head and my MYP coordinator to be creative! I just don't feel like anyone is going to come in to my classroom with a checklist (like last year) and repeatedly tell me how much I suck! I don't feel beat down and overwhelmed like I already did before school started at my English school. I feel like I might actually have a life here! WOO HOO!

Speaking of that, in about a month, I will begin an intense German class for six hours per week that will go until Christmas. I am going to take it at the adult education center downtown with another teacher from my school, Lauren. I am surviving okay not speaking German but I kind of feel like a jerk that my first question is always "Sprechen Sie English?" While we were getting our cell phones hooked up the other day, the guy in the store was apologizing (who, btw, was named Wayne! "Hi Wayne...Hi!" à la Wayne's World) because he didn't think his English was very good. My friend Lauren and I were embarrassed because we're in Germany and here he was apologizing for not speaking English (which he totally did but everyone always says that they don't speak it well and they they speak it about as well as I do!). I think after three months of six hours/week, I will have a good start and will at least be able to converse on the basics! I have definitely already learned a lot of random words just from being in grocery stores, restaurants, and out and about around town.

Düsseldorf is turning out to be a great place to live (except the fact that they weren't lying when they said it was referred to as "Drizzledorf" because it sure does rain a lot here!)! There is a huge variety of restaurants of various ethnicities and hilariously, Düsseldorf is a hugely popular area for bachelor/bachelorette parties and so there are always a lot of groups walking around the Altstadt in matching t-shirts. Last night there was a whole group of guys in the Mexican restaurant where we were having a beer who were dressed in Leiderhosen and leather shorts. Awesome.

Rhonda, me, and Lauren. I think that I've already had a better social life here in two weeks then I had in nine months in England. It is just a lot easier to meet people because everyone is in the same boat and is new instead of me being the only new person. We've already had lots of laughs!

So, the kids start on Tuesday and tomorrow we have a final day of meetings and prep time to begin with kids! I will only meet three of my five groups of kids on the first day but within the first three days will have met everyone! I am nervous and excited but no more so than I am every year at the beginning of the year! I was definitely more nervous last year considering that I was expected to start teaching science on the first day of school whereas here, I am given complete freedom to do what I know needs to be done to build community and establish classroom rituals/routines. That fact alone is a HUGE RELIEF because I know how important and valuable that is and really like being in a school who shares my values. YAY!

Any education people out there...the school is really focused on assessment and gave us the book "Making Classroom Assessment Work" by Anne Davies. I read the first half and it is excellent and very practical and useful and I totally recommend it!

So, in a nutshell...having a great time and really psyched for school to get going! But, I still miss everyone (LOTS AND LOTS!) so feel free to Skype with me when you can!

Tschüss!!! (Bye!)

P.S.
1. Michelle Bachman. REALLY? REALLY? REALLY?
2. I am obsessed with my ipad because while typing this, I have been streaming NPR and listening to "Prairie Home Companion" and "Wait! Wait! Don't Tell Me!" on KUNC. I realize that I could have done this on my regular computer but it is just so much cooler on Ichabod Pad. (Thanks, Mama!)

Here's my new city...Dumbledore...wait, I mean, Düsseldorf...

2011-08-07T20:36:00.000+02:00

I've been here just over a week. I am having so much fun that I am scared to jinx it by saying so...but I'll risk it...I am having so much fun! People at school speak my teacher language! I am encouraged to plan things that are creative and new and my ideas already feel valued. Again, don't want to jinx anything but I just really am having a great time at school and out and about on the town with my new school friends and with my new out-of-school friends, The Brydens.

These are my new friends, The Brydens. They rock! They just moved to Düsseldorf
too and we have a mutual friend, Rachel, with whom I spent many a ridiculous night at the Rio or the Pickle Barrel while at undergrad at CSU! Yippee for new friends!

This week we had orientation at school but a lot of it involved scheduled visits to immigration offices and to the bank so there wasn't a lot of scheduled time every day while at school. So, I've had plenty of time to figure out where things are- except the copy room, which I plan to find tomorrow, and to get acquainted with the various aspects of life at ISD.

I was relieved to find out that I have my own classroom and as soon as I had found that out, I began to prepare myself for the beginning of the year.

Anyone who has been in my classroom will know that these
exact posters are essential for me to start the year!
My dad had the idea for me to translate Be Brave, Work Hard, Have Fun into
German to put next to these ones in English and I am totally going to!

It made me feel productive to make posters like this (and, like coloring, poster making is bizarrely therapeutic) and also I am just so happy that my school values giving me the time to spend building my classroom climate and culture. I will start each year group (I have 6, 7, and 8) exactly the same in terms of setting things up and will worry about differentiating it next year when I already know the kids at the beginning of the year.

I feel like at this school nobody is going to walk through my room with a clipboard and a checklist telling me what a crap teacher I am every third day. Nobody is going to sit down with me and be like, "you need the basics of how to plan a lesson" like they did in my English school. Honestly, I feel a bit like I can just shut my door and do what I have learned through tons of professional development, what is good for kids! Any PEBC related people will be glad to know that my suitcases were packed (really heavy, so thanks!) with books so that I can share good resources with people at my school in terms of literacy! I have found that the elementary teachers here are my peeps in terms of our common values and common professional development. A lot of them have worked with Ron Ritchhart and Project Zero and used the work of Ellin Keene...it makes me excited that I have people to talk to about that kind of stuff! The high school people are more like "high school people" and very subject-area oriented and think I am kind of a silly (but not in a bad way) middle school person...but I DON'T CARE! That is who I am and I am proud that I am good with working with that age of kids, because not everyone is!

I also got my schedule this week. I will have an 8th grade homeroom and then will teach two sections of 6th, two of 7th, and one of 8th grade. The schedule is relatively complicated and we have a 9-day schedule as if there were nine days in a week. So, we go by schedule day and NOT what day of the week it is. For example, just because it is Friday does not mean that it is Day 5. Day 5 would just be whatever day of the actual week it happens to fall on. So, once we do 9 days, we start over to Day 1. I have two or three 50-minute blocks off everyday which is AWESOME so I will be able to actually get lots of work done at school as long as I can keep my socializing under control...which is truly something I have to think about! I was so lucky at CBMS since I was on a team with the people with whom I socialized the most so we had to see each other daily anyway. But, I suppose seeing what is going on in the rest of building will help me with my secret goal of becoming an instructional coach. And, the Asst. Principal told me that once I get settled in here to bring it up because he would like to discuss some options. SWEET!!!

On a social note....

Here are some pictures from around Düsseldorf from the week!

These outfits are for sale at a huge department store downtown!
I might have to buy one, because, really, how can I not?

Took a river cruise on the Rhein around Düsseldorf (yeah, I know...big surprise, I took another river cruise) and here are some pictures of the city...

My new friend, Rhonda. She is another science teacher in my department
but will teach high school. She's Canadian but taught in Stavanger, Norway for the last three years.
I am trying to not be a snotty American and make fun of Canada like I usually do!! :) Curse you, South Park
for teaching me all those things!

I liked how this was an old tower and they just build a modern
building right around it!

I think that more than saying "I am obsessed with river cruises" what this
cruise actually taught me is that major cities are often built on waterways since
I have now been on cruises in London, Paris, Amsterdam, and Copenhagen. Geography lesson, people!

It isn't just the picture- the church steeple is a bit crooked.
The legend says that it will be straight only when a "true virgin" gets married there.
HA!

See, still crooked.

MEAT! I cannot tell you how easy it is to do a low carb diet in Germany (if you can
avoid potatoes and bread because there are lots of delicious choices) because there is A LOT of choice when
it comes to meat! This was a meat case at a street market.

Gorgeous and cheap flowers too!

Bulk foods at the street market. Normally, I will shop a giant American-style
supermarket but on Sundays everything is closed but the street market.

First Brat! (Fed the bread to the seagulls...(this message just for Sally....just like we did
when we threw bread out the window driving my janky Plymouth Acclaim across Kansas forever ago!))

WINE ON THE RHEIN with Rhonda! Woo hoo!

German Wall Street. :) The B means two s's and Strasse means street.
But, this would be pronounced "vall-stasse"

There was a wine festival and these were the food options. Delish!
Who doesn't like wine and cheese in the middle of the day on a Sunday! Perfect!

So, I hope you get some idea of what Dumbledore, I mean, Düsseldorf, looks like! Many parts of the city are very modern because the majority of the city was destroyed by Allied bombing in World War II. Once school starts and I have my classroom set up, I will post some pics of that too!

This week we continue with orientation and then kids start on August 16th. I am pretty excited to just get on with it after the last 9 months without a job. Will update again soon!!

Return to the working world...

2011-08-04T09:17:00.000+02:00

Just wanted to write a quick update about my first day of ISD. No kids yet! They start the 16th but today was our first day of training. We have 30 new teachers and so there were lots and lots of names to learn. But, we had a really fun day and I think by the end I know almost everyone's names. The day was loosely scheduled so we had lots of time to just sit around and socialize and get to know each other while filling out paperwork, getting our new email address, etc. I even got the digital pen to my Interactive White Board, which petrifies me completely as I don't even know how to turn it on! I saw some overhead projectors....phew! :)

I got my keys so I know I am real now! Today I will go do some work in my classroom and get all of my paperwork together to register for my work/residence permit! Thank goodness the school translates all of our forms because I am super lost!

The school had catered lunch for us and then in the evening, after a three hour break wherein we went to an adorable little cafe on the riverbanks of the Rhein, we had a dinner at an Italian restaurant near school. The dinner was super fun, and as all the teachers I have ever met generally do, the more wine flowed, the louder and sillier the teacher group became! (I know that happens to all people, but I feel like teachers are a special brand of let-loose-ers!)

New friends! They have all taught at places around the world before...so fun!

So, to say it in a nutshell....I am having a great time, love my new apartment, and really like Düsseldorf. It is an easily navigable city without a car and I have found lots of stores, and even went to German yoga earlier this week. After living where I felt so stuck last year, I do not feel that AT ALL! Having a great time and since I know my social-butterfly self...I am going to have to work hard at school to not just spend my off periods chatting and actually being productive!

I got my schedule and will explain that later...but simply, I have two sections of 6th, two of 7th, and one of 8th grade...and guess what, unlike in my English school, the multiple classes in one grade level get to do the SAME THING...so it won't be how I had to plan something different for every group of kids. It will truly be three preps. YAY!

Off to "work"...

Return of the Traveling Teacher: Arrival in Düsseldorf

2011-07-28T20:45:00.000+02:00

I AM HERE!

I arrived this morning at 6:45 am local time- which is 10:45 pm the night before in Colorado! Needless to say, I am tired having missed a night of sleep entirely. How has my dad been doing this kind of sleep pattern for the last 40 years? JEEZ! I am a wreck today. I guess it doesn't help that the morning before I left, I woke up with a terrible cold! But, despite that, easy travel that was all on time. Denver-Vancouver and then Vancouver-Düsseldorf.

It just felt really surreal seeing it written considering how long I've
have been anticipating this move! (Since January!!) What you can't see is that there
are people swilling Molsen and playing hockey under this sign while Maple syrup pours of
the drinking fountains...that's just how it is in Canada.

I was met at the airport by the admissions counselor from the school, Maire, who is Irish but has lived here for 14 years...international already! She could easily spot me given my overabundance of luggage! I had three large checked bags, a carry-on size suitcase, and a fully stuff backpack! Hey...I am moving...not just visiting and I had to pack my bag full of green chilis because I cannot go without Mexican food like last time! :)

Maire drove me to my apartment and then we lugged all of my suitcases in the elevator. I am on the seventh floor by German counting and the sixth floor by American...either way, it is at the top of the building and I have a pretty good view! Really relieved the elevator is fully functional (there was question about whether it would be under construction) because my three, 50 pound bags would have broken me if I'd had to do the stairs! The school also had put together a welcome tub for me that included toilet paper, paper towels, a little food, coffee, tea, and cleaning supplies...Maire even brought more cleaning supplies later as the fridge is mother-effing disgusting and I am going to need some gloves and a mask to tackle that- which she brought over later!

Part of the view from my patio!

I felt really crappy upon arrival due to the stuffiness of my head and the fact that it was nighttime to my body, so as soon as she left, I slept for a few hours. My one job today was to wake up for the phone/internet guy, which I did. Let me tell you how much empathy I have for immigrants to the US who don't speak English! Fortunately, the housing coordinator at the school set up all the appointments because when he got here we were like a comical mix of sign language and pointing! I would never have had internet if the school hadn't set it up! For those of you out there working with non-English speakers, think about the daily life things that we don't even think about...bank, grocery shopping, etc. I still don't know what my phone number is but my internet works so that's fine!

I don't have any hangers so it will take me a few days to fully unpack. But, what a relief to have my own house again! I am selfish and don't like sharing my space and am really glad to be able to live my life in more than one room!

I worked on the bathroom with all of my cute, collapsable Target
containers. I've spent an obscene amount of money at Target (Tar-jay) lately! Ugh.

My boxes arrived from England and I trying to decide where to put the paintings my
parents brought over!

So that's it for now. I haven't gone anywhere since I arrived because I feel yucky and am really tired. I have been intermittently unpacking and sleeping and rocking out to my new Glee CDs. The answer is, yes, I am a huge dork. Tomorrow night I will be going out to dinner with my new friends Barbara and Todd Bryden (whom I haven't met yet but I know we'll be friends!)! They are friends of one of my CSU friends, Rachel, and she connected us back in March since they just moved here this summer too! I'm really excited for some new friends already! Tomorrow I will venture out to the grocery store which I am sure will be filled with confusing hilarity! Stay tuned!

The Tale of the Fastest Summer Ever

2011-07-19T05:30:00.000+02:00

This summer has absolutely flown by! I have spent many a days just driving back and forth from Denver to Fort Collins to Boulder (in one of my parents' cars like I am in high school, but unlike my car in high school, these can actually go on the highway...phew!). It has been a busy summer and unlike most summers, I haven't gotten to even have ONE DAY just laying around doing nothing!

The summer began with a visit from my Danish cousin, Terese, and a weekend-long
slumber party with my dear friend, Megan!

Between visiting friends, going to a family wedding reception in Seattle, a training and a family visit in Atlanta, a trip to the Western Slope of Colorado, a Camp Chief Ouray reunion, a visit from fire-escaping New Mexican friends, many trips to Fort Collins to hang out with The Dudleys, and a million breakfasts, lunches, dinners, and coffees with long lost friends, it has been a great trip home. In fact, it has felt like I never actually left.

To be honest, after my horrible experience last year, I am just mentally setting the reset button and starting over with my international teaching experience! The best part about coming home, and Colorado will always be home, is that you always feel at home! (Can I use 'home' again in that sentence?). When I was at my training this summer, it didn't even feel like I had worked in England. All of my teacher thinking came straight from CBMS as if I had never left!

So, here are some pictures from my summer. You'll notice that I spent a lot of time with babies and toddlers. Its what I do! :)

My first summer visit was with The Wolff-Barrys...my favorite twins!
Clark & Fawn have not gotten any less hilarious while I was gone...more so, actually!
Four is funny!

Now these aren't toddlers!
My nanny, Lori, has the most amazing kids ever...Karolina & Kai!
We zooed it up and I can't wait to spend Christmas with them this year!

After a few initial visits, I headed to Seattle for my cousin Annie's one year anniversary party! Seattle is the coolest place and I was really relieved to be back in cool, Northern European-ish weather after the shocking 90's of Colorado!

My cousin, Annie, took me out for delicious dim-sum while in Seattle!
We also spent some time with her backyard throwing knives, seriously fun!

Mount Ranier out the window of the plane!
The best part of the summer: I got an iPad and was able to catch up on movies
I missed while on all of my flights! This was worth putting down the movie!

My friend Dawn from CSU was able to come to Seattle from Oregon while I was there!
Great to catch up with an old friend and to realize that we haven't changed
much since we met when we were 20!

Family dinner in Seattle. My dad's sister and her family live there and hosted me!
We had a great time with plenty of delicious food and wine! Big surprise, huh?

There was a photo booth with props at the party!
My aunts, JoAnn & Marilyn, are always willing to be silly with me!

I had one of the quickest travel turn-arounds I've ever had (enough time for laundry and a little nap) before heading to Atlanta for an International Baccalaureate training at the Atlanta International School. My school in Düsseldorf sent me to the training and the coolest part about it was that the AIS is where the movie "The Blind Side" was filmed! The training was a synthesis of many other professional development experiences that I'd had before, however, IB has a set of vocabulary and principles that were new to me. Most importantly, IB is focused on thinking and application of learning instead of memorization like in my last science department.

I was able to make some good professional connections with several science teachers from around the US who think like me instructionally and we exchanged information and already sent lots of teacher/student documents back and forth through email. I also met a science teacher from California who will be in Germany this summer so we are planning to get together in Düsseldorf. HOW FUN!

The other part of my trip to Atlanta was that I was able to spend time with my cousin Brian (we have twin feet but his are giant...or "superior" he would say!) and his girlfriend Ayla, who is awesome! And, I also got to see my cousin Ryan and his wife, Angie. Ryan and Angie have the most hilarious little girl, Abbie.

Abigail Susan (Abbie, or if you are going to get fully Southern....Abbie Sue)
is an extremely funny kid. I think that there is no doubt that she
is just like her Aunt Cara used to be when she was little!
(Sorry if you are not a family member and you are reading this but my family
will know what I am talking about!)

While I was in Georgia, some enormous fires began burning in New Mexico, the largest in the state's history. The smoke in Taos, where my friends The Murphrees (otherwise known as Shira, J-rod, and Mona) live. The smoke got so bad that they ended up having to flee to Colorado. I had had plans to go to Taos to see them anyway, but instead got to spend a week with them in Colorado. Mona is nine months old and she learned to scream really loudly and hilariously while here.

Mona & J-rod were playing "lion tamer" with Daddy as the lion.
This induced a lot of really funny baby screaming!

During part of The Murphree visit, we stayed with The Cloughs (Kirsten, Matt, & Annika). Nothing beats old friends, wine, cheese, and backyard grilling!

Annika was wearing my empty backpack while we walked
around REI and then saw this bike basket. She
immediately put it on her head! Very logical, of course!

As I mentioned before, I spent a lot of time driving between Denver, Fort Collins, and Boulder. One of the trips to Boulder involved visiting my friend Carolyn and her new baby, Ellie.

Carolyn & Baby Ellie!
Carolyn, Ellie, and I went through a few outfits on this day!

One of the highlights of my summer was seeing Carmen at the Central City Opera with my mom and dad. We decided that operas have to be extra-super dramatic because how boring would an opera be if it was just about clerical work or something? This was the best rendition of a song from Carmen that I could find!

My other sojourn this summer was to the Western Slope with my mom to visit one of her oldest friends, Joanie! We visited Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park, tasted some Western Slope wine, and fought off the worst mosquitoes of my life while camper-camping on the Grand Mesa. We also got to see some of the best, most amazing wildflowers at around 9,000 feet elevation. I was suddenly shocked when random Latin names would escape my brain and burst forth....Thermopsis divaricarpa, Antennaria parvifolia...AAAAHHH!!! (Thank you, Pingree Park, CSU's mountain campus where I spent the most intense four weeks in 1999...so intense that I still randomly bust out scientific names!)

Joanie, My Mama, and Me at the Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park!
AMAZING views!

WHAT? Look at these Columbines!
Aquilegia caerulea

We had a fun trip although I almost lost my mind from the mosquitoes! Ever since my India trip I have a hard time with bug spray since I pretty much burned my skin off with 100% Deet! And, who knew that Colorado had such amazing wine!

Everybody knows that I have been a "camp girl" my whole life...having been a camp counselor translated perfectly into being a middle school teacher. So, at the beginning of the summer, Megan and I concocted an idea to have a Camp Chief Ouray 1997 reunion...the last summer we were all there together. Kir and Matt offered to host and it was so fun to catch up with everyone. Although, it was funny to be like, "so, since college, what have you been doing?" since we've all gotten quite old!

The Campers!
From left to right in the back: Megan, Me, Kir, Matt, Beth, Kevin
In the front: Gina & Justin
We were all counselors at Camp Chief Ouray in 1997 (and most people in other years too!)

I have also been hearing about my mom's painting all year and finally got to try some for myself. We went to a place called "Canvas and Cocktails" and through some careful painting instruction, I was able to create my first painting! Having been told by pretty much every art teacher and every seventh grader that I've ever taught, that I am a horrible artist, it was really exciting to create something that might actually be worthy of hanging on the wall (hopefully at Megan's since she said she wanted it!)!!

The creating begins!

The final products! Turned out pretty well!
I almost threw mine at the very end because I totally screwed up one part....
...but the teacher rescued me, like a good teacher, and the worst part turned into my favorite part!

And lastly, when I wasn't doing all of this other stuff, I spent lots of time with The Dudleys, Natalie, Todd, and Harper! Harper's new thing is to put objects on people's heads and call them a hat and then laugh really hard because they aren't actually hats! She is such a doll and so super smart!

Harper hammed it up for me! I also taught her how to take
pictures with my camera which she thought was really fun!

I leave in a week from Wednesday and have every second planned between now and then. My friend Courtney is flying out from Omaha and I will be staying with my friend Kir while she gets her tonsils out...OUCH!

And, as I have been doing all year...I pack. I will be hauling a major load of green chilis over to Germany because I have learned that I CANNOT live without them and they are impossible to find in Europe.

So, it is likely that the next time I blog, it will be from my new apartment in Germany! WOO HOO! Bittersweet to leave (especially all these sweet babies that I hang out with!) but I am looking forward to having my own place, a new job, and a new challenge!

Auf Wiedersehen!!!

Teacher Nightmares

2011-06-15T02:17:00.000+02:00

I have obviously not blogged in a long time. I didn't have a reliable internet connection for the last few months that I was in England and was traveling a lot so I haven't been able to blog until now. I had a lot of visitors my last few weeks in the country and it was SUPER fun but I am really glad to be home.

I am beginning to start thinking about the upcoming school year and my new teaching opportunity at the International School of Düsseldorf in Germany. And, as I reflect upon my nightmare of an experience at my English school and look forward to my new position, the dreams have started. I have always been the type of person who has dreams about things that I am thinking about or am anxious about. I always knew that it was time to go to camp at the end of every school year when my camp dreams began! And now, I have started to have crazy dreams about school.

Dream #1:
It was the first day of school in a new school. Not sure what school or what country. But, I was trying to teach the kids my quiet signal (oh, by the way, I was also not wearing pants and was trying to make my long shirt look like a dress!) and there were like 6 adults in my room. Since I was at a new school, I didn't know if the adults were paraprofessionals or what in the heck they were. But, as I was trying to teach my quiet signal they (the adults) were being really loud. So, I went over to their table and they had all the kids singing Jimmy Buffet songs so that I coudln't teach my signal. Then, all the kids busted out in Jimmy Buffet singing and I lost control of the class.

Since I have already had my worst teaching nightmares from back in teacher school come true- losing complete control of a class- I know what that feels like in real life. I just don't think that will be a worry anymore at my new school. Plus, I don't have to teach snotty high school kids anymore, just sweet middle school kids who are generally quite pliable!

Dream #2:
In my dream I had to share a classroom with another teacher, who I think might have been a French teacher. On one end of the classroom there was a white board, a projector, and an overhead. At the back of the classroom was an old school blackboard with French writing all over it. I came in to teach in that classroom one day and all the desks were turned toward the back of the room. I was trying to write on the old school blackboard but wasn't allowed to erase anything so I had to just write really really small with colored chalk. I was really stressed that I was going to lose control of the classroom because the kids couldn't read what I was writing on the board!

OI VAY! Think I am having some anxiety??? At least I am being sent to a training in Atlanta next week and then have 9 days of staff training before school starts. That will definitely alleviate some anxiety. I REALLY enjoy over-preparation!

Nicole was my first visitor. We toured the Scottish Highlands and London.

Gordon was my second visitor and we toured Wales and then London.

