Soaking up every last moment...

Just as predicted, these last weeks are filling with friends and fun......

December thus far has included chaperoning the ninth grade Islamic Cairo field trip to the Ibn Tulun, Hassan and Rafai Mosques as well as the Citadel,

seeing the whirling dervishes live downtown,

exploring the Hanging Church in Coptic Cairo,


beaming with pride at the middle school talent show,

and celebrating Egyptian Culture Week at CAC...


The only remaining items on my Egypt bucket list: Islamic Art Museum and Saqqara Pyramids... But you know, I'd still be completely satisfied with my time here even if they don't happen...

Camping with 21 kids...

...Is an adventure. I spent the past four days hiking and camping in the White Desert of Egypt with a group of 8th grade students from Cairo American College. To be honest, I was blessed with a slightly lethargic group---I would have liked to have hiked longer and faster but we kept at a nice pace to observe the scenery and I got to know several of the students really well through long chats. We spent the week with an incredible tour guide, Ziad,

and had two jeep drivers and camel tenders with us to set up camp and cook great food each day. I slept under the stars, we scattered our sleeping bags all over the camp sites and soaked up an amazing night view of more stars than I've ever been able to see in my entire life. The whole desert by day looked like the moon, crazy white rock formations all around... really beautiful.. .

The week without technology, bathrooms, or beds led to a certain amount of complaining by the tweens, but by the end of the week, everyone had come to realize how great it was to be away from the fast paced world we live in. Personally, I loved it. I love getting away, cutting off connections that make life so hectic from day to day... I listened to silence (though often mixed with middle school chatter), sketched and journaled, and really took advantage of the Arabic speaking camp crew to learn more and more Arabic. I was actually understanding a good deal of conversations they had around the campfire the last night.... that's a good feeling. Definitely added kindling to the personal spark to learn the language that already existed within me...

It was nice to get away, but nice to come home last night too... My friends greeted me and welcomed me back home with a night out catching up and eating ice cream :) It's nice to be missed......... that's another sure sign you've made a home for yourself..... Already less than a week away until my next big trip all over Egyptland--Luxor, Aswan, Sinai.... Time to throw the hands in the air for the downhill plunge and laugh and exclaim my way through this month....

The moments I live for.

"This class is about your own art. We learned to think out of the box. And how to use a different media in one masterpiece of art."
-6th grade mixed media student reflection
(possibly my favorite student if we teachers were allowed to have those)

"Miss Martens, why do you call it a piece of art?..."

...It's a masterpiece.

I have done it. I crossed that bridge, made it over the hump... Training wheels are falling off, wings are ready to fly. It's been a wonderful week as a teacher with classes filled with magical moments. The last few weeks have been such a weight...so busy, stressful, felt like nothing really quite went as planned (see, why plan?? jk). Somehow though, I pulled myself back together, woke my classes up, shifted us into the perfect position to make not just good art, but great art.... As my brilliant student in mixed media put it this week, they aren't "pieces" of art... they are masterpieces.

I really pushed my students this week.. more than I perhaps normally would have been comfortable pushing... and they responded... by turning their pieces of art into masterpieces. I am so proud of the art they produced, the way they worked, and how they allowed my guidance to move them forward. They proved that they have truly absorbed what I have been teaching them these past 6 weeks, and that it has made an impact on how they think not only in art but in so many parts of their lives.

I have always lived by the motto "it's about process, not product"...but this week I pushed my students and myself to not allow a weak product to represent such a rich process... Middle school and high school students alike, we're on a good page now, moving in a very good direction and pace... These kids are thinking like artists. And that my friends, is the ultimate goal.

Middle school art display is up and looking good for parent teacher conferences tomorrow. I think they'll like what they are seeing....

Hello UNI Homepage

Pretty cool seeing myself jumping in front of the pyramids on the UNI website this week.. I think now my Egyptian friends are actually starting to grasp how much I truly love my school and my panthers...

I'm feeling a little more of an obligation to give quality updates now that so many more eyes are skimming over this...I'll try even harder to ramble less and add lots of photos (though.. it's already taken me two paragraphs to get this far...)

