Much Ado About Nothing

Hello!
We are in the middle of spring break right now and heading into our last quarter of school! For the beginning of spring break we went to Helsinki, Finland and there will be a post and pictures about that soon.

But the very first day of Spring Break our high school put on the play Much Ado About Nothing! It is a Shakespeare play and ours was set in WWII era.

So here are pictures and an explanation of the general plot.

The play focuses on Don Pedro, Claudio, and Benedick (in order above). They arrive at Leanato's and Claudio falls for his daughter Hero. Benedick and Beatrice, Leanato's niece, have met before and they bicker whenever they are together.
Beatrice on the left and Hero on the right.
Don John has two spies, one on the bench, and is out to get Don Pedro, his brother.
Leanato warning Beatrice that she may want to get married some day while she jokes and teases men in general.

It is decided that Don Pedro will win Hero for Claudio and they are engaged later.

After a masked ball, Benedick goes on a rampage, insulting Beatrice, unaware that she is right behind him.
Don John's spy is told to make Hero seem "loose" to ruin Claudio's happiness and indirectly hurt Don Pedro. (The spy is played by one of our 7th graders who was very good and was pulled in at the last minute and memorized the lines in 10 days!)
The guys decide to set up Beatrice and Benedick and, when they know Benedick is hiding in a grove nearby, loudly make up stories of how love sick she is for him. :-)
The same is done by the girls to Beatrice. Both decide apart from each other that they do in fact love the other.

Benedick confesses to the men that he does have affection for Beatrice.

A side plot opens up with Dogberry, a bumbling and hilarious cop who is to put guards around Leanato's house. Dogberry was hilarious (very much like the police in Pirates of Penzance) and my 6th graders said any time she was on were the times they actually understood what was happening. :-)

Claudio and Don Pedro see the spy with someone else who looks like Hero and are understandably angry.
The guards hear Don John's men talking about how they have framed Hero and been paid by Don John and are arrested and tried. Dogberry begins to tell Leanato about this plot but he says he is busy and leaves.
At the wedding Claudio refuses to marry Hero for cheating on him and leaves. She faints and only wakes up after he is gone.
A plan is made to hide her and announce her death. Then Claudio will feel bad and hopefully come back for her when he discovers she is innocent.

After everyone leaves, Beatrice stays behind and Benedick tries to comfort her. They admit they love each other and she asks him to fight Claudio. He finally agrees to.
So Benedick challenges Claudio to a fight. At the time of the fight, Dogberry brings the spies by and tells of their plot to the whole group.

Claudio repents and asks what he can do to make up for Hero's death. Leanato tells him to marry his brother's daughter and Claudio agrees.

At the wedding it is revealed that Hero is not dead and they are married. Benedick and Beatrice are also married and all is happy! :-)

Benedick and Beatrice!
And this is our wonderful cast and crew (the whole high school and 2 junior high guys)! They did a fantastic job!

They made the play a lot of fun and easy to understand which is saying something indeed!

They even ended with a dance that I will put at the end of this!

So it was a ton of fun and I was very impressed. One of the best high school plays I have seen. :-)

Catching Up

Hello one and all!

A few weeks have passed since our last post, so it is about time to post an update of our goings on here. Mostly we have been wrapped up in things related to school. This past Monday was when our grades for the third quarter were due. That meant that last weekend was full of grading for both of us. For me it meant that I had two drafts of essays for two of my classes to go through in the previous week, so I spent quite a bit of time writing comments on essays for my 9/10 American History and 11/12 Russian History class. I am enjoying watching my students grow as writers and thinkers, but any time I get a nice thick stack of essays I begin to regret having assigned them:-P

Last Friday, Amanda and I got the chance to lead the youth group that we help out with. Most of the kids in the youth group are also IA students, but it provides a great chance to interact with them outside of school. The students took a survey at the beginning of the year that asked for topics that they would be interested in looking at this year, and one of the topics of interest was marriage. John, our fellow World Partners teammate who leads the youth group (among his myriad other responsibilities), asked Amanda and I if we wanted to take this topic since we are much closer in age to the students and would have more recent experience with the kind of questions they would be asking. With ten months of marriage under our belts, we felt exceedingly well qualified to be addressing such a topic:-)

We were able to get some good discussion going about questions like why should people get married? How do you know if someone is "the one"? Is there such a thing as "the one"? How old should be when you get married?, and a host of others. Its always fun to hear our students thoughts on things like what sort of characteristics each gender would like in a potential spouse. The girls managed to come up with a list that was easily twice as long as the guys:-) Who knew that having a husband with musical talent would be important to so many women? We also got to answer some of their questions about us, like how we met and got engaged. I'm always surprised when our students show any sort of interest in us as people, but its a good kind of surprise. We are always glad when we have a chance to invest time in the lives of our students and have the chance to share the wisdom (limited as it is) that we have.