Natalie was my third and final visitor and we went to London and Paris and then flew home together.

The Parentals

2011-04-25T14:06:00.000+02:00

As I type this, my parents are headed to the airport- without the GPS- so let's hope they find it! They left the GPS "Emily" with me because I have another trip coming up in a few weeks to Wales that will require it! We have had a really fun trip and I am sad to see them go- but I will be there in just over a month so I think I will make it!

Lunch at The Royal Standard of England.
It has been an alcohol-serving establishment of some kind
for over 900 years. They have GREAT food!

I am an excellent trip planner, if I do say so myself! We had 9.5 days and I tried to fill it with a lot, (but not too many because who likes that?) things to do! We started the trip just hanging around the area of England where I've been living since August (minus that three month stint in France!) and of course, had to start with a lunch in a country pub. When I posted this picture to Facebook, everyone was freaking out about how large the beers were, but I will just remind you that they are only a pint, but they are in Pilsner glasses so they appear bigger.

One of the things I have loved about living in England are the country pubs. Most of them have excellent food, lots of good beer, and a relaxed, enjoyable atmosphere. At this particular pub we were actually seated in a bay window and so we had our own little nook! The Sunday Roast consists of either beef, lamb, or pork with many, many side dishes. The big puffs of bread are called Yorkshire Puddings. They are delish!! I'd rather go out for a roast as it just seems like WAY too much work to make all of the side dishes on the same day and have them ready at the same time.

There are cute little towns and villages about every three feet in England and so we were able to tour around to see many of the ones in my area. This was also the first full day of driving on the other side of the road. As it turned out, my dad did all of the driving because

Old church in the town of Beaconsfield.
The English pronounce it "Beckensfield." I
I could live here my whole life and never pronounce
things correctly on a consistent basis!

it was extra-expensive to have two drivers. I am extremely grateful for this as I think it seems pretty stressful to just train your brain suddenly to the other side of the road- but my dad did a GREAT job!

My parents stayed at a bed and breakfast near my house, which really, turned out to be just an extra room in someone's house that they now rent out. Chesham is not really a metropolis for tourists and so the options are rather limited for guests. If they had stayed with me, we would have all had to sleep in the same bed, and so I think the bed and breakfast, though completely no frills, was the better option! :)

We spent a lot of the first day just driving around looking at the areas around my town. Since I haven't had a car while living here, I basically don't know where anything is and if we hadn't had Emily the GPS (she is called Emily because the British female voice is named Emily), we never would have even made it home from the airport.

When being a tourist in England, I believe it is
required by law that one must pose in or around
a red phone box!

I believe the law also states that you must take
pictures with all combinations of tourists present.

Our next three days we spent touring a part of England called The Cotswolds. The Cotswolds were the center of the wool industry in Britain before the colonies began growing cotton. Because of the wool industry, many people were able to get very rich and so there are many grand houses in the area. I had been to the Cotswolds once before because my Uncle Abdul's (married to my dad's sister, JoAnn) brother and family live there. After going to visit them in November, I knew that I had to return because it is such a beautiful area. My biggest problem is that I began to run out of synonyms for cute and adorable because everything was so cute and adorable!

Blenheim Palace.
Our first stop in the Cotswolds.

Our first stop in the Cotswolds was Blenheim Palace (pronouced Blennem Palace, of course) which was given to a war hero in the 1600s-ish by Queen Anne. Later in that same family's history, they also produced Winston Churchill. So, this palace is now known for being the birthplace of Winston Churchill- his uncle was the Duke of Marlborough who owned the house. There was an excellent exhibit on Winston Churchill and they even had his curly locks that were cut off around age 5. He was a very interesting person and after seeing the exhibit, it makes me want to know more about him!

After our stop at Bleheim Palace we continued to a village called Woodstock which is only about a mile away to have "High Tea!" As usual (is this true for everyone or just my fat-ass self?) a vacation revolves around food so we had to have High Tea just once. I found a 700 year old hotel in Woodstock and we had scones with clotted cream and strawberries, cucumber sandwiches, and a few pots of delicious English tea.

I made sure to practice the proper etiquette and put out my pinky!

High Tea comes on tiered plates and was super-delish!

The next few days we toured around the adorably cute (see...need synonyms!) villages in the Cotswolds while staying in a village called Kingham, about 1/2 mile from where our relatives live. I stayed at the same B & B back in November and was even in the same room again! We visited several country houses that were more than 500 years old, gardens, and drove on roads that were basically only slightly wider than the car itself with hedges on each side! Again, glad my dad was driving!

Onc of the adorably cute villages in The Cotswolds.
All of the buildings were made of limestone which annoyingly
reminded me of when I had to teach that stupid unit
"Products from Rocks."

One of the country houses we visited- Great Chalfied Manor.
It was completed in the 1480s and had amazing gardens.
But, even on a sunny day, it was FREEZING inside!

BAAAAAAAA!!!!!

The Cotswolds are still a big sheep-raising area despite the fact that wool isn't the world's #1 fabric anymore. Everywhere around there were cute little lambs standing by their mamas out in the fields. Yet another thing I like about England is the BBC. There is such delightful nerd TV on and the other day I saw a show called "Lambing Live" where they just go to a farm and show lots of lambs being born. A little bit gross but after they are all cleaned off they are SO adorable. For as hot as it has been in the last week (low 80s) I think these sheep are ready to have their coats off! I know I wouldn't want to be wearing a wool coat in 80 degree weather!

I think the best purchase we've ever made was to buy this GPS. If we hadn't had this thing, there is NO WAY we would have made it through this trip.

"Please turn right on ROAD."
Thanks for being so specific, Emily the GPS.

Without it, we would have all been yelling at each other and stressed out from trying to get around on the tiny tiny tiny roads that were only one-car wide. Sometimes the roads were so remote that Emily wouldn't even know their names and she would just tell us to turn on "Road." The funny thing to us was when we'd make a wrong turn (usually we'd get off the wrong exit on a roundabout!) and she'd freak out and start yelling about RECALCULATING but in a polite English accent. We started the trip with the American voice but Jill was a disaster at pronouncing the English names (I can relate!) and so we had to switch over to Emily.

After our lovely three days in the Cotswolds- where I would gladly live if I could just be rich and never have to work- (as opposed to now where I don't work but I am poor!) we headed back toward Chesham but HAD to stop at Stonehenge on the way home.

STONEHENGE!!!

Unlike when the Griswolds visited Stonehenge, you cannot actually walk up to it anymore! This is probably a good thing as apparently people were chipping off pieces of it! Fortunately, also unlike the Griswolds, we didn't have the opportunity to back the car into it- the parking lot is actually pretty far! Not to be blassé, but Stonehenge was actually smaller than I thought it was going to be and while there, I wasn't completely overwhelmed and freaking out like I thought I might be. I am aware that very few things ever live up to their hype (except the Taj Mahal which TOTALLY did!) but it was still pretty cool nonetheless. Because I am a complete dork, I had downloaded a National Geographic special on it that we watched the night before so that we would be completely prepared. The current thinking is that this was a monument to the ancestors and they've discovered a large road to "Woodhenge" which was the same shape but was likely the monument to the living. My dad listened to the audio commentary and shared out what it was saying as my mom and I were too lazy and couldn't be bothered!

Ever since I had the picture taken were I was holding up the Taj Mahal,
my dad and I are obsessed with trying to do this again.
Apparently a piece Stonehenge was trying to float away,
good thing he is holding it down!

Since my parents have been to London lots of times before having only lived about 45 minutes from it for three years, we only spent one day there. But, we still managed to see a lot! Everything is totally decked out for the Royal Wedding and the entire long street in front of Buckingham Palace is closed while they finish constructing all of the media tents to film the procession and the "wave" from the balcony! This time, we took a boat tour to Greenwich and then walked around finally ending up at Harrods, the giant store. I personally enjoyed the crystal chandelier section of the store- you don't see a section like that at very many department stores!

Senior picture in London.

My parents are always more than obliging of my senior
picture antics and in fact, they sometimes seek the locations
for me and even for their own! In Maryland, we didn't do the cheesy
outdoor senior pictures so I think that I've more than made up for that
in the last 15 years.

We share the same name and we are not amused!

The souvenirs for the Royal Wedding are out in full force and I just couldn't resist (this was my mom and dad's idea- I swear) taking this picture! I heard that the Queen waves as she does so as not to have her upper arms (her batwings as I call them!) jiggle. Good idea. I'm totally going to start waving like that and I will speak of myself in the "Royal We" from now on.

I am sure the souvenir situation will only escalate after the wedding so if there is anything people want, you've got a month to tell me! My pending visitors may be lucky enough to receive some Kate and Will playing cards! In the newspaper yesterday, there was an article with odds for betting on which tiara Kate Middleton would wear. Hilarious. I know that it is cheesy but it is really fun being here during this festive time as the whole country is decked out in Union Jack flags. The street party after the wedding in my town is called "C.R.O.W.D." which stands for the Chesham Royal Wedding Do. I love it! We are going to have a garden party in the backyard with Coronation Chicken, cucumber sandwiches, and the most English of summer drinks- Pimms & Lemonade. Pimms is like a brandy or something similar and it is delicious when mixed with lemonade (which is really Sprite to Americans).

I had such a fun time with my parents and I was really sad to see them go! I cried, big shock. But, I will see them on June 3rd when I arrive back in the US. And, they are already planning to come visit me in October in Germany where we are looking into taking a several day cruise on the Rhine River. FUN TIMES!

The next two weeks until my friend Nicole arrives I am going to be working on packing up all of my stuff and sending it to Germany! And then, Nicole and I are going to the Scottish Highlands for a few days before we full-on power tourist it up in London! She has all sorts of fun things planned that she wants to do including seeing Macbeth at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre and taking a ghost walk of London.

I just had to show a picture of the most complicated roundabout of all time!
Each small circle is a roundabout within a giant roundabout.
Our American brains just about exploded and Emily the GPS yelled
at us a few times because we made some wrong turns!

And, to end this, I must say thank you to my parents for such an amazing trip! You guys are awesome and I love you!!!

And finally, what would a blog post be without a picture of Felix.

Felix was naughty. He got drunk. It was hot and the beer was just so
delicious and cold! BAD FELIX! I wonder if he'll like the whiskey in
Scottish Highlands? Can't wait to find out!

Dutch? NO! Danish!

2011-04-13T12:29:00.000+02:00

Ida Marie Hansen & Lauritz Svendsen (changed to Swanson
at Ellis Island). This is where the story begins!

I just spent the weekend in Denmark visiting my cousins there but in order to really tell this story, I have to start at the beginning because I find it pretty remarkable!

In 1892, Ida Marie Hansen left the island of Langeland in Denmark and set out for the US leaving behind a portion of her large family- including sisters and brothers. Ida Marie Hansen was my great-grandmother on my dad's side and upon arrival in Omaha, she met my great-grandfather, also from Denmark. Ida Marie and Laurence (his first name was change at Ellis Island too) had many children, including my grandfather, Merrill. That is a common story, really- Scandinavian immigrants settle in the Midwest and buy a farm- they ended up in Western Iowa- and have many children. To me, the remarkable part is that someone in the family managed to continue communicating with the family left in Denmark- now for almost 120 years! I think this is where my deep love for Garrison Keillor and "A Prairie Home Companion" comes from- he is Norwegian, from Minnesota, and Lutheran- while my family is Danish, from Iowa, and Presbyterian...hilariously parallel!

We're not totally sure who did all this letter writing but we are sure glad they did! Fast forward to the 1970s and that's when the visiting really began- 80 years after the original immigration and long after both of my great-grandparents were dead. My parents took my grandparents to visit Denmark in 1977 and that's where we saw the extent of the connections- there are a lot of relatives on both sides! The Danish side came over to visit the farm in Iowa and now with the ease of international travel, Facebook, and email, we are all able to see each other with relative frequency.

Frode is holding the cutting board made by my grandpa,
Merril in the 1970s. Everyone in the family has one!

So, our current connections get really confusing because our common relative was pretty far back- but if you look at this picture- Frode (on the left) and his brother are actually just my dad's second cousins- their grandmothers were sisters. So, I guess it is not TOO far away.

