My girls. 
     2014 - 2015 was MES's 25th year, and the thirteenth year of the American High School section.  MES gave me an opportunity to teach literature to students whose schooling had been in English from kindergarten on.  Two highlights:

• ​Teaching The Lord of the Flies​ in Egypt's post-colonial context allowed me to re-imagine the novel's trajectory.  It didn't have to be that way.  What if the boys had been Muslims, uninterested in hunting wild pig?  What kind of school, what kind of adult influences, informed the choir's actions on the island?

• Teaching Creative Writing:  four 9th and 10th graders formed a true writers' community.  Following the general path of Marie Ponsot's ​Beat Not the Poor Desk​, we meandered through fables, family stories, play writing, and seeing the soccer field from a height of one centimeter.  And I read to them from my own 9th and 10th grade journals.  That, after all, was the purpose of writing the journals in the first place. 
  

​The campus from its soccer field

Cairo has an extraordinary number of international schools teaching in various European languages, but to my knowledge, only MES is built on a Middle Eastern design:  several buildings with classroom wings that extend like petals from a central atrium, all enclosed by oval-shaped walls.

​Christmas at MES

About 20% of Egyptians are Christians, the majority Coptic Christians, one of the oldest churches in the world.  The population at MES was representative.  At Christmas time, this tree was placed in the open-air atrium at the center of the Secondary School building, to catch the spirit of the season.

​Old Cairo

Cairo is a beautiful, historic city struggling with serious environmental issues.  A colleague's class summarized them as follows: