Eine Klein Blog

Where Do Kiwis Come From?

May 21, 2007 by Matt

While searching for some information today for Country Project on New Zealand, a student of mine uncovered this pictorial description of the life of a Kiwi (And you thought they grew on trees!):

Spirit Week at VCS is a bit different than the one you may remember from high school. Typically Spirit Week is the week of the Homecoming football game. Here, well, we don’t have football…ok, we do, but it’s what you silly Americans might call soccer. We do still have the dance at the end of the week.

So during Spirit Week we had a Geek Day where everyone dressed up like a Geek. Being the computer teacher, I had to go all out. Or as someone else put it, “I guess you do have try a bit harder today because you’re a geek everyday.”

Here I am pictured with a middle schooler from Pakistan. If you’d like to see a few more pictures from Geek Day, you can click over to my new Flicker feed in the right sidebar. I plan on updating my new Flickr page with more pictures in the near future, so be sure to check back.

I’ll Be Back…I am Back

May 20, 2007 by Matt

So, it’s been a while. But I’m back to blogging and determined to keep this going on a regular basis again. I know…that’s probably the best news you’ve heard all week. Try to contain yourself.

Brief Update: Track season is over, my AP kids have taken their big test, and classes are winding down with final projects and the like. Softball season is well underway and we just dropped our 5th straight game after winning our 1st.

In summer news, I’ll be in Plymouth, England (not to be confused with Plymouth, NEW England) to start the second year of my Master’s program. After than I’ll be back in the USA for a couple of weeks before I fly back to Vienna for my 6th year.

Most of my next few posts will be backposts of things I should have posted this year, but didn’t get around to. So expect to see some of Matt Klein’s Greatest Hits 2006-2007. So now you have something to look forward to this week. Yay for you.

Amortization Fun!

February 15, 2007 by Matt

So we were talking about amortization in class today and one of the examples I used was buying a house. So, in Excel(snort) I demonstrated that if you bought a $300,000 house at 8% interest with a 30 year mortgage you would end up paying almost $800,000 over the life of the loan. This led to the following discussion:

Student 1: So why don’t you just save up until you have $300,000, and then buy the house?
Me: You mean when you’re 70 years old and your 3 kids are married with kids, you’re going to buy a house then?
Student 2: Oh, well then why don’t you just wait til your parents die and then move into their house?
Me: You mean when you’re 50 or 60 years old and all your kids are grown, you’ll move into your parents old house?
Student 3: (incredulous) I’m not going to be 50 years old when my parents die!
Me: Well when do you expect them to die?
Student 3: A lot sooner than that!

Middle School Basketball Update

January 27, 2007 by Matt

We’ve had two games since my last update.

The first was last week against ICS Budapest. We played a great game, and were even leading by a small margin at half. However, with the score tied midway through the 4th quarter, ICSB broke down our defense and went on a 10-0 run to put the game out of reach. Even though we lost a tough game, we showed some improvement and my boys played well.

The last game was this past Tuesday against DIS, which we had to play with only 7 guys. Even though we short on subs, we staked an early lead and continued to build on it the entire game. Everything we’d worked on in practices finally paid off with our 2nd win over DIS.

We now sit at 2-3 on the season and have a tough matchup next Thursday against VIS.

GO EAGLES!