So, now the connections continue down the generations and Frode & Ida's (far right in the picture) children and grandchildren have been to visit us many times and we have been to visit them a few times too- this is who I stayed with on my last two visits. I know this all sounds very confusing, but I just wanted to provide a little context to this. Basically, I just think it is really cool and not very common that families with immigration more than 100 years ago still manage to keep in touch- although now, with modern communication methods, it sure is a lot easier to stay in touch!

Bent, Lisbeth, Me, Nina Camilla, and Selma, the lab.
We visited Kronborg Palace- which is where Hamlet is set.

So, now the rest of the family that I actually know and see in Denmark (there are tons and tons that I met only once in 1999 and probably more that I don't know!) are Lisbeth, her husband Bent, and their kids Nina Camilla (19) and Terese (16). However, Terese is studying in the US right now outside of Boston so I didn't get to see her this trip. However, she is coming to visit Colorado so I'll see her before her parents do!

We had a great visit with lots of laughs and plenty of Carlsberg beer since Lisbeth works there and gets two large crates free every month! I was really lucky that for most of the trip there was sun- I actually even got sunburned while I was there! This was my first trip to Denmark outside of the summer and so I was nervous what the weather would entail- although after living in rainy, rainy England for 9 months, I shouldn't have been that worried. I am not sure I will ever get over Colorado sun in my whole life- no matter where I live, the weather will always suck compared to Colorado!

Now for some pictures from the trip! Everyone had to work on the weekdays I was there but we packed a lot into the weekend.

View of the fjord from my cousins' house in Roskilde- about 25
minutes by train from Copenhagen.

For two days, I toured Copenhagen and then on the weekend we went to visit some castles, saw Sweden from across the water, and visited Lisbeth's parents, Frode and Ida. I love Denmark. I must say that I got a little sad that I wasn't moving there instead of Düsseldorf- a large part of that is because I have family there- and I LOVE that there are bike lanes EVERYWHERE and it is realistic part of life that you can ride a bike everywhere and not get run over by a car because drivers actually look for bikes. Although, I believe the bike situation is the same in Germany so that's nice.

Took a tour of the Carlsberg Brewery, where Lisbeth works.
They still deliver beer around Copenhagen with horse-drawn carriages.

Some of the horses at Carlsberg.
They were standing in a medicinal foot treatment and were enormous.

Carlsberg also owns Tuborg and this really reminded me of India so
I had to sit in it. When we rode in a bike rickshaw in India, the driver groaned
from the weight of my friend Lisa and me- that was great for the old self-esteem!

One of the coolest parts about visiting Roskilde, where my cousins live, is that in the fjord there were many Viking ships found sunken in the water. So, they were brought up and reconstructed and Roskilde has a huge Viking Ship Museum and an outdoor center where they build modern versions based on the old designs. It is pretty amazing to think that the Vikings sailed to Canada in a wooden boat! CRAZY!

This large ship was reconstructed and actually sailed to Ireland by a group of
international volunteers!

This is the large ship from above actually on its way to Ireland.
Now imagine sailing in this all the way to NewFoundland. No thank you.

Viking boats of all sizes have been reconstructed to sail around the fjord.
This was such a beautiful day that I think half the population of the town was outside eating ice cream!

Lisbeth, me, and Nina Camilla at Frederiksborg Castle outside of Copenhagen.
A huge portion was restored with money from Carlsberg so we got free entry- why do beer companies give so many better perks than schools? No fair!!

The castle is from the mid-1500s. So beautiful!

Felix went too. He REALLY likes castles.

Taking my turn as the Queen of Denmark. Not likely I am going to find out that I am related to Danish royalty as pretty much everyone in my family was a farmer for hundreds and hundreds of years!

An elevator for the king! So cool! It was a trap door in the floor!

The main hall inside the castle. Gorgeous!

I walked around a lot of Copenhagen for two days and think it is such a beautiful city. But, one of my favorite parts of visiting Denmark is that they are the home of Legos! My dad and I went to Legoland in 1999 and it was super cool! This was just a lego store- but they had this really cool thing where you could design your own Lego-guy/girl on a computer and then they had all the parts and you could build it!

This Lego sculpture was taller than me and SUPER cool!

Here are a few more pictures from around Copenhagen.

Nyhavn (New Harbor) is one of the famous sights of Copenhagen.
Apparently it used to be a swarthy sailor area in the past!

The Queen's house in Copenhagen.
You can walk right up to it, unlike at Buckingham Palace.

I'll post the rest of the pictures of Facebook since blogger has decided that I am done posting pictures! Now, I wait three more days and my parents come! I am so excited to see them! We've got a great trip planned and I think we'll have a great time- and a little stress as I will be driving the rental car on the wrong side of the road!!

Ich muss wirklich anfangen, Deutsch zu lernen. Jetzt.

2011-04-02T12:39:00.000+02:00

I am back from Düsseldorf and would say that it was a very successful trip overall! I met all the key players at my new school, toured the city using public transportation, and most importantly, found an apartment! I guess I'll break this post down into the essentials of what I figured out while I was there.

Apartment:

This is the balcony in the summer. It is 15 m X 3 m
and will be like an extra room when the weather is nice.

My apartment is a one bedroom, 750 square feet, furnished place located in the Golzheim area of Düsseldorf. Now, 750 square feet (70 square meters) might not sound like a lot to people with actual houses, but it is bigger than my house in Fort Collins by almost 50 square feet! So, for me, it will be plenty big. And, it will be able to accommodate guests who can even have their own bed!

It is on the seventh floor (with an elevator) and a basement storage room that is big enough to store a bike (which comes with the apt) and anything else I accumulate, which, knowing me, will be a lot of crap. I'm glad I won't have to store my skis in the kitchen like in my FC house! And, I might even be able to be organized enough to change out my winter and summer wardrobes from storage to my closet. Doubtful, unless my friends Tami and Natalie come visit and systematically organize me like they have done for my classroom in the past!

Golzheim is a neighborhood just north of the main downtown area of Düsseldorf and it is on one of the main tram lines. It will only take me 5 minutes to walk to the tram and then a 10 minute ride to school. In the other direction, it is a 10 minute ride to downtown where there is pretty awesome shopping (even couture if I suddenly win the lottery and drop half my body weight), and most importantly, lots of restaurants, bars, cafés, and people. Though I do enjoy quiet, dark neighborhood pubs with "regulars," sometimes it is nice to get to see a variety of people. I really like the location as I wanted to be in a quiet neighborhood that was easily accessible to both work and downtown. I am also glad that it is on the seventh floor so that I won't be bothered by street noise like I am here in England. After living on the manoir in France, out in the country with blackout shutters, living on a busy street with street lamps outside is like never having nighttime.

YAY for my own place again!

I am basically buying the entire apartment's contents from the previous occupant who is a teacher at ISD too. She is just moving to a different apartment but she is buying the furniture at her new apartment. It will then all belong to me and if I want to change it, I can. The couch is brand new- half the "L" is a bed while the other half has storage under the cushions. The kitchen isn't awesome, it has a pretty small oven. I don't think I'll be making a 20 lb. turkey in it or anything but if I have to make a giant turkey so badly I just can't take it, I'll find a big roaster or something like we always use anyway! Maybe I'll master something like Cornish Game Hens- that is more the size we are talking!

I was also able to open my bank account (I now have accounts in three countries even though not one of them has much money at all...awesome) and so all of the internet, etc. will be set up when I get there which just makes my life so much easier. I am really excited to have my own place again. I don't do well with a roommate which has nothing to do with the actual person, I just don't like having to live in someone else's house with all of their stuff and their pictures, etc.

Anyway, I will have plenty of room for visitors so everyone is welcome! I have even already bought a folding cot bed from IKEA from another teacher so there will be plenty of beds and my mom just bought me a load of towels at Cosco that they'll bring over in April. I realize that Germany has towels, but when your mom offers to buy them for you and you are unemployed, you DO NOT say no.

School:

Looks like a school to me!

I spent two full days at the school and think that I am really going to like it there. I think it will take me some time to get past the small class sizes. I was helping out in a sixth grade class and it felt like a day at CBMS when we had half the kids out for swine flu since there were so few kids! I will NOT be complaining, I just think it will take a bit of time to get used to!

Here's what is going to be really crazy for me though- basically I get to design the curriculum in my classes. WHAT? I know. I have always loved curriculum design and if I have ever wondered if it something I can do, now I'll know. The IB program is made so that it can fit on top of any district, state, school curriculum (Curricula? Which one is plural?). It is really flexible and just basically gives you very loose parameters (until you get to the 11/12th grade classes because they take specific exams). For example, if one district teaches science where they do a little bit from all branches of science in each year, the program will work the same as if you had just biology or just physics for the year. The thing that is different at this school is that they don't have a curriculum to lay the program on top of because they don't have a governing agency like a district or state-level making decisions for them. So, it is teacher-directed. Some people hate this, but I love it as I basically just decided everything was teacher-directed at CBMS anyway!

This is going to be pretty exciting for me because it will really challenge all of my skills. And, it is about as opposite as you can possibly get from my English school where they told me basically what to teach on which day- which is like being a substitute teacher every single day. I had a several-hours long meeting with the head of science and he seems to be an abstract-random thinker. I am super concrete-sequential and it seems like maybe the department could use a really organized person to help them get some things down on paper. Are you surprised- I volunteered already to be that person?!? I already secretly picked out a blank wall in the office where I can see a big sticky-note organizer going. They don't have a scope and sequence (even a really general one like the one I'd been ignoring at Con Ball for the last six years) and when I asked him if he knew which topics were taught in which grade level, he got into a semantic discussion about "What, really, is a topic?" Oh boy.

So, as it stands, I have some REALLY general essential questions (What is a scientist? is the one I'll be starting with) and I am going to try to at least plan one MYP (Middle Years Program- the IB program for 6th-10th grade) style unit before I get there so I can get lots of feedback from the MYP Coordinator (who is my kindred teacher-geek spirit and we totally bonded already over our love for Nancy Atwell and TED talks). I have a feeling that at this school there won't be someone coming in and criticizing every nit-picky thing that is going on in my classroom like in England. And, the head of science informed me that I can take however much time I need setting up my rituals, routines, and expectations...phew! By the way, I found out that I will have three preps- two sixth grade, two seventh grade, and one eighth grade class.

The teaching schedule seems quite reasonable, actually. We are on a 9-day cycle. Within that 9 days there are a possible 63 teaching periods. A full-time contract is for 43 periods (but with 5 sections, I will only have about 35 science teaching hours in 9 days while those extra hours are homeroom and duties) and we have lots of built-in planning and meeting time. I love me a school that values collaboration and gives the time to do it and have been told by everyone who matters that they are really excited to have new people to add new ideas. The MYP coordinator told me that there still are a fair amount of really traditional teachers there (which was a little disappointing because I just assumed everyone would be like me since I felt there was really stiff competition to get the jobs- but tenure is tenure is tenure) but since I can basically do what I want in my own classroom, it doesn't really matter that much on a day to day basis.

They are sending me to a big IB training in Atlanta for a week this summer so I feel like I will be really well-prepared when I get there. And, I am SOOOOOOO glad I spent a few days there to at least get the lay of the land before jumping in with both feet. Starting a new job, in a new country where they speak a different language, can be a bit stressful, so at the very least, I know how to get to school even though I still haven't really found my way around the 4 buildings!

Düsseldorf:

I think the main reason I am glad that I went to visit is that I got to see what a nice, livable city Düsseldorf is. First of all, the airport is extremely conveniently located to pretty much everything and it is not going to be a giant ordeal getting there. It is a relatively small city (seventh largest in Germany with a population of only just over 100,000 but that doesn't include surrounding areas) and since it is built along the Rhine River, the city is a long North-South strip.

I bet this is super-crowded on warm summer evenings!
Can't wait!

