This is an excerpt from a book I’m currently reading called Gilead, which recently won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. It’s a wonderfully written book and I highly recommend it to anyone. I find there are quite a few sections that cause me to pause, reread and reflect. Here is one particular excerpt that I have been mulling over for the past couple of weeks:
“[John] Calvin says somewhere that each of us is an actor on a stage and God is the audience. That metaphor has always interested me, because it makes us artists of our behavior, and the reaction of God to us might be thought of as aesthetic rather than morally judgmental in the ordinary sense. How well do we understand our role? With how much assurance do we perform it?…I do like Calvin’s image, though, because it suggest how God might actually enjoy us. I believe we think about that far too little. It would be a way into understanding essential things, since presumably the world exists for God’s enjoyment, not in any simple sense, but as you enjoy the being of a child even when he is in every way a thorn in your heart”(Robinson, Marilynne. Gilead. p. 124-125).
No video this week because we had Friday off. But I do have an interview for you.
I had my 9th graders pick a geek to interview for their final quarter project and the first one I will share with you is a “conversation” between Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs.
I hope you enjoy learning a little bit about Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple Computers. Maybe you’ll learn something new. For instance, I never knew Steve Wozniak speaks with so many different accents.
This photo was taken about two months ago when the sun was still around in Vienna, so the numbers on this sign have dwindled by 60 days (Tage) or so.
If you don’t know, and you probably don’t since you’re most likely an American, Austria is hosting the 2008 European Soccer Championships next summer. They will be sharing the hosting duties with neighboring Switzerland.
As with most events of this nature the host country gets an automatic bid into the tournament even if they don’t belong there. And believe me, the Austrian soccer team just isn’t very good at all. They are so bad, that a group of Austrian soccer fans started a petition to try and revoke Austria’s automatic bid to the tournament.
Their appeal is to fans who appreciate aesthetically pleasing soccer: Nice passes, exciting dribbling skills, beautiful goals. You won’t see this if Austria plays, they warn.
Reportedly they have 10,000 signatures on their petition in only about a month’s time. And if you want to further support the cause you can even buy a T-shirt, which I totally would if they didn’t cost 20 Euro.
In any case you gotta love that home town team spirit. It makes me feel like I’m back in Philly the way these Austrians get behind their team.
Fall Festival is a time where our students and parents come to school to share food and play carnival type games set up all around school. The evening is topped off by performances by the elementary, middle and high school choirs. It is always a lot of fun and it is a great opportunity to show off what our school is all about.For more pictures check out my Flickr sidebar or click here.
I’ve dumped a lot of video on you lately, but that’s just because I’ve been sitting on a lot of it. Scroll down to my previous posts if you missed some of the videos. My students are doing a great job with them, and I think you will enjoy them.
You will be getting a weekly video from here on out. Here is this week’s. Enjoy!
This is a new feature on my blog where I will take a picture of an actual sign in Vienna and comment on it’s meaning. I hope you enjoy it.
This is one of the first true signs that summer is over here in Vienna. It is the day when hundreds of ice cream parlors throughout the city close until the warm hints of springtime cause us again to crave a cold treat.
This particular sign is just a block or two from my apartment and makes the best After Eight Mint ice cream in town.
Roughly translated (very roughly), We thank our customers for buying and eating our yummy, yummy ice cream and promise to open back up in the spring with freshly made gelato for all. Until then we hope your winter will be as nice and warm as ours is down in Italy.
My video class did a series of videos for Spiritual Emphasis Week, and we tried to do a variation on the theme of the week: Direction Determines Destination. You can decide how well we follow this theme throughout the series. In any case, my kids did a great job and we had a lot of fun with it.
Here is a link to the playlist on my Youtube account:
A few other staff members and I ran this year’s Vienna Night Run last Wednesday. It is a 4K that starts and finishes in Vienna’s Museum Quarter and follows the length of the main shopping street in the city. So you can imagine this is a street I spend a lot of time on. You know me, shop til I drop every weekend.
It was a nice, mostly flat run and a great way to motivate myself to get back into running. The one thing I found odd about this course were the post-race snacks which consisted of Krapfen, sugar donuts, and a few other assorted pastries. I don’t know about you, but pure sugar isn’t the most appetizing thing to me right after a hard run. Of course that didn’t stop me from eating a donut, but I did have to wait a little while to drop that on my stomach. Also, I’m pretty sure it’s still better than the turkey liver pate I received after the Marathon I ran a couple of years ago.
You can see more pictures by clicking the Flickr link on my sidebar or by clicking here.
Posted on October 15, 2007 by Matt Klein in VCS, videos
One of the new classes I picked up this year is a videography class. In this class I have 8 seniors and half of them already knew what they’re doing with a camera before the class even started. So one of the things they’ve been working on are commercials for the Senior Store. Here are the one’s we’ve completed so far. We also did a week long series for Spiritual Emphasis Week that we will be posting later on this week. All future videos will be posting all of our videos on this Youtube group.
Last week we also enjoyed a Staff vs. Student soccer game. For those of you who know me, you know that soccer isn’t my best sport, though I did impress myself with a couple of good touches. Though I think those were mostly by accident.
I did have a shot on goal, though…Ok, well it would have been if the goal was about 2 times…make that 3 times as large as it normally is.
In any case, it was a lot of fun even though us teachers ended up on the losing end of this game. Of course, we’re all Americans. We’re not supposed to be good at soccer.
This is an excerpt from a book I’m currently reading called Gilead, which recently won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. It’s a wonderfully written book and I highly recommend it to anyone. I find there are quite a few sections that cause me to pause, reread and reflect. Here is one particular excerpt that I have been mulling over for the past couple of weeks:
No video this week because we had Friday off. But I do have an interview for you.
