A day at the races...camel races

On December 14, I had the opportunity to experience a very Arab event: camel races. A local cultural center hosted a day and bussed a comically large number of expats out to the Kuwaiti Camel Racing Association camel track. I am so glad I got the chance to finally figure out where the track is, and I definitely plan to go back on my own without all the gobsmacked North Americans.

Criticism aside, the day was very entertaining!

You approach the grandstands out in the middle of the desert and enter a very swanky lounge type room with a wall of windows. An announcer calls the race, which has started 6 kilometers away and is in progress as we enter the complex. His feverish cadence, even though you have no idea what he's saying, builds the excitement as the camels make their way to the finish line.

Assumed these were the owners/investors of the racing camels. We called it the Old Boys Club. 

The racing complex from the front.

The TV screens that showed the progress of the race as the camels approached.

Now, when you google "camel races," you get images from Qatar, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia where they still have human jockeys. From what I've been told, they used to have small boys as the jockeys at the camel races in Kuwait, but it became a child safety issue so now they use robots here.

One of the last of the pack coming in for his race.  See the little red box looking thing behind his hump? It's a little robot jockey that has a little whip any everything! It's even dressed like a horse jockey!

 They also had camels for the tourists to enjoy for rides and photo opportunities.

I assume they had her hobbled so that she wouldn't freak out and trample any of the tourists surrounding her. Eventually they took off the hobble and led her home.

Over all it was a really cool experience. I'm looking forward to going back for a solo adventure.

Vicariously yours,

Home Sweet Home: an Update

I was looking through old posts the other day and I realized I never updated y'all on how we settled in to our apartment! So here are a few shots of the current state of our place.

This is the entry way with the Mr. Pig and Mr. Otter prints that were two of the first things we hung in our new home. We've since added a fantastic entry table that affords us so much storage! You can't see it very well, but just to the right of the door is the print of Van Gogh's Sunflowers, which is a gift from my aunt Becky. It's a tradition the women in my family (my mom, my aunt Becky, her daughter Sarah, my sister, and me) to have a print of Sunflowers hanging somewhere in our homes. I've had this print hanging in all my homes since my first college dorm.

Here are the dining room tables. The apartment comes with one table, but our weekly family dinners have grown to up to 16 people, so I got us a second table and 4 more chairs. It's like Thanksgiving every week (but with slightly less food) and I love it.

Storage is at a premium over here, so I have tried to find furniture that serves a dual purpose when possible. Those benches on either side of the white loveseat used to be the only storage in this corner. They roll out and hold all our holiday stuff and my scrapbooking materials. The white love seat is a life saver for the times the Mister wants to play video games and I want to stretch out and stream my TV shows.

This is my favorite part of the house! The couch has taken quite a beating since we purchased it last year, but I still love it! The photos over the couch make it feel so much like home. But the best part of this living room, by far, is the fantastic comfy chair we got from our friend Sharon! The Mister is in it right now playing his video games and it is famous for its afternoon-nap-inducing powers. You'll notice that the entertainment center is a vast improvement over the rustic xbox-sitting-on-a-chair set up we had last year.

A close up on my attempt to be all interior design-ish. The Ganesh was our latest smuggle from Sri Lanka. We also were able to re-purchase the Sri Lankan man and woman and nativities that were confiscated by the Saudi government in April 2012.

The guest room (aka the cat room for the time being) actually looks like a guest room! We bought the bed last semester because a friend of ours was coming to visit from Saudi. Notice the storage under the bed. It currently holds...well...everything I couldn't find a place for previously.

This is the room where I spend a lot of my time (keep your jokes to yourself, fellas). It's not much, but it's mine. The green cabinets drive me a little crazy. The guy who lived in this apartment before us had leftover paint from the living room, so he decided to paint the cabinets. Alas, he only had enough for the uppers. It feels like a kitschy 1950s kitchen and I kind of hate it.  But oh well. At least it doesn't clash with the tiles.

Here's the bedroom. I know, Mom, I know: the bed's not made. Some things never change.

Hope you enjoyed your tour of our crib! The guest bed has a VERY dreamy memory foam mattress topper, so feel free to come visit any time!

