Christmas Newsletter 2014

Hello friends and family,

I’m obviously not using my blog much anymore, but I thought I’d use it at least to write my Christmas newsletter this year. Especially since I’m not home to mail it out to anyone. So, without further adieu, Merry Christmas from Germany!

2014 has been an amazing year. Very difficult in many ways. But I have learned a lot about teaching, myself, and life itself. I have grown and matured in some ways, and (I hope) my faith is deeper than it was before. And yes, according to Christmas newsletter tradition, I’ll brag for a bit that I’ve been to some of the most amazing places on Earth this year!

Since I last wrote from Bahrain, I spent a fun summer reconnecting with friends and family in the States. There I travelled to California and Utah to visit good friends and got to hike on the Central California coast, camped in Montana, and saw geology at work in the geysers of Yellowstone and the dramatic canyon of Zion National Park. I also spent lovely time with friends and family at the Southern Oregon coastline and other lovely Oregon sights.

This fall, while living again in Central Asia, I visited friends in Qatar and enjoyed exploring ruins and the beach there for the Eid holiday. I also flew with friends to Bamiyan and saw where the giant Buddhas once stood, and hiked to an ancient fort that was attacked by Genghis Khan. (Yeah, pretty amazing! This history nerd was beyond giddy.)

And now I’m in Europe. My friend and I flew into Prague and enjoyed the Christmas market in the Old Town there. We’ve been staying since with a friend in Germany and taking in the culture and scenery here. Today we visited the city where my parents were stationed, and I lived the first three months of my life. It was lovely! And happens to be the birthplace of the Brothers Grimm. Yep, that must be why I love fairy tales so much.

As for teaching, this new year has been challenging but incredibly fun. Geometry is my most challenging class content-wise. Proofs and justifications are just as difficult as they were when I was in high school! And teaching 10th graders just doesn’t come as naturally to me as the middle-school age. But now we’re into the triangles unit, and having more fun with that. This year, my one non-math class is history, which is blessedly within my content areas that I’m licensed for (8th grade science was crazy hard last year!). So I’m teaching 8th grade U.S. History to Central Asian kids. Definitely a challenge, but a fun one! These kids are really intrigued by American history, so it’s been a lot of fun to teach them. They ask excellent discussion questions and are getting really good at seeing the history from different perspectives, which was one of my goals. My 7th and 8th grade math classes have been a lot of fun, too. Behavior is definitely the biggest challenge there, but I adore them.

Those of you who know where I teach specifically can guess that it’s been a difficult year based on the news you may have seen. It has been hard. But I love the people there and the culture and especially the kids, and it has been a blessing to be there with them in hard times.

Well, that’s pretty much 2014 in a nutshell (that’s an American idiom; I find myself explaining idioms a lot to my students this year!). I sincerely hope that you have all had a wonderful year, will have a wonderful Christmas, and a happy New Year.