Who's Stopping Us?

As I sit in my usual Study Hall perch this evening (albeit with only two students to supervise!), I invoke the mantra of the Whiffenpoofs of 2012, and with it the days of singing and reveling on sunny verandas for people in nicely pressed suits. Why, you ask?

Because it never ends. And here's the proof:

Here's the surprise I've been holding onto, from blog readers and teacher friends alike, for the past few weeks. That's the sunny veranda of the home at which I performed this afternoon with 9 King's Academy singers for a fundraising event thrown by the school's development office. They invited a whole host of well-to-do Jordanians (and others from around the region) for a truly lovely garden party luncheon and wanted to show off some of the school's finest. As always, this meant musical performances, and so continued my illustrious career of singing songs at fancy parties...

After some scrambling around the last week or so, I assembled a 9-singer team, rehearsed a pretty and simple 3-part Arabic song, and along with the student string quintet (+ percussion and another vocalist) we squeezed into a bus right before typical school lunch. The kids were excited enough to be missing two periods of school, but that was only the beginning.

Here's our lunch table, with individual gifts (they turned out to be very pretty candles):

And before too long, the party was in full swing! Our view from across the infinity pool:

All this - not to mention the ancient daggers in the living room, the beautiful still life paintings on the walls, the terrace and gazebo - might've been enough, but the real treat was the guests of honor. 

I don't want to get too detailed (this is The Internet, after all), but suffice it to say that we performed for some very important people. As in, the most important people. The most important two people. And I have to say, seeing the Big Guy as he speaks on the KA stage is one thing, but singing him a song from twenty feet away is quite another.

And it went great! The kids kept their cool and sounded real good, and we got a personal table visit from him afterwards to congratulate us on a job well done. He has a real knack for inspiration: he gave a little speech to the donors about the power of the school to bring people together and propel them towards successful futures, and I found myself really buying into it and feeling really proud to be part of such an institution. Not sure how he did it: is it something about his status? Or does he actually truly have a way with words? Either way, it was surprisingly moving for an off-the-cuff speech, and reaffirmed my belief that this is a pretty freakin good place to be.

Then, of course, it was lunch time, and when you've got guests like these, you don't skimp on the good stuff. A buffet with seemingly endless options (including caviar, smoked salmon, duck, scallops, and some seriously prime cuts of meat) was followed by an equally endless dessert with all manner of Jordanian and Western delights. I didn't need dinner, to say the least.

So the kids were awed and thrilled, Reem (the string quintet director) and I were feeling good, and our headmaster and trustees seemed legitimately impressed by our performance. I can't say my time with the Whiffs didn't prepare me well for this kind of thing. Another box checked in the world leaders category!

***

And as a fitting coda to such a special day, we celebrated the best way we could: more food. Specifically, Four Winters, the brand-new liquid nitrogen ice cream place in the swanky part of town. Here's the wizard at work, with bottles of what I could most accurately call "pre-ice cream" behind him:

A few glugs from those bottles, plus a liberal application of liquid nitrogen from some kind of extensive network of tubes, plus a few casual smooches from a blowtorch to keep the product from freezing to the bowl, and voila:

This, if you can believe it, is beetroot ice cream - yes, they do crazy flavors in addition to crazy preparations. And it was so good! A nice sweet start that gave way to a deeper and more savory vegetable flavor, and the orange balanced things out with a juicy, citrusy pop. As tempting as the chocolate peanut butter option was, I'm glad I went out on a limb this time; this crazy pink adventure was well worth it.

So here I am, with one day of school until another three-day weekend, and then it's May all of a sudden and I think I'm going to the Dead Sea for an epic relaxation adventure. Barely enough time to bask in our success this afternoon, but I have to say that the feelings were more familiar than anything else. There's something about throwing on a suit and singing at a party that I doubt will ever quite get out of my system, and though I hardly expected those particular skills to come in handy on an otherwise ordinary Tuesday, it's a good thing I've got them on hand. Almost two years removed from those crazy Whiffenpoof days, I find myself realizing more and more how much they changed me and led me to where I am now. Maybe we don't do as much wanton wandering as we did back then, and maybe we've grown up from that strange golden age of no consequences, but on days like these, when performance and privilege and opportunity seem to land in your lap, the question once again rears its head: who's stopping us?

