End of the Year Celebrations

Greetings,

The first year for Kaust School is officially over. Graduation happened for our two amazing senior boys, who have set the standards high as our first graduating class. Though friends, they are different from each other in their impressive talents and skills, and I think all of the teachers are proud that these two boys set standards high for future classes. We were blessed that they were the first. All tests, projects, and exams are over. Grades are mostly done. Teachers are working on final reports to be sent to parents at the end of the week. Awards and celebrations have occurred. The last day of school saw an array of emotions on the part of the students - many smiles, memories, and tears. We laughed about the fire alarms that went off the first day - and every day of the first week. We talked about how far we have come. We said good-bye to some students moving on. We acknowledged with awards the special abilities and strengths of some. It was a more touching and emotional last day than I expected. It's funny because students are so excited for school to end - and then it does and they don't want to leave. I suppose it's the work they are happy to have a break from rather than the relationships with friends and even teachers. I suspect that some will have little to do over the hot summer months; others will head home to other countries or travel.

We went to a large faculty/staff party last night to honor two couples from the founding administration team who are leaving. The first superintendent was only hired as an interim for this year, so he and his wife are heading home to the US. I like and respect him a great deal, as do many. I think he has a been a true advocate for the schools and for the teachers specifically. He will be missed a lot. He confronts issues when needed, but quietly, and he willingly and openly commends the strengths and gifts he sees in others. The other couple who is leaving is heading to Germany. The husband was in San Francisco doing the hiring when we went to the recruitment fair. He is a wonderful man, and we also really like and enjoy his wife, who has deftly managed the school where Logan goes - the early learning center. I will miss them a lot. Several of the kids acknowledged these adults on the last day of school and one said, "I don't really know what Mr. M does at our school, but he was always really friendly and nice to the students." Everyone laughed.

We have a full week of work this next week and then teachers are heading off for the summer. We will be here a little longer than this next week, doing some working projects, before we head to Switzerland to meet family there. We are excited for our vacation and travels.

More soon! Thanks for reading,
Jennifer

Last Day of School

Greetings all,
We have been super busy, as you can imagine, finishing up classes, tests, grading, projects, grading, activities, grading. You get the idea. I am finished now with all projects, tests, and grading! One boy came up to me after class today - a boy who could not say anything in English on the first day of school - and he said, "Ms. Evans, a student in class always teased me that I failed on every test. Today I get a 6 and today she get 4. Today she quiet!" He smiled a mischievous smile and went to lunch. All year this boy has tried, then not tried, tried, then not tried. Nonetheless, he has learned so much this year. Another boy who was in a similar situation worked all through our final humanities class while we were playing a geography game; he completed his entire final test and did very well!

We will try to write more soon.

Thanks for reading.

A Birthday Celebration

Greetings,
A year ago we celebrated Hayden's birthday with his good friends in Seattle - eating and playing at Discovery Park. This year, Hayden has a new group of friends and many of them were able to join him for his birthday (though he misses and talks about his Seattle friends as well). We all met up at the secondary school to play basketball on the outdoor courts and tag on the playground, which was new for most of the kids who do not come to the secondary school often. Along with a lot of water, juice, and 7up, we ordered pizza to be delivered to the playground from the campus pizza shop, Pizza Inn. Later we headed to our house for chocolate cupcakes, more water, and a ping pong tournament. That evening Hayden said that the party had been awesome. If you have a group of boys, a ball or two, and a park or playground, you pretty much have a good, sweaty time. The boys were energetic, funny, and active. One of the coolest parts of our lives at the moment is the various nationalities and backgrounds of our kids' friends - Canadian, Filipino, American-Lebanese, Indian, South African, Ghanian-American, English ... Kids love to play - wherever they might be from - and they generally like pizza and chocolate too!

We are wrapping up our year. We have two weeks of school left, including final projects and tests and a lot of grading and report writing! School is done for the students on June 16, but we have one additional week of reports, meetings, and packing up for the summer. We are officially done on June 23. We will stay until June 29 when we head off for the summer.

Thanks for reading.

Many of us remember paying nearly $4/gallon for gas a few summers ago. Not so here. At our sole gas station on campus, which we frequent about every three weeks, if that, gas is a whopping 70 cents per gallon. Our usual habit is to pull into the station on our motorbike, pop the seat to reveal the hidden gas tank, and then wait the 9.2 seconds it might take for the attendant to fill up the two-liter tank which, let's face it, is never actually empty. I'm usually embarrassed enough about spending so little that I often find myself silently praying for the tank to be suitably empty so that I can give the pump operator two riyals in order to tell him to keep the change. Never has a 70- 90% tip felt so good! Of course, this tip is a mere 25 cents or so, which may seem none too consequential to many of us but could really add up for the Indian or Pakistani citizen who most often fills our tank...

Indeed, campus is an odd juxtaposition of vehicles, from cyclists and their mechanical cousins like our small motorbike, to huge, hulking SUVs. Many families have purchased a vehicle, often large, for use while in Saudi Arabia. What many are finding, however, is that getting off campus and exploring the country is proving to be more the exception than the rule, and so most vehicles just sit, or else are driven a perfunctory quarter mile to the store or school once or twice a day, only to collect a veneer of dust in the driveway once home.

KAUST also provides a fleet of buses, and these understandably get most use before and after the school or work day, but seemingly very little use otherwise. Oddly enough, whether large or small, about the only thing most of these campus vehicles have in common is one occupant, or maybe two, much of their time in use.

So, while the U.S. continues to reel from the effects of its largest oil spill in history, with no end in sight, this part of the world, where oil is much more plentiful and vastly easier to drill, seems of another time, and certainly of a forgotten cost when it comes to anything related to purchasing energy. How will it all look in 50 years? Who can know? In the meantime, we ride our bikes, both mechanized and not, and enjoy getting around our growing campus when we need to.

Thanks for reading,

David

This is Why I Teach Middle School

Greetings,
Though this year has been challenging in many ways, typical of starting a school, there are, of course, tremendously positive things that have happened as well. I have seen students who could not read well, complete entire books in English and feel proud; students who could barely say hello in English can now struggle through a conversation and read simple books; students are doing homework, writing essays, passing math tests, learning to edit their own writing, and discussing literature!

We are studying the Middle Ages in humanities right now. I asked the students to write about what it was like to live during the Middle Ages. One 7th grade student, whose first language is not English, wrote, "Many people usually died during the Middle Ages."

Yesterday, we were talking in that same class about whether students would have wanted to live during that time (no one did), and then we talked about why that was. The conversation moved to how people 500-1000 years from now might view this current time period in which we are living, and students pondered how this country and the world might function without oil. They thought that maybe laptops and iPods would be so obsolete. Finally, we talked about changes that they have seen just in their short 13 years. One boy said, "My parents still have those huge CDs that you have to play with a needle." (Record albums) I told them that in my lifetime, TV has gone from being five or six channels during a limited time of day to what my students experience now - hundreds of stations on at all hours. It was a fascinating conversation, and I realized how much they are able to think and discuss ideas.

Thanks for reading!
Jennifer

Arts at KAUST

Greetings,

At first, the practices were informal, modest, the May concert slated to be for another small gathering made up mostly of friends and colleagues. Then a fellow violinist's brother, a seasoned cellist, arrived from Germany, in part to help us through our Vivaldi solos and the concert, to have been advertised by word of mouth and taken place in a small venue, was switched to the large cinema cum campus theater. A concert poster began making the campus rounds, and the few students I'd invited grew into the much larger number encouraged to attend by our school's music instructors, one of whom is our string bassist, with his wife the conductor of the community choir, which would nicely fill the second half of the evening's bill.

By 7 pm, concert time, the auditorium was packed, with people waiting in the wings for an available seat and we ten nervously warming up in the back room, hoping we'd get through the five pieces on the program we'd not quite gotten through sans hitch yet. Thousands of miles from where each of us had originally fallen in love with classical music, here we were, about to play to members of an audience, many of whom had never been to a classical concert before let alone attended an evening event where men and women were able to sit freely together.

Again, the orchestral and choral offerings had to be sandwiched between the two evening prayer times, leaving us a bit less than 90 minutes to perform everything, with a stage change added in for good measure.

In the end, I tried not to look beyond the bright lights of the stage to the large audience beyond and instead just focused, like my musical peers, on creating good music that those assembled might enjoy. Personally, it was a bit of an epiphany. I'd never been much of a soloist in younger years (having always been surrounded by other musicians, many much more gifted than I, especially during Interlochen summers). Yet here I was, playing beautifully composed music with new friends and trying to stay reasonably poised, especially through a couple of solos, in a hall that had never held a music concert and on land that could not have anticipated the huge changes about to come to it just five years ago.

By all accounts, the evening was a wonderful success, and further indication that the arts are alive and well at KAUST and that there is enough of a number among the provosts, researchers, professors, graduate and high school students, teachers, accompanying spouses, and even visiting family members who not only like to make music together but apparently even like performing in public on occasion, especially if it brings the community together, which this evening most certainly did.

After our first-half gig, we ten got to sit back and relax together and enjoy the impressive performance of our community choir, which sang songs in French, English, Swahili, Japanese, and Spanish and was accompanied ably in one of their songs by two brand-new percussionists who happen to be two Arabic-speaking high school boys from our school. Sensational!

Two nights later, the four Evanses attended the first KAUST Talent Show, again awed by the wide-ranging abilities of many on campus. Original poetry in English and Arabic, Tai Chi, fashion, classical and pop music, dance, comedy, classical Indian violin - it would be hard to beat the diversity of talents we were happily exposed to on Wednesday!

So, KAUST continues to define itself each month in ways new and inspiring. Those hours of violin practicing as a kid are having certainly unanticipated outcomes, that's for sure. Given that this week has also included Mother's Day, I hope it's not too late to thank my mother for making me practice after school each day after school in elementary and junior high. I may have given up the violin for running at 14, but music, rather like riding a bike, once embedded in the heart never leaves you. Thank goodness since I like to do both, though not generally together!

Thanks for reading,

David

Beach Day

Greetings,

This weekend was been glorious, as usual! Logan and Jennifer enjoyed time at the pool on Thursday, David and Hayden went to the cinema to see "The Blind Side" (great film!), and we all benefited from homemade pizza at friends' house. Some friends brought a carpet salesman from Afghanistan to their home on Wednesday night; he and his son took time to explain the various carpets, styles, and colors to the many KAUST residents who were curious and/or wanted to purchase. The Afghan carpets are truly rich in color and fine in their wool textures. We chose a small one in deep reds which we both loved. There was a waterpark set up Thursday afternoon, with bouncy houses and water slides. Friday we went to the beach where we swam, kayaked, and played some football. The beach water is getting warmer, not surprisingly, and the Red Sea is crystal clear blue.

The beach is so nice. It's been all cleaned up, and barges of sand from somewhere along the coast south of Jeddah have been brought in to create a beautiful sandy beach. We can swim, windsurf, kayak, and enjoy the sunshine. It's quite lovely. I was excited that Hayden wanted to try kayaking and was enjoying the easy maneuverability of the single kayak. Although Hayden is learning golf and badminton, kayaking might the best option for when we ultimately return to Seattle.

School for the kids ends on June 16, but we have meetings and work for the week following that. We have hired a lovely Filipina woman, named Princess (!), to look after Logan after school and to be with both boys during that third week in June when we will be working yet they don't have school. We are all starting to get excited about the end of school. Only five weeks of classes to go. Students and teachers alike are feeling that itch of 'the end of the school year.' The students will have to give up their school-issued laptops, which for some will feel like a huge void in their free-time/game-playing. Some kids have really benefited from the laptop program, but many have been increasingly pulled into time-wasting (in my opinion) games and YouTube sites. It would not be so frustrating except for the kids who are most playing games are often the same ones who repeatedly don't complete homework and who truthfully NEVER read! You gotta wonder ...

More soon. Thanks for reading.