First, the game last weekend=so fun! I wish my brother had been here with me... El Ahly beat Tunisia (yay!) which produced some unhappy Tunisian fans...Next time I want to sit in the hooligan section (though my friends will never let me, don't worry)

Then Wednesday we had the day off school for the Egyptian National Holiday. I still get a funny feeling about this day, it's not talked about.. the reclaiming of the Sinai... It's a bit of an elephant in the room... (notice the cut out of this flags of the world poster?...)


I spent the day on an MJ tour. MJ is my cooperating teacher's wife, and a very knowledgeable, connected woman in Maadi who frequently takes groups of newcomers and visitors around Cairo. We visited some not-so-touristy-places (right up my alley), including: Garbage City, Mother Theresa House,some tombs in the City of the Dead, an Alabaster Factory,
and ended at Al Azhar Park.



Now after this week of fun, I seriously.. really.. truly.. need to *finish* this Teacher Work Sample. Off to school today and tomorrow to try out some new lesson plan ideas, finish up some sections of my TWS, and support the boys volleyball team as they host a tournament with a school in London.

By the way.. it's a beautiful fall day in Egyptland...

I am teaching here, I haven't forgotten that part...

But sometimes my updates may make it seem as though the whole Student Teaching thing is taking a back seat to my social exploration lifestyle. I will admit, things have been going really well these last 7 weeks of teaching...but it's getting to be more and more of a reality every day... With mounds of planning and preparation building up and trying to keep on top of all of the meetings and communications with the middle school, high school, and my cooperating teachers..Most of my student teaching friends are ending their first placement and switching over to their new classroom right now for the second 8 weeks, but I've got my unique situation where I'm teaching in both rooms for 17 weeks so there is no switch over...just adding on...

I've worked in the elementary during a few planning periods, and starting this week I'll be teaching silk painting in the other middle school art room-a first for me. I'm excited but it also requires prep time and figuring out what and how I present the information to the new group of students. High school gave me a really rough time on Thursday. It was last period, Mr. Crouch was gone for the day, and they just decided to find their attitudes. I was really frustrated until I realized it was a surprise and blessing that I hadn't been challenged like that before. Just another moment to learn from and reflect on.. And all the more motivation to come in this week with my A game on... A recap of my teaching so far,

I've taught Exploratory Art with 6 graders (just switched to a new group of students this week). We made "Me Stars", Kaleidoscope Kites usin oil pastels, and their own sketch books. The new group is making altered books... (Had to adjust my oil pastel lesson to use white and paper clips to scratch away areas that got too muddy and thick with pastels)

My middle school mixed media class has been working on their altered books for several weeks. We've explored collage, texture, color, using a variety of media and writing...I've been using the school flip cam to record discussions during this class for documentation...

Middle School sculpture made clay seascapes and now we're working on our recycling bobble head project with plaster and mixed media...(I learned you should not give students water before they cut their plaster strips or you'll have a messy ocean of plaster covering the tables)

High School printmaking made graffiti tags and now are learning relief printing; using styrofoam to learn the process and the qualities of a good print...it will be leading into another form of printmaking along the theme of 1000 awesome things...



Ceramics created textured tag mugs, classical pots, and are currently learning to glaze (assuming anything I told them sunk in on Thursday)... I'm working on lining up a guest artist to come in and talk to the students about her work next week.

It's keeping me busy.. the big thing I still need to work on is documentation and the busier I get, the less formal, written out planning ahead I do... I continually need to keep myself in check and think through details over and over... I am hoping/assuming this will get easier/better/more of a habit the longer I teach.......

From 6th graders to 6 year olds...

Today I my prep periods with lunch to go shadow and help in the elementary art rooms for the first time. I was able to sit in on KGE and 2W art (kinders and 2nd graders). What a switch. I used to swear I would teach elementary art; through field experiences I have grown to love middle schoolers more and more (and am continuing to here at CAC), but working with these tiny little paint shirt clad students was really a wonderful trip back to raw creativity where water bottles full of neon pink and green are used to splatter paint watermelon backgrounds.



Next thoughts in life: get cracking on that TWS, long holiday weekend for Eid (look for a sad end of Ramadan/end of my favorite lantern filled midan post this weekend), Egyptian Museum and other touristy site to see this weekend, and lots of lots of lesson plan/evaluation writing to get ready for turning in grades next week and preparing for my whirlwind of a month in October...oh. did I mention the real world is rapidly approaching and I need to get my resume in shape and start looking for jobs and applying for overseas recruiting fairs.. oh yeah.. that too........