The downtown area is called the Altstadt (Old City) and when the weather is nice, it has miles of sidewalk cafés along the river. A lot of the city is new-ish after World War II but it still looks quaintly European in my opinion with cobblestone streets and nice architecture. There are some more modern looking buildings too but no 50-floor skyscrapers or anything. It is also extremely green (in terms of color- not sure about ecologically yet but did see lots of recycling bins around!) and has many parks. There is a huge park right by my house! And, there are sidewalk bike lanes on the big, main streets so you can ride around and not feel like you're going to be run over. I only made the mistake once of walking in the bike lane before I figured out what it was!

I just had a really positive overall feeling from the school, the city, and all of the colleagues I met. Having already known I was going to move there since January, I have been getting a little bit antsy, but at least now, I can visualize what I am getting myself into! I definitely need to get started really studying German- at least so I can know what I am ordering at restaurants. Not surprisingly, I learned the words for white wine and red wine (Weißwein and Rotwein) right away. As it is an extremely international city, I know that there are many people who speak English, so I'll be able to survive without fluent German. However, I felt like a moron and I felt extremely impolite not even knowing basic words.

Now I stay home in England not spending any money until Thursday when I fly to Copenhagen for 5 days to visit my family there. I decided that was an acceptable expense for myself since I have a free place to stay. :) I can justify just about anything. And then, two weeks from today...my parents arrive! I am so excited to see them! We are going to tour around this part of England for a few days and then head to the Cotswolds (think that movie, "The Holiday" with Cameron Diaz and Kate Winslet and that's the type of places we'll be visiting) for several days. We're also going to go to Stonehenge because really...why not? AND...I'll be driving. Yikes. I was most afraid of roundabouts and now that I have driven in France, (even though you go around roundabouts to the left in England) I feel pretty good about it. The weirdest part to me is just sitting on the other side of the car and shifting with my left hand instead of right.

So, there you have it.

Ich bin wirklich aufgeregt, um nach Düsseldorf zu bewegen und auch wirklich froh, dass so etwas wie Google Translate existiert!

Auf Wiedersehen!

Really glad I chose the pork & alcohol option!

2011-03-29T21:01:00.000+02:00

If you recall, my other option for international jobs was in Kuwait. After a full day in Germany where I have consumed both pork and alcohol already, I sure am glad that I didn't go with the other option! I love it in Düsseldorf already!

I know I have been lucky that the weather has been gorgeous and that really helps to like a place. I flew in last night and today spent the day at the school! I met all the key people at the school today except for my department head because he's out sick and everyone was extremely nice and very welcoming. I shook hands with about one million people today and remember the names of about 2 of them! I will do a full blog on all the details later but for now just wanted to display some pictures of the city!

It is real! The school exists! It has a long street name!

Kind of felt like it might be a figment of my imagination that I was really going to teach here! It is real!!

Not the Rhine but a canal running through the Altstadt (Old City) of Düsseldorf.

Shopping area in the Altstadt.

More shopping.

The walkway next to the Rhine River which is considered the "world's longest bar" since it is just sidewalk cafe after cafe for miles. DEEEEELIGHTFUL!

More of the walkway next to the river. There was a guy jet-skiing! I didn't think it was quite warm enough for that!

First German beer in Germany!!!! (Followed by some pork consumption, of course!)

Marktplatz (Marketsquare) where they have a big Christmas market!

I went to visit my new apartment and I am definitely going to take it! It is a 9 minute tram ride to school and a 9 minute tram ride to the center of town- perfect! And, it is on the main line...AND...the apartment is only a three minute walk to the stop! YAY!

View from the balcony of my new apartment!!!

More view- the pictures don't really capture it but it is a really nice view and has a HUGE balcony!

Much more later! I am tired, and I TOTALLY BAILED today and hit the ground on a cement step- nice swollen knee like the loser that I am. It was totally in front of a bunch of kids and they were like, "ARE YOU HURT???" And, I responded, "just my pride..." because I was REALLY embarrassed. But, hopefully they were seniors and will be gone next year!! Ha!

Return to the Land of Eng

2011-03-22T08:59:00.000+01:00

Last Thursday, I once again embarked upon my nine hour, six train journey back to Chesham, England from Dol de Bretagne, France with an over-abundance of luggage. Overall, it was a really great experience and though they drove me crazy sometimes, I will miss my French family. I am glad to know that I will always have a place to visit in France! We all cried the day I left and spent time the night before taking some "family portraits" but already in our pajamas! The day before I left, I made them American-style chocolate chip cookies à la Nestlé Tollhouse (which always reminds me of the Friends episode where Monica tries to figure out Phoebe's grandmother's recipe!) and they were a big hit! Really, chocolate, butter, and sugar? How can that not be good?

My "family" for the last (almost) three months!

As I was making my way through the Gare du Nord in Paris to get the Eurostar (Chunnel Train under the English Channel) to London, I walked toward a machine to print out my ticket. As I approached the machine, I saw a familiar face...Sonia from my gym in Fort Collins! She was on Spring Break in Paris with her boyfriend. We definitely "went all American" and screamed when we saw each other because it was just so incredibly random!

It made me really happy to suddenly get to speak English with someone I know from home!! I LOVE random connections like this! One time during college, I met the cousin of a high school friend on a train in Italy. Wonder what my next random meeting will be?

So, because I am trying not to spend any money since I don't have a job, I spent the weekend at home catching up on nerdy BBC tv (like Antiques Roadshow, I really am a nerd, I am aware!) and reading an amazing book called "Cutting for Stone" that I highly highly recommend. But, my computer was still broken so I had an appointment at an Apple Store in London for Monday. I figured since I had to spend the money to get to London (the tube is like £8 ($12 ish) each way, I should make the best of the day and be a tourist! It was a beautiful spring day (first day of spring, actually!) and so instead of going to museums, I decided to just walk around outside. Plus, I had a friend with me, Felix.

Felix is a rabbit who is a character in a children's book and he writes letters to his owner from his travels around the world to teach kids about geography. My friend Kendra's daughter, Haley, is reading about Felix and they asked me to take pictures of Felix in my travels. So, since it was beautiful and warm out, Felix and I decided to see the major sights of London.

Felix prefers land lines. He is kind of old-fashioned.

Don't even ask why I randomly had a roll of tape in my bag. I'm a teacher, we just carry school supplies sometimes!

Felix and Big Ben.

"Look Felix, Parliament. Look Felix, Parliament."

Felix ran away in St. James' Park (he is a rabbit) because the flowers were so beautiful!

Felix at Buckingham Palace.

Felix totally stormed the gates at Buckingham Palace. He was screaming something about trying to see the Queen- I think he was a bit carried away.

This was driving around in front of Buckingham Palace. Huh?

Felix kept trying to make the Queen's House Guard laugh...they were not amused.

This was just such a perfect London view.

I know I should be more mature. I'm just not.

This sculpture looked like a baby projectile vomiting.

It is really giggle-worthy and there were lots of kids standing around laughing at it (Oh, and me- probably why I like being a middle school teacher!)!

Queen Victoria outside of Buckingham Palace.

I haven't seen this part of London since I'd been in India- so very similar!

The Brits really did just try to rebuild England in India.

Since I was going to be in London all day, I figured, why not just go super early in the morning and wait for cheap, front row tickets to Wicked, my favorite musical.

I've seen Wicked a few times already but I still totally cried and had goose-bumps for half of the show. I'm such a loser, I am well aware. It was funny to hear all of the songs I know so well sung with English accents! Aren't I doing a great job of saving money???

So, now, after my one big day out, I am back to staying home and visiting the public library and nerd tv on the BBC. Next Monday I fly to Düsseldorf to see my new school and to see my new apartment! Yes, I have found an apartment! YAY!! This apartment will be perfect for visitors if anyone wants to start planning a visit! Felix is really excited about going to Germany! I hope he speaks some German because I sure don't but will start learning soon!

A visit to the Débarquements de Normandie

2011-03-12T14:07:00.000+01:00

Yesterday I visited Normandy and took a guided tour of many of the sites associated with World War II and the allied attacks on the Germans. Before I start, though, I would like to dedicate this post to my Papa, my mom's father, who arrived on Omaha Beach on Dday + 3. (According to our oral family history but I am trying to do some more investigation of that online.) I know it is cheesy to do that but I thought about him a lot yesterday and what his life must have been like for those four years he was in the army. He never really talked about it, according to my mom and her siblings, but he got to see it all again in 1978, which I can imagine was quite difficult.

James E. Handley

Technical Sergeant

U.S. Army July 1942- January 1946

820th Ordnance Base Depot Company

These pictures are not in order of our stops but I am still not proficient at using blogger after all this time to get the pics in an order I want. Anyway...sorry if you are reading this and think that I am over-explaining common knowledge- I didn't know a lot of this stuff and so if it is new to me, maybe it is to others as well.

The following three pictures are from Omaha Beach. I am by no means a historian but I feel like I should at least try to offer a little context for the pictures. So, if I have made any major faux-pas in my captions, please let me know so that I can correct them!

Hillside facing the beach with a German sniper hole.

The hills were quite steep just behind the beach.

Another sniper hole on the hillside.

Everything has been cleared off the beach and it just looks like a normal beach now.

Omaha Beach:

-Omaha was an allied code name. I guess I knew that somewhere in my brain since it is not a word in French, but all of the beaches in the area had code names in the planning. However, now, they are all referred to by their code names.

-There were around 3,000 American casualties from the attack launched on Dday- June 6, 1944. (This was the scene at the beginning of Saving Private Ryan.)

-The tides go out very far at this beach and they had to come in at low tide because the Germans had placed many obstacles and mines on the beach that would have been covered at high tide. They, therefore, had to come in very far from the various landing crafts that dropped them off- sometimes in deep water and so they just drowned immediately with the weight of their gear.

-Many injured soldiers died when the tide came in after the initial attack from drowning.

-The German guns were supposed to have been knocked out by planes in advance of the attack but there was low cloud cover and they were unable to hit the correct targets- thus leaving the arriving soldiers in the position of "sitting ducks." The hillsides are very high next to the beach and because they had to come in so far because it was low tide, the American soldiers were easy targets from the hill.

-Once the allied forces took control of the beach a large amount of men unloaded here within a short time. As most people know, June 6, 1944 is considered Dday (which I didn't know until yesterday just means "Day Day" and it is just military speak for whatever day is the attack day- in French it is Jour J which literally just means "Jour Jour")

-I don't normally believe in this kind of stuff, but Omaha Beach really did have an eery kind of feel. As our guide pointed out, there are no shells on the beach, no seagulls, and apparently they get some weird, unexplained red sand that looks like blood. People don't use Omaha Beach as a beach. It has bad juju.

American Cemetery at Omaha Beach:

The next set of pictures are from the American Cemetery just above Omaha Beach. It contains only WWII dead and mostly just from the DDay battles and ensuing attacks. There are around 9,000 Americans buried here and it is closed to new burials. There are other allied and American cemeteries in the area but this is the main American one. If you've ever been to Arlington or any other national cemetery, it is similar in format, but the thing that is different is that it is from a short period of time. Also, it overlooks Omaha Beach and it is on foreign soil, which is technically American on the spot.

Our guide stated that approximately 60% of the visitors are French and in his words, "The French have not forgotten." It might have just been for the benefit of all of the tourists who visit the area, but if I went by what I saw in Normandy, the French indeed have not forgotten. American flags (as well as Canadian and English at the allied sites) flags were everywhere. When my parents took my grandparents to France in 1978, some old women came up to my Papa and hugged him when they found out he had been a US Army soldier.

This was a piece of a tile mosaic on the ceiling of the non-denominational (including Jewish) chapel.

As I walked around, I noticed that many of the graves had this date.

Graves included the soldier's name, rank, unit, death date, and state but no age or birth date.

I wonder if they left those off because it would have been too shocking to see that so many of them were kids.

American flag at the cemetery.

All of the information is given in English and in French.

Jewish soldiers had a Star of David on their grave instead of a cross.

Many soldiers' bodies were found without any identification.

There was also a whole wall of names for the men whose bodies were never found but whose names were known. It was a big wall.

This is the main monument with a reflection pond.

Within the monument are carved granite maps explaining the liberation of France by the allies.

Everything is, again, in both English and French.

From every angle these graves are in a straight line.

This statue is called "Spirit of American Youth" and is a man rising from waves/water.

Arromanches:

We also visited the site of the allied "floating harbor." This was just down the coast from Omaha and Utah beaches.

-Arromanches was liberated on DDay +1 by the British but the town was very heavily bombed.

-The allied forces constructed a massive artificial harbor out of floating concrete blocks surrounded by a breakwater of old, sunken warships.

-As always in this area, tides were a huge issue and so they had to construct something that would work in both low and high tides.

-This floating harbor was only operational for a short time because after about 18 days in use, the worst storm in about 40 years hit the Normandy coast and so severely damaged it that it could no longer be used.

Parts of the floating harbor. These were called Mulberry A and Mulberry B.

Off in the distance, you can still see some of the concrete blocks.

They were about 200 X 50 feet so those don't just go away in 70 years.

Sainte-Mère-Eglise:

The reason I wanted to take a guided tour was to hear the little stories that I wouldn't get to know about otherwise because I would have been too busy trying to find my way around. Sainte-Mère-Eglise is a town inland from the beaches where soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division landed when they pretty much all jumped and landed at wrong spots because of the weather. One of the soldiers landed on top of the church and was caught there for days. He apparently played dead but was eventually cut down by the Germans but then escaped. I haven't seen it, but the movie "The Longest Day" is about this.

Also in front of this church was a ROMAN ROAD SIGNPOST! WHAT? How cool!

Makes you remember that really, Europe has a long history and the Germans were just another in a series of invaders.

They put a dummy on top of the church to show how the parachuter was stuck.

The windows in the church show the Virgin Mary with American paratroopers.

Angoville au Plain:

This was another one of those cool things that you'd only know about from a guided tour and it was really cool. We visited a tiny church in the hamlet of Angoville au Plain which only has about 50 residents. During the war, two 19-year-old American medics used it as a field hospital for several days for American, allied forces, Germans, and local civilians. The medics did not discriminate and cared only that the people were injured.

After it had been used as a field hospital, the doors were shut and locked. They were not opened until more than 50 years later when an old American man who had been a patient came to see it and basically just broke in. So, because it was closed all those years, it had some pretty amazing features.

These stains are ACTUAL BLOOD from wounded soldiers on the church pews.

The town decided, upon the anniversary of DDay in 2004, to recreate their church windows to thank the two medics for their service to the people of the town.

The medics were from the 101st Airborne Division.

People haven't forgotten.

Pointe du Hoc:

If you have ever seen the movie "Holes," this is what this area looks like. However, instead of holes dug by kids, they are giant bomb craters. Pointe du Hoc was a site occupied by Germans and was considered virtually untouchable because it has giant limestone cliffs leading up to it and all around it. It is a "point" of land out into the English Channel. An elite squad of American paratroopers trained for months on scaling cliffs in preparation for taking this point. However, they were dropped in the wrong spot, and were basically slaughtered by the Germans because they'd been detected climbing the cliffs.

Also, when the survivors got to the top, the mission had been for naught as the Germans had moved all of the weapons that they'd thought had been stashed there. They eventually found the weapons just inland and were able to destroy them.

You can't forget a war occurred less than 70 years ago when you see giant craters surrounded by concrete gun holes and gun stands.

The craters were about 10-15 deep.

This was a picture our guide had from during the war when the Americans had taken Pointe du Hoc.

I took the same view as the picture from above.

This is what it looks like today. Part of the actual point was bombed out and so it is no longer connected to the land.

Utah Beach:

Utah Beach was further down the coastline from Omaha Beach but the terrain in the area is very different. There are no bluffs overlooking the beach, it is virtually flat so there were not as many sniper opportunities. And, during the attack, it wasn't like with Omaha Beach on DDay where just about everything that could go wrong, went wrong.

The planes who were sent to pre-bomb the area were able to hit their targets because they could fly lower due to the lack of bluffs. So, more of the German guns were knocked out. Also, the tides are slightly differently timed here so the naval support from the seaside could be stronger and closer here. Interestingly, a Danish naval ship provided some of the support so there is a Danish war memorial here too. Utah Beach had only about 400 dead. Though that is a high number, compared to Omaha Beach, it is a fraction.

The feeling here was very different from Omaha Beach. I can't explain it. Utah Beach had different juju.

Utah Beach. Again, like Omaha Beach, just looks like a regular beach.

Naval Monument recognizing the contributions of the American and Allied Navies in providing fire support for the invasion.

I'm really glad I took this side trip. It was well worth the cost of a guided tour as I learned a lot and had context for everything I was seeing. It was definitely weird to be in a van full of Americans (especially because a few of them were total rednecks who had only been in France for three days but were complaining about how much they missed American food and that they just wanted a Big Mac-THREE DAYS???? WAY TO BE THE STEREOTYPE!). The real reason it was weird is because my brain hasn't adjusted to speaking English full time and French words kept popping out of my mouth. I doubt this will happen once everything around me is in English again, but while everything else is still in French, it was weird to speak English for a whole day!

So, now I am doing a little research to see if I can find out more about what my Papa's regiment actually did and where they were during the war. From what I can see they were in England, France, Belgium, and Germany and so it will be interesting to see if I can find the whole record.

À la prochaine....

I leave France to go back to England on Thursday.

Subway Poetry

2011-03-06T18:21:00.000+01:00

I'm not normally into poetry but I saw this poem on the tube in London and it really struck me. I even wrote it down quickly between stops so I could remember it.

So, here it is:

Loving the rituals that keep men close-

Nature created means for friends apart.

Pen.

Paper.

Ink.

The Alphabet.

Signs for the distant and disconsolate heart.

By Palladus (4th Century) and translated by Tony Harrison

Since it was written in the 4th Century, he couldn't have been able to include blogs, Facebook, email, and Skype. But, the sentiments are the same. Made me feel all warm and fuzzy.

I miss everyone!!

Le Mont Saint Michel...

2011-03-04T17:28:00.000+01:00

Well, today I finally got to visit the most tourist-y place in my area, Le Mont Saint Michel. It holds special meaning for me because my parents took my grandparents (Nana and Papa) to see it in 1978. It has always been part of my family's folklore and it was just too far away when I lived in France during college to visit it. I did get a little veklempt a few times thinking about my family being here. It made me miss my Nana who would have had a birthday this week.

I'm sure next Friday when I visit the DDay beaches I'll be extremely emotional- for obvious reasons, and also because my Papa fought in the war and was in France. More on that later...don't need to get into it today!

Mont Saint Michel is an abbey dedicated to St. Michael, on top of a huge granite block out in the middle of the English Channel. It used to only be accessible when the tide was out but they have built a road that makes it accessible all the time. There are a few random giant granite hills around here and one of the other ones is just outside of Dol, my town. One thing I found amusing is that the sheep who graze on the grasses in the area are called "pre-salted" because they eat salty grasses and so their meat is really salty.

There's lots of medieval history that goes with this place but .....Wait. I just fell asleep. I know I should have more interest in medieval French/English history...I just can't. Sorry. The only person I know who has read "The Pillars of the Earth" is my friend Courtney and they were selling copies in the gift shops. So, maybe I'll see if that has anything to do with Mt. St. Michel by asking her because I just don't have enough interest otherwise! If you'd like a full historical work-up on Mt. St. Michel, you'll have to use Wikipedia.

Here's a link if you're interested. Wait. I just fell asleep again.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mont_St._Michel

There's not too much to say...the pictures do the talking and I think I might have been able to upload a video at the bottom of this. Oh wait, I just got an angry error message in French...don't think the video worked...sorry! I have been waiting to visit because this would not be a fun activity in the horrible weather we've been having. We've got a few days of sun and so I am trying to pack everything in!

Let's start with the pictures...

This is a necessary picture after visiting the Taj Mahal.

I just can't help myself!

The Leaning Tower of Michel.

Had to do a timed self-portrait and I guess the rock I set my camera on was at an angle. But, I thought this was funny and wanted to show everyone anyway.

(This reminds me of a picture I have of my friend Sally and me in front of the Eiffel Tower in 1998- it is almost sideways! I'll have to find it and scan it sometime!)

Thank goodness for digital cameras.

I used to get way out of control with film cameras (like maybe took like 4 rolls of the Acropolis in Greece) and this is much more manageable and instant. I always hated waiting for pictures to be developed! It was horrible torture!

Pretty amazing.

The tide comes in and covers up the parking lots so cars have to be moved by a certain time.

Yep. I was here.

This is a famous restaurant in Mt. St. Michel.

My parents and grandparents ate here in the 70s.

I didn't eat here because it was like €40 for lunch, but I thought of Nana.

SENIOR PICTURE!!

I met a random older English couple while they were taking their own senior pictures!

We got to talking and they offered to take them for me too!

That's the worst part about traveling alone, nobody to participate in my ridiculous antics. (If there had been a giant shoe like in Amsterdam, I would have figured out a way...don't worry!)

Up at the top, in the abbey, you can see how far the tide really does go out- I think they said 28km or something.

I don't understand the metric system so I have no idea how far that really is!

Below the abbey are houses which are now hotels.

The people who live in Mt. St. Michel are called Montois.

Talk about high population density.

Everything is literally built on top of something else.

Some windows in the abbey.

This view is now glassed-over to protect stupid tourists from falling.

But, monks could have jumped out if they chose.

The Cloister at the abbey.

I'd like to be all smart and tell you what a cloister is, but I can't.

Oh, and I kind of don't care.

GORGEOUS!!!

In the summer there is a lot of muscle (Is this how you spell this type of creature? In French it is moules but that translates directly to mollusk so I don't know!), oyster, and other shellfish harvesting going on here. Update: My friend Nicole just informed me it is spelled "mussels." I'm a serious moron. I knew that, I swear.

Apparently, there also quicksand and the tides come in "faster than a galloping horse" according to the guidebook, so it is pretty dangerous to play in the area.

Looking back toward Dol. On a clear day, you can supposedly see it.

I believe it because I could see Mt. St. Michel from the other direction.

The causeway to get to Mt. St. Michel.

They are trying to change it to an elevated bridge so the natural tides can resume and the wetlands can be protected.

So, that was my day. I did meet a group of 8th graders from one of the international schools in London where I had an interview. They were all American kids and even before I heard them speak, it was obvious. I cannot really put my finger on it, but I could just tell. Made me excited for next year!

This weekend we are having 15 people over for Sunday lunch so I'll be making another cobbler and fattening up these skinny Frenchies! :) I made chili again, as requested. I thought it was crazy bland, but they all really like it!

I'm headed out of here two weeks from yesterday to go back to England. As much fun as I've had, I am getting a bit bored (nobody EVER wants to have English lessons- even the parents are whiny that it is too hard!) and so I don't really have a purpose anymore, per se. We've had two chickens die this week so my "purpose", as I see it, is to not get some weird poultry disease.

Motivation and "Drive" revisited

2011-02-28T11:00:00.000+01:00

Last summer, while on a road trip, I listened to the book “Drive” by Daniel Pink. It was about intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and I was really struck by all that he had to say and how it related so wholeheartedly to schools. Well, in my life of unemployment in France, I have been looking for free ways to entertain myself when I am not playing the role of French housewife and was introduced to the website ted.com. I am now completely obsessed with TED talks, which are talks, given at a conference focusing on creativity and technology for smart, rich people…from what I can deduce.

The subject matter is incredibly varied and pretty much every researcher or writer that I enjoy reading, can be found at a TED conference. Everyone from Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma, The Botany of Desire) to Malcolm Gladwell (Blink, What the Dog Saw, Outliers) to Edward O. Wilson (biologist and ethicist) to Isabel Allende (amazing fiction writer) to Dave Eggers (writer and screenplay author) to James Watson (as in Watson and Crick- the discoverers of the double helix structure!) can be found giving talks that are extremely interesting. They also have talks given by politicians and policy makers, scientific researchers, comedians, etc. Literally, just about every person who I have looked up (except Bill Bryson but maybe they are saving him for the future) has had a TED talk and the last few weeks since I learned about TED, I cannot get enough. It is also searchable by subject matter and person and so I waste a lot of time here. But, I am not going to consider it wasted time, because I am learning so much.

I am probably way behind the times and everyone else has known about this forever. So, sorry if you already do. Introducing people to TED is not really the point of this, I just thought that I needed to give the background knowledge to set the context for the video and the ensuing discussion. Now, to get to the point…

I found a TED talk by Daniel Pink pretty much summarizing his book into about 20 minutes. So, if you don’t have time to read it, you MUST watch the video. I think that business people and educators alike will really be struck by what he has to say.

Click on the link below to watch the video:

Dan Pink on the surprising science of motivation | Video on TED.com

Just to give some further information about the book and the concept, here is a repost of a few paragraphs that I wrote last summer regarding the book.

"Pink talks about how our traditional societal views of motivation are outdated. Prior to the industrial revolution, motivation was purely linked to survival and people’s actions were all in the name of satisfying basic needs. As our society became industrialized, and basic needs were being met, motivation became more related to extrinsic rewards/punishments like a salary, a boss micromanaging your every move, or fear of job loss. Eventually, extrinsic rewards/punishments became things like bonuses, commissions, and sales incentives, and I would think, in an educational setting, we saw the advent of letter grades and office referrals.

He equated these different types of motivation to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (which we’ve all discussed frequently in pre-service teacher programs and don’t even get me started on grad school!). In the beginning, the survival motivation was like the bottom of Maslow’s Hierarchy. However, as we’ve developed as a society, we’ve moved up that pyramid, and we are now in the “self-actualizing” top portion. Because of this, Pink argues, the extrinsic reward/punishment motivation is no longer applicable in businesses and schools. The research has found that extrinsic motivators might work marginally in the very short-term, but over time, are ineffective. This sure is interesting when you consider schools are basically set up on an entire system of punishments and rewards- and mostly punishments when you really think about it.

The tasks that we are now asked to do in many jobs are not algorithmic tasks that simply require a pattern of repeated behaviors. For most of Western society’s large corporations, these tasks are the ones that have been outsourced. The modern workforce requires creativity and innovation and the research that Pink cites claims that our outdated extrinsic motivators actually stifle and dampen a person’s creative abilities and that we need to have a societal business/educational shift into intrinsic motivators. It is interesting to me that businesses require all of this creative thinking/tasks (Pink calls these "heuristic" tasks) and that in schools, we are still asking kids to do a lot of rote learning and trivial tasks. This idea is what really got me thinking about how this relates to classrooms and schools."

I read this book before spending the semester in an educational system that is largely driven my external factors, i.e. performance on a set of exams. And, I read it before spending the semester in a school that continued to just tell me to “give a detention” every time I had an issue with a kid. Like, literally any issue that I can think of, I was told to give a detention and if they didn’t show up, the detentions got increasingly longer and longer (sharpening the stick in the carrot/stick analogy). Well, it doesn’t take a book about motivation to see that these didn’t work but now that I have some time to reflect, I can see that the system as it stood was going against everything research shows about motivation. (Ironic since the head of the school had read the book himself and we discussed how much it really meant for the world of education…maybe his hands were tied in terms of systematic changes!)

Also, all those weeks that I was required to have kids memorize pointless information (the minutiae of the iron blast furnace, the molecular structure of cast iron vs. wrought iron, the exact chemical reactions in the thermal decomposition of limestone, someone else’s bullet points as to why stem cell research was right/wrong, the list could continue for just about the rest of time…) there were only extrinsic motivators out there- the giant exams at the end. And, for the population of kids with whom I was working, they lacked intrinsic motivation by the time they were at the end of secondary school and a “sweeter carrot” or a “sharper stick” just wasn’t making a difference at all.

The system was so rigid and so overly structured that it didn’t allow for teachers to actually help students create intrinsic motivation. When I tried to do something outside of the ordinary for my juvenile delinquent section of kids, I was told instead that I should just have them copy notes straight out of the book or worse yet...give them a word search. Really? Really. I think that we forget sometimes that kids are humans. And, something an adult wouldn’t be motivated to do, a kid is likely not going to be motivated either. I know that there are some tasks that people “have” to do and part of being an adult is knowing how to have the perseverance to get through them. However, when your entire educational experience becomes one long stream of “just get through it,” which it was for many of my students, that is when the problems occur.

I am not making a blanket statement that there isn’t intrinsic motivation (for learning in school, behaving appropriately, etc.) present in many students at the school where I was. All I am saying is for those who lacked it, there really wasn’t a way that the system allowed for any manipulation in order to create it. At my new school I will have the opportunity to and at CBMS, I was able to employ many strategies to create intrinsic motivation in students. (Not to mention, this is one of the main tenets of Love and Logic, which I pretty much have established through this blog that I could be their #1 salesperson!)

I was struck again by his three big ideas of Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose and how true this is not only in business settings but also in schools. I actually have a business example and this person will know who they are, but I am not naming a name here.

A friend of mine worked in an office setting where her job description should have allowed her to have autonomy, mastery, and purpose but she was often given either relatively menial tasks or just not enough to do in general. Then, she was micromanaged in those tasks to the point where she wondered why she even bothered to do them and why the person micro-managing her didn’t do them. She is a really motivated and driven person in general, but this lack of autonomy, mastery, and purpose created in her a general malaise toward her workplace, her company, and she viewed her workday as just an annoying and very boring way to pass the time.

She expressed feelings of purposelessness in her professional life and tried on several occasions to make her bosses aware of her underutilization. To put it bluntly, she had no motivation to succeed in her company and not even much motivation to do a good job- although her upbringing and internal sense of what is right and ethical still made sure that she gave her best effort to the tasks she was given.

They FINALLY heard her. Some restructuring happened and now she is extremely busy and utilized at work and they have basically restored to her position autonomy, mastery, and purpose…and guess what…she is extremely motivated and has a renewed sense of her professional life.

Why can’t we do this for kids? What is stopping us? They "complain to their bosses" through misbehavior, lack of effort, and extreme malaise (not just general as was the case for my friend!). Life is short. Why do we make kids sit through at least 12 years and sometimes 16 years of non-engaging memorization? What purpose does this later serve society? I realize that I am fixated with this idea. But, the inane crap we ask kids to do that we would never want to do ourselves infuriates me. Oh, and then we punish them when they don’t want to do something we’d never do- further decreasing any chance that they might have some intrinsic motivation. We’ve got to make some changes and soon! Modern society and all of our futures will not wait. (For solutions, see the book “Focus” by Mike Schmoker).

This man found a way to genuinely motivate kids and I found it amazing and worth watching. Watch how these kids are learning…not memorizing because they are told to…because they are so genuinely interested in learning- when given autonomy, mastery, and purpose!

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/sugata_mitra_the_child_driven_education.html

Il faut rire...ma vie dans la campagne...

2011-02-26T09:52:00.000+01:00

I haven't had very positive blogs this week, so I am attempting to turn my frown upside-down!

Professionally related updates:

I'm going to visit Düsseldorf at the end of March!! I will spend a day at the school and two days checking out the city! Can't wait to see it- especially since I have already committed to two years there. By the way, my friend Rachel Larimore from CSU (GO NRRT!) has other friends moving to the Düsse this summer from the US! In her words they are "good liberals who like good music." Who doesn't love liberals who listen to bluegrass (Glenn Beck?)?? Yay for new friends!! And, how totally random!!
I get to go on a BUSINESS TRIP!! My school in Germany is sending me to Atlanta for a week in June for International Baccalaureate training. How fun private school life is going to be (not selling out public education, I swear...don't worry, in my heart I am still a public educator who believes that public education is the key to a participatory democracy!) because they have MONEY!! What? So fun. All schools could have money if people realized what a priority educational funding is and stopped whining about paying taxes so we can have good schools. How's that for 'good liberal?'

Besides the fact that I am tortured daily by the dramatic mealtime issues in this family, which have now even reached heights such as:

-won't eat bread from a certain bakery

-won't eat melted cheese IN something only ON things

-something eaten for the entire time I've been here suddenly becomes something disgusting

But, I just can't talk about it any more and I am trying to internalize that it is NOT MY PROBLEM. I sit in silence. As my cousin Lauren said, (she's a teacher too!) "I think that I'm the teacher of all kids in the world and they should all follow my classroom rules!" So true. I bet other teachers out there can relate to this sentiment. I always love kids at school and abhor them when I have to be around teenagers in public settings because they are not following "The One Rule," and I cannot remind them that they are "living below the line" when they are being obnoxious little shits. :)

I am heading out of here on March 18th- which will be bittersweet because I have had a lot of fun here despite the drama. It has been a great experience to renew the French skills that I had let go of since college. Obviously, to truly be "fluent" I would need WAY more time. For example, I don't know many idiomatic expressions nor do I know slang and still am thrown by certain verb tenses. But, I can generally communicate with people to survive life (okay, not Love and Logic type communication, but normal, daily life!) And, now that I'll only be a few hours from France when I move to Düsseldorf, I can hopefully keep it up a bit. Maybe I'll have some Francophones at my new school too! However, I will be trying to learn German and as quickly as possible so I can do normal things like go to the grocery store, ORDER A BEER, etc. (Another aside...I'm full of them...my new school has an all-school happy hour every Friday!!)

I haven't posted any pictures recently of my housewife projects which have continued. I've done less photogenic projects lately like peeling lots of wallpaper and picking up pony poo. Also, I read a lot here so there's not much to share about that on a blog...yet...because I did discover a whole area of research I was unaware of..."Third Culture Kids!" So, stay tuned for updates on my latest nerd endeavor. (Third Culture Kids are those who have grown up outside of their parents' home culture, in another foreign culture(s) and their nomadic lives create a 'third' culture with others who share their characteristics...more on this later when I finish reading my first book!). It was suggested reading for my new international school!

So, here are some pics of the latest projects and happenings...haven't been a tourist much lately. But, in the few weeks I've got left, I'll be tourist-ing it up! I've still yet to visit Mt. St. Michel but it has been so very rainy every day. Oh Colorado sunshine, I can't wait to see you!! Düsseldorf is apparently nicknamed "Drizzledorf" so I'm going to have to soak up as much blue sky as I can when I am home for the summer. You don't realize how much GREY sucks until you live in GREY every day! **

**As an aside, last semester, I had to teach about the rotation of the earth, etc. I was telling the kids to really picture how the light is different in different seasons and how when I picture memories from different seasons, the light is different in my memories. Specifically, I always picture CSU homecoming parades in Fort Collins in the fall with all of the yellow leaves on Laurel Street and how I love the light on bright, crisp Saturday mornings in October...wait...I'm getting veklempt...One of the kids raised her hand and said, "Uh, Miss Swanson, it is cloudy here almost all the time. We have no idea what you're talking about!" **

Now, some pictures...

I made a goat cheese tart. It was awesome!

(Didn't even try to make Picky McEatsnothing even taste it!)

The cows next door!

You should hear them mooing in French. Hilarious.

Madonna, the pony, meets Peggy, the lonely donkey. They were both excited!

Peggy brays all day long. Hello herd animal being left alone.

She is caused major distress, it is sad...AND LOUD!!!

For Steven's birthday I made a three-layer chocolate tart.

It had three types of ganache: dark chocolate, milk chocolate, and white chocolate.

It was totally fat free. Not.

The tart before cutting. Ignore the slightly burned crust, it was my first attempt!

Someone forgot to buy candles so we had to use this.

We sang to him in English and French. Delightful!

Crèpes? NO! Les Galettes.

Galettes are similar but are made with whole wheat flour.

They are a specialty of the Bretagne region and you eat them with savory things.

This is the ONLY food that Whiny McThrowsafit eats without grumbling.

I also made chocolate éclairs for Steven's actual birthday-day.

They were pretty darn complicated and time-consuming considering it took everyone about 30 seconds to consume them. I don't think I could be a pastry chef, I'd get mad that people ate my creations too quickly after all of my time and effort.

Before filling them....

The chocolate filling. Yum.

They have an induction stove. I love it!

The dough.

Had to make the dough on the stove and then pipe it out with a pastry bag.

See what I mean by complicated??

