Journey to the Colder Side of the Earth: It Begins Again

After a wonderful three week break over Christmas and New Year's, last week we once again returned to work at IA. It was a good week back and it was fun to be with our students again. While getting up early in the morning has not instantly become fun once more, it makes it easier knowing that we have the privilege of teaching such a great group of kids and get to work alongside other great teachers.

This quarter is going to be full of activity as always. For me (Matt), I will be helping to lead a field trip to Moscow during the second week of February. I had been planning to do this for the past two months, but recently the scope of the field trip has expanded as we realized at IA that we could combine the trip I wanted to take with another field trip for the AP English class as well as a basketball tournament the school is playing it. The end result: a full week in Moscow! The 11th and 12th graders will be going to the state historical museum, the Kremlin armory museum, and the estate of author Leo Tolstoy, and we will all get a chance to cheer on the Cossacks as they compete in basketball. Amanda will also be going along as a chaperone for half of the week as well. This is an exciting opportunity for us and our students and should be a fun and educationally rewarding time.

At the moment we are settling back in to our classes and trying to find new ways to motivate our students for the new semester. My Russian history class finished a week where we took a break from history to focus on learning about logic and reasoning. One of my chief goals for this class is to help prepare my students for college, and a big part of doing that is helping them grow as thinkers and writers. The change of pace was probably nice for the class, but next week we begin again with Russian history as we look at the period between the reigns of Peter the Great and Catherine the Great. My 9th and 10th graders are in the midst of learning about the Industrial Revolution in America as we explore the Gilded Age. The 7th/8th grade history class is eagerly embracing my spur of the moment decision to make class a team competition to find answers to history questions. I decided to do it as a way of trying to get them to do a better job of carefully reading their textbook and it went over so well that we will try again one class this coming week! Amanda's class is embarking upon a science fiction unit and had fun this week learning about utopian communities, while her 4th and 5th grade language arts class has begun a creative writing unit and are hard at work on original short stories.

All of this goes to show that this quarter will be just as much of a flurry of activity as the last two have been! Today we had a chance to relax for a bit: Amanda went shopping with our friend Svyeta, who teaches the 4/5 class at IA, and I went to a museum on the history of St. Petersburg's water system. Good times:-)

Here are a few photos from the water museum since they are the most recent ones we have taken. Not exactly essential viewing to understand our Russian experience, but the museum was interesting and there are a few good photos.