Jenny Juniper and The Full Fourth Grade

My first week of teaching is finished and I need another massage. All tension lost via "the big guy in a towel" is now setting up residence in my neck and back. When teachers tell their children they are a pain in the neck, they really mean it!

My kids are energetic, intelligent, well funded, well equiped, highly trained, higly motivated annoyance machines. I spent my first week disciplining a raging nightmare of Scooby-Doo and Spider Man. Flashes of color and flying pencils are all that I truly remember. The headlines in the local paper read "American Man Run Over By Children in First Mob Related Fatality in Years." They mugged me!

That put aside, my classroom is crap, I have no materials, no A/C, no heater, no teacher's desk, not enough desks for the kids, my assistant didn't show up yesterday, and I got last months paycheck today. Never in a million years will you hear me speak or write "National School of Aleppo" and "organized" in the same sentence after this one.

On a brighter note I saw an amzing performance art piece sponsered by the French embassy last night. I guess the embassy brings in troupes and artists to spread some French culture around here. It was a silent piece that went on for almost an hour with a guy in a room emoting to the audience silently. The amazing part was it was choreographed with music and A/V projection, so that much of it was a "second projection" of his image on one of the walls. He was the strongest guy I have seen in a long time - I wonder if he is a climber. He would handstand on the floor by the wall, or one-handed press himself up with his feet on the wall, so that on the A/V screen it looked like a different view of a guy standing. All things like this with good athletics, acting, and music.

Some university friends of ours took us unsuspectingly. At one point my friend put his arm around me in the theater and said to us "look I have an American hostage!" It is pretty funny how far from reality this is here and how much of a joke it is that the US is so against Syria. I wish everyone could see and experience what I experience, then everyone wouldn't be so afraid. People are so amazing here, and it really is more safe than home even for me.

I guess if something else happens that is interesting I will write it up, otherwise it is off to the "Cat Bar" for some coffee and arabic lessons, and then later on...poker with the Westerners. Wish me luck.