Vicariously yours,

Close-to-Finished-Classroom Reveal

I read a lot of teacher blogs and this time of year is filled with posts as teachers a heck of a lot more organized than me show off their freshly prepared classrooms and highlight all the nooks and crannies where they have hidden away teachable moments to be found later in the school year. Many are the types who have adopted the new teacher fad of going without a teacher desk (it robs the room of valuable instructional space), and Pinterest is filled with their free printable owl-themed filing cabinet labels or bulletin board characters.

Yeah. I'm not one of those ladies. I tried to do that whole no-teacher-desk thing one year. I just ended up commandeering a section of student desks instead. I teach middle school. We don't do bulletin boards and we definitely don't have room themes.

But I worked my butt off on my classroom this summer, so I'm gonna do a classroom reveal, dangit!

It's not quite finished yet. I'm waiting for payday so I can buy a few more organizational tools and possibly spring for some more laminating. But I figure my teacher friends back home would enjoy seeing my current classroom. If you found this post from a middle school classroom management google search, I've bolded the tricks I use that I think work best for middle school minds.

This is the view while standing at the door. I took these shots right before the parents arrived for Open House, so I had my introductory powerpoint up on the screen already.

This is the view while standing on the other side of the room at the student workstation. I use the workstation as a student hub of craft supplies and such.

 In my first year of teaching, students were constantly taking things from my desk because it was the only place in the room to store things like tape dispensers and staplers. It was harmless pilfering at first, but then all my writing utensils went missing, even the ones that were buried under the ubiquitous piles of papers on every middle school teacher's desk. So I have dedicated a corner of my classroom to the student workstation every year since. It has multiple staplers, tape dispensers, 3-hole punches, scissors, and all the other supplies students could need. That way they have no reason to go to my desk.

I always try to have a mirror somewhere in my classroom. It's a trick I learned in college. Ninety percent* of middle school bathroom visits are because the students want to check their hair or reapply lip gloss. So I put a mirror in my room and it really does reduce the amount of bathroom requests. Thanks to our school's strict policy on phones during the school day, the amount of checking-my-whatsapp bathroom visits has also diminished this school year.

*I just made up that percentage. It's probably closer to 95%, but the studies haven't concluded yet.

Also on the workstation are the WYWOs. These are an organizational tool I came up with while I was in Saudi Arabia. Student absence was a really big problem, and I was constantly being swamped by returning students at the beginning of class wanting to know what they had missed the day before. I was proud of them for being responsible and finding out about their make up work, but their timing was horrible. A middle school teacher has about a bajillion things to do in the first 5 minutes of each class period, and mentally replaying what we did yesterday in third period (which is usually different from what we did in first and fourth period thanks to the ever changing needs of middle school students) is not one of them.

So I created the WYWO (while you were out) form and I assigned the job of filling out that form to a different student each week whom I call The Go-to Guy/Gal. That way absent students don't come talk to me at the beginning of the day, and if they have any questions about the WYWO, they ask the go-to guy and I'm left to input attendance as well as put out the 50 other fires that start during hectic transition times.

These are the student desks. They're in groups of 6 kids (though they are rarely completely full) and I call them "pods." Each pod has a pod pack, a gold star board, 2 trash cans, and a parking lot. See my ugly permanent bulletin board display on the right? I told you. Middle School teachers don't do bulletin boards.

I don't have a close up of the pod packs (they're the soup cans attached to the wall in the picture above), but they along with the trashcans are LIFE SAVERS!! Another problem I had in my first year of teaching was the vagabonds. The kids who found every possible reason to wander even though I tried my hardest to work physical movement into all my lesson plans. They needed a pencil sharpener, they needed to borrow a pencil from a friend directly across the room, they needed to get a tissue, they needed to throw away their snotty tissue. So I eliminated the wandering by putting all those things at their desks. The pod packs have pencils. I use tiny golf pencils with crappy erasers; the kids HATE them, but beggars can't be choosers. The pod packs have sharpeners, a ruler (a new addition in the straight-line obsessed Middle East), erasers, and a pack of tissues. There are two of these ikea trash cans attached to each pod so the water-cooler-meeting style rendez-vous at the trashcan is a thing of the past.

Throughout high school and college I had jobs that were centered around customer service. I was expected to go out of my way to make sure my customers didn't lift a finger unless they had to. My most used phrase was "I can do that for you."

When I started teaching, it was hard to turn that impulse off and I spent my first year running around like a mad woman! "Don't get up! I'll hand out ALL of these graded homework assignments while ALL of you watch me." My instinct was to be a servant and my students were bored and antsy as a result. There was no sense of community in my room, just panic as I tried to spin all the plates.

So ever since my second year I've had classroom jobs whenever possible. Back in Nashville I had about 8 different jobs and my students LOVED chipping in! I don't know why I didn't realize that students like to feel useful and needed, especially when in a high poverty population. I was finally able to have some one-on-one time with students because my Operator could answer the classroom phone for me. My Manager knew where to locate the day's handouts and could distribute them quickly while I had a disciplinary conference with a student in the hall. It was GREAT!

Since moving to the Middle East I've decreased the number of classroom jobs I use. My current students are used to being waited on by adults and are often opposed to being assigned a job in the classroom other than to sit and absorb their surroundings. They don't get to opt out of performing their duties, but I have eliminated jobs like the Trash Collector and Street Sweepers that I had in Nashville.

I have put job descriptions above the job assignments because terms like "manager" don't seem to be a part of my Middle Eastern students' regular vernacular. When I first introduced the job here I said, "What do you think a manager should do?" and I was met with total silence. "Ok...Bobby*, what does a restaurant manager do?" ....nothing. They had no idea!! They either didn't know that was a job in the real world or they were playing stupid!

So now I can just point to the job descriptions when a student asks "I'm this week's Gopher. What does that job do?"

*names have been changed to protect the naive.

This is the most unfinished part of my classroom. I snagged some of the old teacher mailboxes from the office when they were changed out last school year and they make an awesome storage space! I just need to get some plastic bins so all my craft supplies aren't just hanging out for all the world to see.

Those green and white beauties on top of the storage are student mailboxes that I MADE! I got an idea from Pinterest, but didn't have pizza boxes or USPS shipping boxes like the inspiration sites suggest. So I jimmy-rigged them using the tops of the cardboard boxes our reams of copy paper come in! They aren't all that pretty to look at but I pretty darn proud of them! I have the class mailman retrieve the graded work from the outboxes (the silver trays on top) and deliver the "mail" so I don't have to run around and waste class time passing back graded papers--a task that I put off so much in my first year of teaching that it often took a whole class period to purge all the stacks of graded work from my desk. Since I teach about 120 students this year, the "addresses" are the kids' seat assignments. Each seat has a pod letter (A pod, B pod, etc) and a number. They write their assignment in the top left corner of all their work and the mailman places it in the corresponding mailbox.

The messy box of tissue paper is a Next Activity option for the kids. Next Activities are short assignments the kids can work on if they finish classwork before we're ready to move on with the rest of the lesson and I need to assist other students. Instead of just talking and distracting their classmates, the kids have 4-5 rotating choices of activities they can do instead. The stained glass window that has gotten started behind the mailboxes is one of them. I modified an idea from (surprise) Pinterest and it's serving two purposes. The kids are LOVING that they get to glue paper to the window and not get in trouble, and the fly-by wavers and hand signalers that were constantly distracting my class last year are being blocked from view! I love all the natural light the windows let in, but they provided the perfect frame for kids "going to the bathroom" who wanted to flag their friends down to let them know it was time for their 11:25 appointment in the john.

Other next activities I use are coloring pages, reading a book (which my students this year actually do without my having to force it!), create a crossword puzzle using the unit's current vocabulary, play with (censored) magnetic poetry, test their trivia knowledge using Brain Quests, and puzzle packs with mazes and word searches.

One of the things I started new this year is my reward system. I've struggled with a reward system that I could maintain for years! I was raised in a household where you weren't rewarded for doing the things you were supposed to do, so it's not natural for me to shower my students with stickers or treats when they sit in their seats and do their work. But I modified found this idea found on Pinterest and it is working like magic on my sixth grade students.

