Today was the last day of the third week! Wow, what a crazy week. It was the first week of coding, and we also had the Apprentice challenge on Tuesday. On top of that, tonight we had a really neat event with the parents of our students. This consisted of a presentation where we all introduced ourselves, and other stuff. Then we hung out and ate food that the parents had brought. Finally, we got to go into lab and the students showed their parents what they have been working on.

It was really neat to meet the parents of the students. They were very interesting, and it was great to understand where my students are coming from. Specifically, it was great to see how some students would light up when they saw their parents come in to the room when they were going to be presenting.

However, in the afternoon, Jerusalem shut down the checkpoints coming from the West Bank, so some of the parents of our students were not able to come in. Those students were pretty upset about it.

About the atmosphere here: Life is continuing, but everyone knows what is happening around them. The air is tense. There is talk about the police catching suicide bombers and such. That is actually why they shut down the checkpoints. Apparently, there was intelligence that a lot of bombers were going to try to come into town. Since this number was greater than the amount that the police could reasonably track down, they shut down the checkpoints, so nobody could come into the city. I don't see why shutting down checkpoints for a weekend will stop bombers from coming in as soon as they are opened again. Anyways, it is pretty crappy for our students, who want to show their parents what they are doing.