Spring Turns A Corner

Hello from my bed, which seems like the only reasonable place to be after a day of parent-teacher conferences. They weren't even that painful, frankly, and I only had ten, but there's something a little exhausting about wearing dress shoes on a weekend. 

So I've got a half hour until we leave for a very fun-sounding dinner outing, and I have my lesson plan for tomorrow laid out (which means Monday is taken care of too!), and I am feeling like I need to be productive so a blog post seemed like the right move. Is it actually productive? I leave that question up to you, dear readers.

Since last we spoke, life in the desert has been generally quite pleasant. I chose the season-related title because it really does feel like things have turned a corner in a few ways: May is fast approaching, for one, and the weather has decided we've had quite enough pleasant coolth and it's time to bring the heat. Grown-Up Clothes are so helpful in cold weather that I'd frankly forgotten how freaking hot they are when it's warm out. May's gonna be a sweaty one for all of us.

But anyway. The Glee Club concert went so well! The kids were super engaged and very confident, which is a big improvement from our last little performance, and I'm really proud of what we pulled off, especially considering the extreme brevity of our rehearsal time. Here's a little teaser that Meredith snapped from the audience:

More to come from the communications department, I hope!

And this weekend has been a lovely one. Pick-up softball yesterday, which drew a fairly impressive faculty-student showing (enough for two solid teams, at least) and was INSANELY fun. For much of the time, I played first base, which is a little terrifying when the other team keeps hitting it to the shortstop who actually played baseball and whose every put-out throw reminded me of that time Peter Smith knocked my glasses off in 8th grade. But I held my own, at least most of the time, and more than anything else it was a great sunny afternoon. We may even do it again next week!

And beyond that? Hamantaschen baking with Yasmine, only about six weeks late for the relevant holiday. Our first batch left a little to be desired from an aesthetic standpoint:

But thanks to some architectural mastery, round 2 was significantly more successful:

That's raspberry, apricot, chocolate chip, and a homemade prune compote thingy that only Yasmine and I will eat because everyone else is scared of prunes. More for us!

It's amazing how much they taste like the holiday; I think it's the lemon zest. Really no clue how I'm gonna live a fulfilling culinary life without Yasmine next year, but perhaps it will be time for me to leave the nest and go it alone. Cooking with company is a hell of a lot more fun though.

Hope you enjoyed reading my stream of consciousness, folks! I suppose I do feel somewhat more productive, and I'm confident enough that the week to come will be a fulfilling one for my young philosophers.

In closing, I have a secret to tell that I will reveal later this week. It has to do with the Glee Club, and it's secret enough that even they don't know what they're doing yet, but I am super excited and it's definitely adding a little spice to the next few days. Stay tuned...

Speed Week

Hello everyone! I am writing this post from Supervised Study Hall, which probably won't surprise those of you loyal followers out there. I have to grade an assignment that my students submitted last night, but I am being uncharacteristically procrastinatory, so I decided to goad myself into action by checking something else off my to-do list. Here I am now, bringing you up-to-the-week news straight from my own life.

It's a three-day week. WHAT A FEELING. There was school today, and now it's a two-day week! How did it go so fast? Then there will be school tomorrow and heck, it'll practically be over already. I can get behind this system. Pity it's only happening this once.

Anyway, though, the four-day Easter weekend went just about as well as we could've hoped. Daniel and I set sail right when school ended on Thursday, and after an eight-hour border crossing that left us very glad to have each other as conversation partners, we arrived at our destination: Machon Shlomo yeshiva in the Orthodox enclave of Har Nof, a mountaintop neighborhood set off from the hustle and bustle of the city.

