Teaching Adventures: Sports and more

Sunday, February 2, 2014

Sports and more

The last two weeks have found us in familiar territory. Ryan is back coaching basketball and had his first game. He has the JV team and they looked great. He has some 8th graders in the team as well as 9th and 10th and the team they played against were all big 10th graders, so it was impressive. They played on Friday afternoon and it reminded me of the last few years going to games on Friday night. Only this time we were done before 7, which was great. We went to eat at Bread Republic after, which I don't think I have written about. It is a restaurant that does local on season food, like sandwiches, pastas, salads, and of course all kinds of fresh baked bread. We were sitting at our table in the tiny alleyway outside laughing at how it was February and we were eating outside, and our family home in Chicago had just gotten another 4 inches of snow. Definitely want to stay in warm countries for the rest of our teaching career if possible!

Saturday we went to the cross country meet that ACS hosted in the mountains. It was a beautiful day. There were a lot of amazing student volunteers that came to help our team and the other team on the extremely tough uphill course. Our kids did a great job running and it was a eeay fun day complete with a Lebanese picnic after. Saturday night we were invited to our neighbor Jamil's house to play a game with his friends, which was fun to meet a lot of new people.

We had a parent teacher conferences Wednesday. I was really impressed with how many parents were able to make it out, which just continues how much parental involvement there has been at the school. It is really nice to work somewhere where the parents can be involved.

This week is my last session of coaching little kid volleyball. It has been really fun and a whole new challenge. 20 third fourth and fifth graders running around after school is quite the sight! I was lucky to have two great 11th graders helping me out especially for the trip to bring them down 6 flights of stairs and over to another building to wait for their parents at the end. Starting the next week I will be the conditioning coach for the track team which I am excited about, and any of my forner players reading this will remember how much I love conditioning! Another exciting project coming up starting Sunday will be the CAS project of two students. CAS is creativity action and service and all ib students have to create a project that helps the community in some way. Two students are going to be running a basketball camp for less fortunate children for two hours on Sundays. They asked me to be the chaperone-obviously they have not seen me play basketball! I am really excited to see this work. The students have been setting up their practice plan and getting some fundraising ideas together. This is one of many impressive community service projects the students here are involved in. There are a lot of refugees here in different camps that the students often work with or gather supplies for them.

Today is another beautiful day, we did get a little rain last week, but it was mainly at night. I am planning on a nice long run today down on the waterfront path that reminds me of the lake shore drive path, but way less crowded. It is really peaceful out there.

Last weekend after our long run we decided to take the kayaks out again. We paddled to pigeon rocks and went into some caves until we heard the bats, which Ryan hates. We paddled around for an hour or so, which was a great shoulder workout on top of the bootcamp and TRX workouts I started going to at my gym.

Check out the digital photography students work from ACS at www.acsdigitalphotography.blogspot.com for some impressive photos taken around Beirut. The students have inspired me to take the camera out today and try to get some good photos too.