Spring is coming! And, it was sunny one day last week!

This is the driveway up to the house!

I was proud of my photo skills because I digitally removed the car in the driveway.

I am now removing all wrinkles in pictures of myself (and others too if you pose with me!) now that I am getting proficient with this new technology. 29 forever, baby!

This is the outside of the cottage.

I have been spending many a day in here removing wallpaper.

This will be their prime vacation rental property when they get it all finished.

We go furniture shopping for it like 3 times a week. Make a decision already!!

So, that's my life right now. Exciting, huh? Please note sarcasm. No, really, I am having fun! I do miss a few things...like being able to fully communicate with people in my native language (which doesn't even really happen in England, if I am going to be honest!) but it has been a great experience nonetheless! And, I know I will always have a French Manoir that I can visit in the future! Can't wait to see it all renovated!! And, OF COURSE I miss ice in drinks. But, this is just a fact of life once you cross the Atlantic. I just don't get it.

Also, my good friend Megan just started a blog and I think it is going to be fantastic! There is a link to it on the side of my blog, but here is the link so you can just click to enjoy!

http://www.raisingollie.blogspot.com/

Repeat performance...

2011-02-23T20:02:00.000+01:00

In case anyone is wondering, we just got to have an awesome repeat performance of yesterday's mealtime antics this evening. And, it was literally exactly the same except this time after the dad stormed out, the little guy got to have chocolate dessert provided by his wimp-out mom! I just want to scream, "HE'S PLAYING YOU!!!!" (Oh, and during all of these exchanges, the 9-year-old talks only in a baby voice.)

Good times.

My head might explode.

I could seriously make a Love and Logic video with what I just witnessed...

2011-02-22T13:17:00.000+01:00

I just watched a 9-year-old exert complete and utter control over his parents...AND WIN!!! And, this was one of many similar instances. So, as a Love and Logic person, I just have to share this story.

For those not familiar with Love and Logic (www.loveandlogic.com) I will quote their website.

"Love and Logic is a philosophy of raising and teaching children which allows adults to be happier, empowered, and more skilled in the interactions with children. Love allows children to grow through their mistakes. Logic allows children to live with the consequences of their choices. Love and Logic is a way of working with children that puts parents and teachers back in control, teaches children to be responsible, and prepares young people to live in the real world, with its many choices and consequences."

It is a theory where parents create choices (or teachers) in which they would be equally happy with either option while the kid feels like they have some control. So, a non-example would be, "Do you want to eat peas or a piece of cake?" Duh. What option is the kid going to choose? A better option would be "Do you want peas or carrots?" or "Do you want your peas on the side or on top of the other food?" Two choices that are equally likable to the parent. The example that Love and Logic always gives is this, "Would you rather carry your jacket or wear your jacket?" The command, "PUT ON YOUR JACKET!" often just results in a power struggle.

In a classroom this can look like this, "Do you want to write with pen or pencil?" "Do you want me to choose your partners or do you want to choose?" "Would you rather do this on lined or unlined paper?" Simple, easy things like this where whichever option the kids choose, the teacher is happy with the outcome.

Love and Logic allows parents and teachers to avoid power struggles. And, it is about logical consequences. "Don't like what's being served? Bummer. I guess you'll be hungry this afternoon." You're never going to let the kid actually go hungry long term, but a logical consequence of not liking what's on the menu is that you're stomach might growl a bit. Sad day. Maybe I am cold and unfeeling and if I had kids I would think differently, but it is hard to sit and watch a 9 year old have complete control over the family. The rest of the family often only eats what he likes most of the time too just so they can avoid scenes like today.

Now, I know I'm not a parent and I know that when you are a parent, you think that people without kids don't know anything about parenting. While this is likely true, however, teachers without kids, have an advantage, in my opinion. And, as a Love and Logic devotee, I can recognize when someone needs Love and Logic...and badly!

That brings me back to my story...

Every day the youngest child in the family comes home for lunch. This is fairly typical in France, and, his school doesn't have a cafeteria at the moment because it is under construction. As I've said before, he is an extremely picky eater, but today really took the cake.

We had Turkey Cordon Bleu today for lunch which is a turkey breast stuffed with ham and cheese, battered, and baked in the oven. As soon as he walked in the door and made a dissatisfied face at what we were having, I knew it was going to be a rough lunch. He wouldn't eat it, which is not very surprising. So then the yelling begins. I just sit there while both of the parents first try to convince him that he likes it, then cut it up for him, then straight out yell and threaten while he just sits there pushing the food around his plate. Some version of this happens pretty much every single day at least once...sometimes with dinner too!

After several agonizing minutes of this, he just sits in front of his plate. The mom gets mad and storms out. The dad gets mad and storms out, and I was clearing the dishes while he just sat there. Well, here's why he does it: if he holds out long enough, they ALWAYS give in. As soon as the dad had stormed outside, the mom let him have his giant daily bowl of plain yogurt with about a whole cup (and this is not an exaggeration at all) of sugar on it. OF COURSE he isn't going to eat the healthy option when he knows that if he just throws a fit and holds out until everyone is angry, they are totally going to just let him have what he wants. As an outsider, I can totally see this happening every single day. I think today he even had a little secret smile as soon as the give-in occurred because he knew he'd won.

I know that really, I don't own this problem (as my mom would say!) but it is hard to sit through this several times a day since the yelling and screaming is really unpleasant for everyone involved. This is a really sweet, loving family until mealtimes come around. And, the youngest kid is a sweet, loving boy until he takes control and sidelines every meal with his pickiness. Love and Logic would just say to buy them a book or CD but they don't speak English and that's not an option. Plus, I think the mom might just always give in as she has a hard time putting on her big girl pants when it comes to things like this. She is convinced he is going to starve to death at school during the afternoon. Ironically, if he had just held out until after school, the kids are allowed free reign on a giant basket full of sugary snacks and they literally stuff their faces around 5 pm every day with about 5-6 cookies, several pieces each of toast with nutella, and lots of chocolate. Is it any wonder that mealtimes are a major issue on a daily basis?

I know I am being super judgmental since I am not a parent, but the teacher in me wants to TEACH but I just can't...and voilà...a blog entry. I ordered her the cookbook by Jessica Seinfeld that hides vegetables in foods kids like so hopefully that will help. I've been told by others with picky eaters that it is really helpful!

So, I will just sit here and say nothing because I am not sure I can explain Love and Logic in another language, and it is not my problem. But, I think I am enough of a fixer, and I've been living with this family for about 6 weeks now that I want to help them since they all seem so miserable about this. Oh, Love and Logic, you need to start making materials in every language- there are people around the world who need you!!

So, that's that. Just going to keep all these experiences in my back pocket should I ever have a super picky eater, or a kid in a classroom who adamantly refuses to do anything. (I should say in case I have a kid like that...again...because I've had many!)

Sometimes it is great to be a packrat...

2011-02-14T11:59:00.001+01:00

Happy Valentine's Day!

Normally, I protest this holiday, but these cards were just too cute to pass up! My mom saved any extra cards when we were kids and so now we have some excellent 80s-90s cards!

I'm going to make some heart-shaped cookies for the boys to decorate when they get home today. Maybe we can write on them in English to practice our words!

Lots of good plays on words with Valentine cards!

Very fitting since I'm in France!

This one is the best. Has to be from about circa 1985-ish.

My brother was a California raisin for Halloween around that same year! Awesome.

FOCUS! FOCUS! FOCUS!

2011-02-12T11:30:00.000+01:00

Found out that I have until mid-April on my warranty and that I can't live without my computer for two weeks while in France. So, I'll wait to get it fixed back in England. I'm cyberdependent...it's true.

I have just read the first half of the book Focus: Elevating the Essentials to Radically Improve Student Learning by Mike Schmoker and I think that I am ready to be back in a classroom!! Schmoker argues that we have gotten utterly ridiculous in terms of the volume and breadth of our state and national standards and that we need to cut them to 40-50% of their current levels and focus on the truly essential ones. More on this later…but most importantly, he thinks that in every class, regardless of content, we need to focus on the following four standards or habits of mind: (Page 38). Not only do we need to focus on them, but they should be central to every instructional decision in the classroom and to how we view the standards.

1. Reading to infer/interpret/draw conclusions

2. Supporting arguments with evidence

3. Resolving conflicting views encountered in source documents

4. Solving complex problems with no obvious answer

He argues that all of these require students to have a deep level of content understanding in order to complete them, and so even if we are cutting the amount of content standards, we are doing students a great service. They will have opportunities to think deeply and really understand content instead of just having a few facts committed to memory that they then forget quickly.

When I think about “preparing students for adulthood” in a democratic society where everyone has the opportunity to vote, these four habits of mind, are crucial. From a science perspective, many of the issues students are going to vote on in the future have a scientific background, so of course they need to have a conceptual understanding, but more importantly, they need to have the skills listed above. Life is about “solving problems with no obvious answer” most of the time and if we are not preparing students to do this in school, what are we doing?

Most of his arguments focus around having embedded, authentic literacy practices in every classroom almost every day. This means that students are truly engaged with a variety of texts and that teachers are providing opportunities for reading, discussions, and the four “new standards” listed above on a regular basis. He also stresses that teachers should be modeling and doing think-alouds about how to read text and how to annotate in order to infer/interpret/draw conclusions, etc. There is so much information constantly coming at people (I think I heard somewhere that the amount of information in the world doubles every 40-some days or something like that!) that unless they have the skills listed above, they won’t be able to survive and thrive in the modern world. So, bye-bye canned programs…hello real instruction!

**(On a quick aside- at my school in England, I was observed doing a think-aloud and lots of modeling and a gradual release lesson on how to read scientific text, and I was told that it was a waste of time! That was definitely not the school for me!)**

Schmoker talks about how focusing on these four habits of mind, while also focusing on only 50% of the standards, allows students to really learn and that teachers can slow down, include many checks for understanding, and ensure that all kids are truly understanding. How many times have I heard people say, or said/thought it myself, “Well, I taught it. If they didn’t get it, that’s not my fault because I taught it.” HA!

Ummm, yeah, it is my fault if I “taught” something and my students didn’t “get” it. I always was shocked in college courses when a teacher would grade on a curve so that a 45% was an A or something like that. Even then, before I was a teacher, I used to think that if students were doing that poorly in your class, maybe the teacher should do a little re-evaluation of their teaching practices.

I am sure that many teachers and standards-writers reading his book will be mad that the implications of it might be that people might have to give up their “pet unit.” Well, (and this is probably why I wouldn’t be a good administrator…not tactful enough) if you are doing a unit just because it is interesting to you, and not what is good for kids, then you shouldn’t be doing it. He talks about how to determine what standards should stay and which should go (page 47).

Endurance: Will the standard provide students with knowledge and skills beyond a single test date?

Leverage: Will the standard provide knowledge and skills that are of value in multiple disciplines?

Readiness for the Next Level: Will the standard provide the students with essential knowledge and skills that are necessary for their success in the next grade level?

He says that schools, departments, and teams need to sit down and go through the processes of cutting down the standards to a manageable, focused, and essential level. I’m glad I won’t have to be the manager of that, as I can see that being a tough process where many people will be upset. I’ve been to plenty of meetings where teachers just sit around a bitch about everything so I’m glad I don’t have to be the facilitator of the “cutting down the standards” meetings!

So, basically, reading this, just made me really excited. I hope this is the way the pendulum is going to swing. I think it should. It makes me even more excited to be out of a system that is just driven by exams to the exclusion of everything else.

I think Schmoker is dead-on. I also think that this is what PEBC has been saying for a long time. If you are reading this and not familiar with PEBC (the Public Education and Business Coalition- www.pebc.org) they are an amazing organization based around the ideas encapsulated in Schmoker’s book. (At least so far in the first half, so I hope I’m not jumping the gun by saying this!) Any school that has had the opportunity to be involved with PEBC will likely be ahead of the curve here in terms of what Schmoker is saying…it won’t be earth-shattering information to them!

If you aren’t an education person and you’re reading this blog…sorry…I am isolated from my professional colleagues in my current situation and have no other mode for discussing this great book. But, any teachers out there…read it!