Week 1....Done-zo!

Today marks the end of my first full week of teaching. It was fun and crazy!! I have now seen all the kids at least twice, but I'm still having problems remembering the names of all the students. The 6th graders are so cute! They are ridiculously excited to play their instruments. They ask every day if they are allowed to bring their instrument and book home and we always say OF COURSE! The studnets can get passes to come down at Packer Time, their after lunch study hall class, and a lot of the 6th graders have been doing that. They only know 2 notes so far, open D and A string, but they want to play every day. It's going to be a really fun group.

The 7th graders are really nice and welcoming. They are already talking to me a lot and telling me stories. I have been working mostly with the cellos and basses and they are pretty funny. 7th graders are nice because they haven't developed attitudes yet. They are getting more serious, but are still fun. The 8th graders are nuts! There are a couple of kids that will be hard to get through to. They are testing me right now, but I will win!! hehe I think after a month or two it will be fine.

I played a super fancy cello piece for the 7th and 8th graders this week and it was pretty well recieved. The two assistant principals even came to watch! The kids don't get to hear classical musicians all the time, so it was nice to play for them. However, it meant that I had to play the piece 9 times, and I missed one 7th grade class, so I have to play for them next week.

In other news, I am going to play with the Minnesota State University Moorhead orchestra. My co-teacher Suzanne's husband Jon conducts it. I will have rehearsals for that on Tuesdays and I think 4 concerts this year. I'm also going to audition for the Fargo-Moorhead Symphony. Those auditions are on October 7th and 8th, which is also the same days as Yom Kippur and the first MSUM concert. Hopefully I make it in!

I am slowly making some friends. Tonight I hung out with my new friend Jessica. She's a another 1st year orchestra teacher that teaches 5th and 6th grade orchestra in Fargo. We walked around the mall and then got some dinner at the Space Aliens restaurant. It was a pretty wierd place. I'll have to get a picture up of it.

Anyways, we have a long weekend now so I can relax and rest up for the next few months!

The 1st Day!

Today was my first day as a real orchestra teacher! and boy did it go by fast. I got to school at 7am to help my co-teacher Suzanne get ready for the day. We were a little behind in our preparations because of music department meetings the two days before. The music department schedule is anything but simple, and it took up a lot of time trying to figure it all out. Suzanne and I worked all morning and were finally ready to recieve kids at 8:40am when school starts.

We had classes straight all day with only a little break for lunch. Cheney uses a block schedule with A and B days. This means that there are 5 blocks in the day, each made up of 2 periods called skinnys. Each block is about 84 minutes long, and each skinny is 40 minutes long. The students have 3 blocks a day for language arts, social studies, math, and science. One block is for encore classes, like music, art, gym, computers, etc. The encore block is split into skinnies, so they have 2 encore classes in one block. The other block is for lunch and packer time. Packer time is 40 minutes where the students can work on homework, makeup tests, or do other activities their teacher decides to do. Also, they have different classes depending on whether it's an A day or a B day. Basically, it's the most confusing schedule ever!

We also teach 3 orchestra classes at the STEM charter middle school. STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math. This means that once on A days and twice on B days one of us has to go to the STEM center to teach classes while the other teaches class at Cheney. Most of the classes Suzanne and I will team teach, but some of them we will be on our own. However, we will alternate classes every week so that we both get to see all of the kids.

Hopefully I will be able to get this schedule and the kids names memorized in the next couple weeks!! Anyways, tomorrow is day two and hopefully it will run as smoothly as today did. Thanks for all your support during this new time in my life!

I'm a real person now!

So I've decided to start up my blog again! Horray! Now all of you can share in my grand North Dakota adventure.

For those of you who don't know, I have taken a job with West Fargo Public Schools in North Dakota. I'm teaching middle school orchestra at Cheney Middle School. I'm really excited, and a bit nervous, for my first real job. I have a co-teacher, Suzanne, who has been teaching at the school for 6-7 years. She is fantastic and I can't wait to see what the two of us will come up with.

My apartment, which I moved into last Wednesday, is really nice. It's a 2 bedroom apartment with a killer kitchen! Below are some pictures of it. I didn't take any pictures of my bedroom because it is a mess.

My Haitian artwork

My library!

So stay tuned for more updates about my life in the great plaines!

Blamo!! from Salzburg

The Friday and Saturday after Thanksgiving I went to the city of Salzburg with Danielle. We were both really tired from Thanksgiving, so we took things slow and didn't rush around trying to see everything. We stayed at a hostel near the city center, owned by the same people where we had stayed in Mariezell and Graz.

The Festung, or fortress in English, dominates the view in Salzburg. We had a pretty good view of it outstid our hostel.

Old town Salzburg

We found this crazy shop that makes egg ornaments for Easter and Christmas. So many eggs!!

The first thing we did after eating and walking around a bit was to go to Mozart's birth house!

It was so cool to be where Mozart was born and the museum inside was really cool. They had the first violin Mozart ever played on!

Salzburg is in a valley of mountains, so there are giant rock mountain sides that surround the city

We went up a gondola thingy to see the Modern Art Museum (Museum der Modern). Danielle is an art major so we did music and art things.

The view from the Modern art museum

We took some sneaky photos in the museum because we weren't really allowed to.

After the art museum we stopped in this wierd cafe called Afro Cafe. It was really brightly decorated inside and we tried to take some pictures, but we didn't want to seem too much like tourists.

When we left the cafe it was night time so we walked around some more and made our way to the Augustine Brewery, which is part of the Augustine Monastary. The other house Mozart lived in!

Giant old church

Brass quintet playing at a Christmas market

It was kind of hard to find the Augustine Brewery because there weren't any signs for it and it's in the basement of the Monastary building. It was kind of a place you had to know where it was and we felt slightly out of place there because there were huge groups of people that looked like they were regulars. How works is that you get your beer, then you can buy food at the little stands and then sit in one of the several giant halls.

After the brewery we walked back to our hostel and went to bed early!

Saturday, November 28th We woke up a little later and ate breakfast in our hostel. Then we headed over to Scholss Mirabelle (Palace Mirabelle).

Then we found these wierd statues in the garden....

Trees that look like the Womping Willow from Harry Potter

Chocolate Jam Pretzel!

In the afternoon we headed to the Festung, the giant fortress! Because of the Christmas Markets there was a discounted price on the tickets, so that rocked. We took the funicular up to the top and then wandered around the fortress for a couple hours before walking back down.

Blamo!! from Thanksgiving

I'm in my last week of classes! It's hard to believe that I've been here for almost 4 months. They have gone by so fast. My family will be here Sunday and then on the 18th we head to London. I've had a ton of fun in Vienna, but I'm definitely excited to go home to English speaking America.

So for Thanksgiving, I decided to make Apple Pies for my students at the school I've been working at because they have no idea what pie is and it's my favorite food! I have 21 1st graders and 27 4th graders, so I needed to make a lot of pies....6 in fact (well 1 pie was for us, not the kids). My mom sent me pie tins in the mail. Sarah and I made all the crusts on Tuesday and then on Wednesday I cooked all the pies. Here's the end result:

I wanted to make all different crusts so they could see the different looks for pie. We did 2 lattices, 2 normal, and 2 with hearts on the top. They all turned out so great and tasted delicious. On actual Thanksgiving, Sarah, Erica, and I went into my school and taught about Thanksgiving and fed them pie! They loved the pie!!! It was so much fun! We made hand turkey drawings with the 1st graders and an Thanksgiving poem with the 4th graders.

I still had class on Thanksgiving, which was a bummer, but IES took us to a restaurant in Baden (a city just outside of Vienna) for traditional Thanksgiving dinner. One of the guys that works for IES, Kent, moved to Austria in 1978 and for that Thanksgiving he was in charge of organizing food for like 150 Americans at the school he was going to, and he did it at the restaurant that we went to. So Kent taught them how to make Thanksgiving food and every year IES goes there for dinner. The food was great and we had a really good time!

Our table! (left to right) Molly, Sabrina, Paul, Erica, Sarah, and Kevin. Danielle was also there but you can't see her in this picture.

Me and Molly

Kevin was so hungry he was going to eat his napkin!

First they brought us some bread with wierd spreads on top

Then came the food!

Erica, Danielle, and Sarah

After dinner some of the music students played for us! Ellye and Liz played some flute. There weren't any stands so Kent had to hold the music.Then Lauren and Erica played some jazz

Then we got dessert, which was Apple Studel. I was so full I couldn't eat any, but it looked good

Then we all relxed an hung out for a bit before returning back to Vienna. Me and Paul

Erica and Jory

Kevin, me and Paul being very full

Madeline, Ruthanne, and Diana
Thanksgiving turned out really well and I wasn't that homesick. I got to skype with my family, so that was good too. The next morning I left for Salzburg with my friend Danielle. I'll post those pictures soon....maybe even today.....