With grades turned in, we get to look forward to Spring break next week! We are going to be spending part of our break in Helsinki, Finland. One of the benefits of living in St. Petersburg is that it is very close to a wide array of interesting places, and Amanda and I are eager to take in as many of them as we can. With that in mind, we saved most of the money our families gave us for Christmas so that we could travel somewhere over Spring Break. Two other teachers from our school asked to come as well, so Amanda and I will be joined by Svyeta and Kristina. I always enjoy traveling with other people, so it should be fun. I don't consider myself to be a very good traveler- I get stressed far to easily and can easily get caught up in ridiculous worries, so its always good to have a few other people around to help relieve any self-produced tension. I think there is a major distinction between people who are good travelers and people who are good at living in a foreign country/culture, but that's probably a subject for another post. It's always fun to get outside of the city, which we don't often have the chance to do, so we are both looking forward to it. I'm sure we will have pictures to post once we return!

It's hard to believe that 3/4 of the school year is already completed. I'm sure the next quarter will seem to fly by as well. Time keeps marching on, but we are reminded daily how blessed we are to be where we are with the people that God has blessed us with. Thanks to all of you for your prayers and gifts- this would not be possible without you!

-Matt

Spring and Visitors!

Hello and Happy Spring from Russia!

According to the Russian calendar system, the first day of Spring begins on March 1 rather than on the vernal equinox as it does in the United States, so we are technically enjoying spring right now in St. Petersburg. As I look outside and see the mountains of snow that are still with us I have a hard time accepting this, but the temperatures are beginning to get warmer and the amount of sunlight is increasing steadily. Winter has been fine, but I'm sure it will be nice for a change of pace once spring-like weather truly does in fact arrive.

Our lives have been rather busy these past few weeks, which is the main reason that we have not posted anything in a while. One of the most exciting things that happened was that we had our first visitors from the U.S. the week before last! Rachel and Analiese, two friends of ours from college, came and stayed with us for a little over a week. We had a great time showing them the sites of our city, catching up with what has been going on in their lives, and getting the chance to show off our hard-earned knowledge and experience. It really is nice for once to not be the people who know the least Russian:-) We showed them many beautiful churches, some significant graveyards, the apartment of Dostoevsky, the Hermitage, and a stunning variety of forms of public transportation, along with giving them ample opportunities to try different kinds of Russian food. We all had a great time, and we didn't kill each other as four people had to share our rather modestly sized apartment.

While it was wonderful to have friends visit us, it has meant that we have been playing catch-up for this past week and a half as we try to stay on top of everything for school. The end of our third grading quarter approaches rapidly, which means that Amanda and I each have a fair bit of grading to do. I have been working through various essays for my classes this past week. Before sitting down to write this post, I finished writing comments on the first draft of an essay for my 9/10 American History class (topic: identify what you believe to be the single greatest problem facing the United States during the Gilded Age and explain what was done to address it in the Progressive Era and how successful you believe the attempted reforms were. Good stuff:-)).

Happily for the catching up side of things, we have had a long weekend in honor of International Women's Day today. So while we have done quite a bit of school work, we also have had a chance to have some fun as well. We saw a performance of Alice in Wonderland on Ice Sunday afternoon (we had bought the tickets a month ago, but the event was rescheduled to this weekend), and enjoyed a trip to the State Russian Museum to take in significant works of Russian art, including a great new exhibition on the heroes and villains of Russian history in art, yesterday courtesy of some free tickets that another teacher at school gave us.

To make up for the long break in between posts, we have new photos:-) These photos are courtesy of our friend Rachel who took them while she was here.


Amanda teaching social studies in her 6th grade class. Our friends went to school and sat in our classes to see what exactly we do here, and the benefit is that we finally have some photos of us in action in the classroom! Here it is- genuine proof that we do in fact have students and are teaching:-)


Amanda reading aloud to her class.


Click on this to make it bigger: here I am with my 9th and 10th graders, explaining to them about Theodore Roosevelt's views on government and the economy.


Taking attendance in Russian history.


And here is a photo I took: Analiese, Rachel, and Amanda standing out on the Gulf of Finland. We were in the middle of a vicious cold snap when our friends visited, and took advantage of it to go exploring on the frozen water around us.


More ice-walking: this time its Amanda and I in the middle of the Neva, halfway between the end of our island and the Peter and Paul Fortress. We walked about 3/4ths of the way across the river before stopping because an icebreaker had cut a channel through the river.


What better thing to do when in the middle of a frozen river than to write your name in giant letters, which is precisely what Amanda did.


Inside a metro car as it speeds off into the underground worlds of the city.

That's all for now. Thank you to all of you for prayers and support!

-Matt