Throughout the class period I divvy out "gold stars" to the pods. I tried to find a feasible way to use actual gold stars, but it just didn't work out. So I have attached a small dry erase board next to each pod and when a student or the whole pod is behaving exceptionally well, I make sure to call out the desired behavior as I add a tally to their gold star board (or I have a student do it if I'm across the room). The pod with the most gold stars at the end of the class period gets to choose a reward to add a letter to on our reward board. They're hard to see in the photo above but the kids have the choice of brownies, class snacks, gum in class, or a lunch party. We add one letter each day and the reward that gets filled up first is what the whole class gets.

I was afraid the kids would find the whole gold star thing cheesy and lame, but they have really latched on to it. I'm not sure if it would work as well in a 7th or 8th grade class, but as long as I'm teaching 6th grade, this will be the reward system for me.

There are lots of other areas in my classroom I would like to show you, but I think I've rambled on enough for one day. My apologies to non-teacher readers who find all of this mundane and elementary. Thank you for allowing me one post where I get to nerd out on all things teacher-y. If you're a teacher and you have questions about anything you see if the photos, please let a comment and I'll get back to you.

Vicariously yours,

Low Key New Year's in Prague

Despite all the illness and pink eye we've suffered this break, it has been kind of relaxing. The most expensive relaxing vacation ever. We basically paid for airfare and lodging so we could go get sick in Europe.

But yesterday we tried to make up for lost time. We got all dressed up and went to a fancy dinner at a fancy restaurant. We had heard all about the fireworks over Prague on New Year's Eve, so we picked a restaurant that overlooked the whole city with a clear view of the river so we wouldn't miss a minute of the show.

It was a very fancy restaurant. They had a pianist and violinist.

The dinner was very very good! We had several courses. It was so fancy that when we looked at the menu I had to look at the Mister and ask, "Do we get to eat all of this, or do we only choose one thing?"

We got to eat all of it.

Including the "poachet pikeperch" with caviar and red beet carpaccio. I wasn't even sure what red beet carpaccio was!

At first the dinner was very awkward because we were one of maybe 3 English-speaking couples in the whole room. We were seated really close to everyone around us, but not close enough to non-awkwardly strike up a conversation with any of them. Eventually we were able to entertain ourselves between courses.

They gave us some cool pseudo costumes to keep ourselves occupied.

Finally it was time for the big fireworks we'd heard so much about! Anyone who has spent a 4th of July with me can attest to my unhealthy love for fireworks shows. So we got our half bottle of Czech sparkling wine and headed outside for the big display.

Turns out, the big fireworks display organized by the city of Prague happens on the night of New Years Day...because the city of Prague doesn't want to compete with this.

It's not an actual fireworks display so much as all the people in Prague (tourists, immigrants, and Czechs alike) just setting off the most elaborate fireworks I have ever seen set off by private citizens! Seriously! I have had MANY a 4th of July in my day and I have NEVER seen people legally setting off fireworks this nice, loud, and dangerous! WHERE ARE THEY GETTING THESE FIREWORKS!?

It was pretty darn cool, though. We could see for miles across the city and into the outskirts of town and it was fireworks as far as the eye could see. It was like little tiny, not-scary volcanoes going off every 400 feet for miles and miles.

Here's a blurry photo of what it looked like. I'm a dedicated blogger.

It was a pretty awesome way to ring in the new year.

We woke up today feeling energized, refreshed and ready to start the new year tackling ALL our resolutions.

I'm just kidding! haha! We literally haven't left the apartment all day. And it's been awesome. Around 5:30 I asked the Mister if we should get dressed and try to find a good place to watch tonight's real fireworks show. We both responded with a resounding, "meh."

Luckily we could see the fireworks from our awesome apartment!

Video can be seen here.

Happy New Year, y'all!

Vicariously yours,

We went to a fairy tale land

This vacation has not gone as planned.

At. all.

Thank goodness we rented an apartment through airbnb. If we had been sick and holed up in a hotel room this whole time, there probably wouldn't be a We anymore. Only one of us would have survived.*

*it would not have been this guy.

We've been following a pretty regular pattern of one day on, one day off. We'll go out and see some sights, and it'll take it all out of me and I'm in bed the whole next day. I should probably take it a little more easy and not go so hard when I am out of bed, I'm determined to see something while on this darn vacation!

