Greetings and a few more photos

Hello again!

Life goes on in St. Petersburg. As I write this, we have cloudy skies and a light rain falling. Pretty typical weather for this time of year here. We've completed yet another week of school. It doesn't seem like we are already three weeks into the school year and have been here in the city for a month and a half. Time seems to be racing by. Teaching continues to be challenging and rewarding. Considering that I'm not really qualified to be teaching at all, I am relieved that the students here are generally good kids and well behaved so that I haven't had to deal with any major class management issues.

Today was filled with running a few errands like getting photos taken for Amanda for her visa and some grocery shopping. Nothing too terribly exciting, but things that needed to be done. Today IA hosted a seminar for parents and students dealing with raising children in an international setting and also focusing on preparing older students for the college application process and reentry into their home culture. Amanda and I came in at the very end because we were needed to stick around afterward while some of the students had a worship band rehearsal.

The week after this coming week IA has a spiritual retreat for secondary students. Amanda and I will be going, along with most of the rest of the teachers of the older students. I'm sure we will have an accompanying post with pictures afterwards:-D Student-led worship is part of the retreat so today the group that will be doing that had a rehearsal. Since we live so close to the school, we were enlisted to lock up the building afterwards:-)

Since we were at the school today and actually remembered the camera, we have a few photos of the inside of the building and of our classrooms! One of these days we will actually have some photos of our students to post, but for now you'll have to be content with the rooms themselves.

As always, just click on a picture if you want to enlarge it.


This is Amanda's room, looking out from behind her desk.
(An addition from Amanda: If you look closely you can see that the middle bookshelves are made out of chairs! I had these chairs in my room blocking my shelves so I got sick of them and made shelves. The students bring their own art supplies to art class so I organized them in my make shift shelves! So far so good!)


Here are the desks in Amanda's room where 10 high energy 6th graders sit each day.


And here is the front of Amanda's classroom. The person whose back is to the camera is Deb Siegel, who taught the 6th grade class last year and was instrumental in helping us find our apartment. She didn't realize that Amanda was taking a photo:-)


Moving up from Amanda's room on the second floor, we have the landing between the second and third floor where we have a variety of flags representing the countries of our students (past and present).


The main staircase at the end of the building opposite the main entrance.


Here is my classroom! As you can see, the ceilings are HIGH! There is at least a good 6 feet more than what I could get in the photo. My two U.S. History classes meet in this room. Those of you with sharp eyes will note that I have a large photograph of former President and current Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in my room (it came with the building).


This is the room that my Russian History class meets in. Normally there are chairs around the table, but they were conscripted for the seminar today.


This is the open space on the third floor. As you can see, high ceilings abound! These are some of the parents of our students following the seminar. My two classrooms are to the left side of the photo.

Hopefully this can help you better visualize the space where we spend most of our time during the week!

-Matt