Despite the late hour, we were welcomed cordially by a group of familiarly frat-bro-esque American yeshiva students, some of whom were full-timers but most of whom were in Har Nof for a 3-week Orthodox immersion program called STEP. We didn't get to see the view from the yeshiva until the next morning, but it was worth the wait:

That's the largest Jewish cemetery in Jerusalem, just a part of the gorgeous panorama out the windows of the yeshiva. Machon Shlomo is scattered across three floors of an apartment building and its pleasantly, familiarly grungy aesthetic keeps the frat house theme going nicely. Here's Daniel in our room:

It actually belongs to 3 actual students, but 2 were away for the Pesach holiday, so we snagged their beds and the hospitality of their roommate, Aaron.

The weekend itself was quite immersive: davening (that is, prayer) 3 times a day; meals at a few local homes; and study sessions when the holiday schedule permitted. For these sessions, which took place on Friday and Sunday mornings, we and the STEP students paired up with Har Nof volunteers for one-on-one Talmud study for an hour. I was lucky enough to work with our contact, Rabbi Yonason Sigler, a Princeton and MIT grad (and a cappella singer!) who's a published astrophysicist and former NASA employee. Smart, to say the least; and a thoughtful and engaging teacher too.

After that first hour, we'd all group together with Rabbi Sigler to go over the topic; this weekend happened to be a bit from the Gemara about whether it's appropriate to recite the Sh'ma in any language, or just Hebrew. Esoteric stuff, to be sure, but Daniel and I agreed that it was as much about learning the process of Jewish logic than the actual content. Taken as an exercise to that end, our study was quite rewarding.

The third hour was the most thrilling: guest lectures! The first was from a Rabbi Triebitz, who got his Ph.D in mathematical physics from either Princeton or Stanford (but who's counting) at age TWENTY-ONE (I'm counting). And apparently conducted at Juilliard when he was 14. And now sits in a plastic folding chair in an old apartment building lecturing to twenty-somethings about the Jewish conception of the World to Come. Given that I certainly never would've heard any of his physics lectures, I might make the argument that I'm better off for his change in life plans.

The second lecture was from a guy who I honestly might best describe as Chasidic Santa Claus. The jolliest, twinkliest-eyed Danish Jew you could imagine gave us a phenomenal lecture on his studies of the Jewish notion free will, while cracking jokes about his beard and soliciting feedback in a way that rivals the best efforts of the King's Academy faculty. There was some inspired and inspiring teaching going on at this place, and we felt lucky to be there.

And the rest of the weekend? A delightful Shabbos dinner with a South African guy and his Canadian wife and their adorable kids; Saturday meals at the Sigler household, featuring epic 3-part harmony by the Rabbi and his two oldest sons (plus the youngest boy, who'd wail away an octave above his dad); and plenty of contemplative prayerful moments and discussions with the other students, who were fascinated about our work in Jordan and generally kept very open minds.

Some more pics from Machon Shlomo! Here's the dining-type area, where we had college-kitchen-esque eggs and matzah lasagnas and intriguingly gross-but-addictive Kosher for Passover strawberry jelly on matzah:

An actual culinary highlight of the yeshiva: gefilte fish and horseradish. Home sweet home.

All in all, a bizarre and pretty wonderful experience. Am I considering going back for the full three-week STEP adventure? Totally. We'll see what happens.

And the rest of the trip was fun too. We scooted down to the Western Wall on Saturday night and were just in time to see the Gerrer Rebbe, leader of the biggest Chasidic dynasty in Israel and sharer of Daniel's last name. CRAZY crowds of Chasidic dudes trying to catch a glimpse of him as he made his way to pray. Our sheer dumb luck put us in just the right place to see his wizened face paying absolutely no heed to the literally hundreds of men clambering over each other to get close to him. Very weird. Pretty cool.

We spent the last evening with Micah, which was pleasantly reminiscent of last time, playing frisbee in a park and eating Chinese food because it was the last night of Passover and everywhere was closed for the holiday. It felt weirdly like being an American Jew on Christmas, but was somehow very appropriate. Then Daniel and I somehow finished a pint of Ben and Jerry's in like 10 minutes. I think the best explanation is that there's Ben and Jerry's in Israel. It was like an ice cream oasis.

***

And now I'm back for this cute little school week! Put three asterisks up above in case you were bored of the Israel stuff and wanted to skip it and get back to the present. You're welcome!

On tap: a Glee Club concert, the last big one of the year. We were quite anemic tonight in the cavernous and acoustically deplorable auditorium, but started to warm to it towards the end, and I think things will turn out fine. Then parent-teacher conferences over the weekend, and then a week at whose end is the first of May. Where on earth does the time go?

Well, took more time and wrote much more than I'd planned to. Time to be productive and do some grading like a Real Teacher; if all those weekend lessons and conversations with Daniel led to anything, it was confidence and reaffirmation that I've got a great job and that the challenges are all so worth it. Let's hope those thoughts continue to prove true, and that I can practice what I preach to the kids and finish this year strong.

Oh, and I'm gonna order some mana'eesh in fifteen minutes, because Passover is DONE and it's time to celebrate. Mmmmm.

Chag Sameach!!

WOW, it's been a while, huh?

What happens that keeps me from blogging for all these many weeks? Hard to say, sort of - the term went from business-as-usual to lightning-fast without me even noticing, and now it's suddenly the middle of April and spring is very much upon us here. The sun shines, the birds sing (they actually do; opening the windows in class can be a dangerous move), and I'm here trying to quiet down these whiny delinquents so I can write this post in peace.

OK, success. Let's talk!

1. Weekend in America: April 4-7

So I think the reason things have gone so fast is that I haven't had a five-day week of school in a little while. The first weekend in April was utterly eaten by my return to New Haven for the Spizzwinks'(?) 100th Reunion, an event so momentous that I had explicitly mentioned it to the higher-ups before signing my contract. (They were, fortunately, perfectly fine with the idea, though it probably helped that I called it a "music conference").

And what a weekend! My first flight home was canceled, which led to a nerve-wracking few hours before I was rerouted through Rome and (thanks to two Moroccan cabbies in New York and New Haven who were reasonably impressed with my Arabic skills) made it in time for almost all of the celebrating. It was all the singing, carousing, and reminiscing that I ever could've hoped for, and I didn't even feel the jetlag when I returned! Plenty of videos are on their way; here's a fun one from our gala dinner at the Omni.

I miss everyone already. What an amazingly fortunate thing to be a part of for the rest of my life. One thing that made me so glad that weekend was the realization that here, in Jordan, is probably the furthest away from my singing friends that I'll ever be, and thinking about everything we have left to look forward to made it a little easier to hop back on the plane. Austrian Airlines was showing Frozen, too, which helped.


2. Music Workshop Weekend: April 10-13

So then this past weekend, after a whiz-bang blink-and-you-miss-it three days of school that I can barely remember, we welcomed a trio of Austrians to campus for a few days of music workshops (why the confluence of Austrians? No clue). This had been in the works for a few months and finally came to pass, and I must admit that I was feeling a little underprepared when the action started.

Why? Well, partly my fault - I had taken no responsibility but had sort of played along, and didn't realize until the weekend was nearly upon us that the Glee Club was supposed to be present at six 2+-hour rehearsals over the course of the weekend. This is an awful lot to ask of a choir that usually meets once a week for an hour and doesn't really read music, and I had been wary of forcing them to come because I had no idea what the event was going to entail. I also hadn't really been informed of what was going on...you get the picture. It was touch-and-go, to say the least.

BUT! The kids, awesome and amazing and curious people that they are, pulled through - by the final performance, which included the quite wonderful Dozan wa Awtar community choir from Amman, we had the 15-20 students I had promised mixed right in with the rest of the singers. It was tough music, too: Bruckner's Locus Iste (shout-out to the Yale Glee Club!), Mozart's Ave Verum Corpus, a somewhat tonal composition by one of the Austrians herself, and a totally bizarre piece from the 30s that had all of us basically barking random notes at random times.

For students who have never sung in a tenor clef before, much less in 4-part Latin or atonal improvisation, this was quite an undertaking, but the kids jumped right in and I think they took an awful lot out of the weekend. They weren't the only ones, either: Ewald Donhoffer, our director, was an utterly inspiring figure whose rehearsal style won over the students and the adults from Dozan alike. I found myself sneaking to the back of the group to take notes on my phone about all of his warmups, exercises, and fantastically creative imagery - I learned so much in those few days that I've gotten seriously pumped about the Choral Conducting Workshop I'll be attending in Michigan this June.

So all in all, what looked like an utter shitshow ended up being something of a success, not to mention a serious learning experience about wrangling students and structuring weekend workshops. I really hope they come back, for my sake if no one else's!


3. Passover: This Week in Jerusalem!!

And so, somehow or another, we've reached the present. If this post is going to have a theme, it's something about memory and time and the transience of experience, and what better way to bring all of those themes together than a big ol' Jewish holiday?

I'm so glad Daniel and I decided to make a Seder happen at King's. I hadn't been sure, but I think somebody somewhere is watching out for us, because Spinneys (the posh-ish grocery store in Amman's fanciest mall) surprised me last week with a few of these on the shelves:

Hebrew text and all, this is K-for-P Kedem, and given that one of our Seder party is Muslim, it seemed prudent to avoid alcohol anyway. Ready with our four cups of wine, we assembled the necessary supplies (with a fairly hilarious grocery run the day of), and got to work:

Charoset without a food processor. Certainly on the chunky side, but we hit the right flavor points (and the charoset virgins seemed pleased).

Ready to start! Those papers on the plates are the two-page Haggadot that I threw together and printed out to serve as guides; we also had a real Haggadah to give a little more meat to the service. Speaking of meat, that plastic bag to Yasmine's right is our shankbone, which was quite literally the entire leg of whatever animal they were butchering when we got to the Carrefour butcher. We said it was for our dog.

The main course: matzah lasagna with roasted eggplant, courtesy of me and Yasmine. This recipe's a keeper (and we only had to combine like 4 assorted lasagna recipes to execute it!).

The obvious pièce de résistance: matzah candy/matzah toffee/matzah crack. Our first batch of caramel burnt, which didn't make the resulting toffee any less delicious (kinda smoky!), and the second batch was utterly perfect so we graced it with salted almonds to really knock everyone's socks off. I literally could not stop eating it. There's a lot left. 

And I think I might use the leftover matzah (of which there's plenty; thanks Mom and Dad!) to make more. 

Meg finds the afikomen! The prize: more dessert! I hid it inside the Haggadah itself because I didn't have time to do anything else. Dad, I have no idea how you manage to pull off the hiding job every year - Chase and Meg were vigilant and it was amazing the search even lasted the three minutes that it did.

Leading a Seder is, somewhat unsurprisingly, a lot like teaching a class, and it feels even more so on the other side. As with all the lessons I teach for the first time, this one has plenty of room for improvement, but overall I think people learned and we had some nice little discussions, which (as far as I'm concerned) is really what the holiday is about. Every slurp of salt water from a piece of parsley and every refrain of Dayenu felt like a little piece of home, and I ended the night by whistling "Eliyahu HaNavi" into the darkness on my walk back from Yasmine's. Chag sameach, indeed.

4. What's Next

Well, the "this week in Jerusalem" part wasn't a lie: Daniel and I are staying at a yeshiva for Easter weekend! We've got 4 days off, and what better way to spend our Passover than in the center of it all. With the Holy Land a stone's throw away (almost literally), it felt like the obvious choice, and I'm excited to see what a few days of serious Torah study with some seriously observant Jews will feel like.

And then? A three-day week next week punctuated by a big concert for which the Glee Club is more-or-less ready, and then a four-day week the week after that, and all of a sudden it's May and we're really nearing the end of things. As I suspected, the end is feeling like a crazy cascade towards the finish line, and I'm doing my best to appreciate the many things there are to love about King's rather than cross off the days until I return home.

Classes are going well; I'm playing around with the structure of our units because I feel comfortable enough with the material to do that, and it's been nice to get out of the last two terms' comfort zone (especially with these particular classes of kids, which are real gems in wonderfully different ways). I promise to update more frequently in the weeks to come, which the schedule should allow - stay tuned for more as the weather heats up and the end of my first year as a professional teacher approaches!