So yesterday, the Mister and I met up with the tour guide who showed us around town on our first day in Prague and he drove us south to a medieval village called Cesky Krumlov.

Literally translated, the town name means "Crooked Czech" or "Crooked Bohemian." Kamil, our tour guide, told us that originally there was more to the name that made it mean "Crooked Czech Town" but that was too much to say so it got shortened. The original parts of the village were built as early as the 1200s and a post Communism boom in tourism has helped to bring the old buildings back to their wonderful historic luster. Here are a few photos.

Oh. We stopped by the Budweiser Budvar brewery on the way down. This is where the real Budweiser has been brewed for several hundred years.

The town is built along the southern banks of the Vlata River, which flows north to Prague.

The castle is on the left, the cathedral of St. Vitus is on the right. Two hotties in the middle. amirite? 

This is the lower castle, the oldest part of the castle that got a "facelift" during the Renaissance (ie around the mid 1500s)

All the detailed artwork on the facades of all the buildings was so amazing! The castle was handed down from one wealthy family to the next for hundreds of years. As each family ran out of money, another one would step in and...spend money on parties and entertaining guests till they went broke. It was very Downton Abbey. But in Bohemia.

Behind me is a plague column, built during one of the many plagues to try to ward off the evil spirits that were causing all the deaths. I'm standing in the town square down the hill from the castle.

The upper castle is on the hill behind the Mister. Tchotchkes and quaint buildings are  featured as well.

One of the families built this elaborate passageway to connect the lower castle to the new theater in the upper castle some time in the 1600s.

One of the perks of staying in a fully functional apartment? You get to burn cook your own dinner after a long, cold day of sightseeing! 

The Mister was down for the count today, complaining of the same ails I had at the beginning of our adventure (minus the pink eye), so we didn't go anywhere today. Tomorrow's goal: leave the apartment.

...If we can accomplish that we're going to try to see the Prague castle, visit a museum or two, and find me some shoes for New Year's Eve!

Here's hopin'!

Vicariously yours,

Serving up some drag realness

The other night, I had an experience that so greatly contrasted my life in Saudi Arabia it just made me smile. I went to a show. This isn't an uncommon occurrence in Nashville. But this was a special show. Last Friday night, I went to a drag show.

Oh. my. lady boy.

I realize this is not a topic I usually discuss on this blog: I usually reserve my posts for international musings and photos of place and things most Americans don't have access to. But a lot of my students read this blog and I think this is a part of my life that some of them might be interested to know about. At least some will find it interesting.

Plus it was a fabulous night and I want to show everyone the pictures!!

For those who have never had the pleasure of going to a drag show, here's how it works:

Step 1. Pay your entry and get your wristband.

Step 2. Scan the crowd and find the best spot for the show.

Step 3. Wait.

Step 4. Enjoy the magic and hilarity.

For those who don't know, a drag show takes place in a gay club. The performers are men who dress like women. As was the case for most of the performers on Friday night, the queens sometimes have had some body modifications to make them look more like women.

exhibit A. ...and B.

The performances consist of the drag queens lip syncing to various popular songs and, depending on the talents of the performers, dancing and interacting with the crowd. The queens all have their own drag names that are different from their non-drag names. Each queen has her own style, there are the super girly types, the more punk types, and the androgynous, more modern types. There are several forms of drag, and I love them all.

Aurora Sexton. She's serving up showgirl-meets-1950s realness.

On Friday, however, I was there to see one particular queen: Latrice Royale!!

The shade of it all!

Latrice was a contestant on a show called Ru Paul's Drag Race. Think America's Next Top Model meets Project Runway...but with drag queens. It's a guilty pleasure of mine, and Latrice was one of my favorite queens from season 4. Even though I only got to see her perform one song, she was fabulous and I had a great time. I used to go to drag shows just about every Friday and Sunday night in college and I have missed hanging out in the drag scene. This is definitely an experience I would never have had living in Saudi Arabia! I love my crazy life.

Here are a few other photographic highlights:

Sara Andrews serving up a little Katy Perry.

Vicariously yours,