Thanksgiving vs. Black Friday

Well, I realize this is the first update in the entire month of November.  Things have been a little busy.  All right, maybe they've been a lot busy.  This month has been a challenge, but I have seen some good improvements in many of my students.  Of course, it would be way too easy if they participated well every day or even most days in a week.  It has been encouraging to see this change happening.  I actually got to teach what felt like a complete lesson last Friday!  It was great.


The "worst storm ever" was a little bit of a joke.  We had some high winds and some flooding.  Neither was as severe as predicted.  The picture to the left is a view of the sea ice after the flooding peaked.  It would have needed to rise significantly higher to reach where we are and have any impact.


And now to the heart of the matter...HAPPY THANKSGIVING!!!!  For the first time, I am unable to be with the family for Thanksgiving dinner, and I will miss the kids' table.  I certainly miss the food...a lot, but even without the food, I would simply love to spend the time with the fam.


I'm going to keep this rather brief today, but I will end with a question.  Why is it that a day after we spend being thankful for everything that we have, countless people stampede their way through stores acting in the most selfish and materialistic manner possible?


And now, a countdown to my Christmas arrival:

Quarterly Review

Well, it's official.  The first quarter of this school year is in the books, and it has certainly been an incredible time.  I currently have fifteen students who require a crazy amount of attention at all times.  The chaos level in the classroom can easily get out of hand, but I am starting to learn how to manage it and keep most of the students on task.  I have a few who just don't care, but we are working on it.  Another recurrent issue is sleep deprivation.  Sometimes, things happen in the village that can't be avoided by the kids, and they are unable to get sufficient rest.  However, there are other times when the kids simply stay out too late at night.  Things do seem to be getting better though.

Oh yeah!  We have had some foreign substance polluting our shores recently.  It is very strange and cold.  I took a picture of it (obviously...).  We've had it for a little over a week now.  Temperatures have been slowly creeping downward.  I first saw snow here on the last day of September, but it really seems like it is here to stay now.  We're consistently at or right below 30 degrees, and the lowest wind chill I saw was around 15 degrees.  I've talked with some people back in the Pennsylvania/Virginia area who mentioned their "cold" days.  Friends, 50 degrees is not cold...don't think you realize!  Actually, after this winter, I think any temperature above 0 will feel warmish.

And now, it is time for...yes...a secret message:

FBGAG JMLD GQ UBPX, UBPX DMMA!

Power Failure

Kids, let me tell you about a little something that happened a few weeks ago.  You see, there is this wonderful thing that is often taken for granted:  electricity.  (Sidebar:  I'm looking out my window at some snow falling gently to the ground.  It's the second time I've seen it this year.  Previously, I saw September snow for the first time in my life.)  Anyway, back to the story I was just about to tell.

So, in rural Alaska, electricity is not always the most consistent thing.  One Sunday, a group of us decided it would be fun to go have a bonfire on the beach.  We hopped on some four-wheelers and headed out of town to a better location.  After having a nice fire and eating several (...four...for just me) hotdogs, we returned to find that the power went out when we were gone.  Our apartments and school were running on a generator at the moment.  No big deal, right?  Oh wait!  We had no water pressure.  Hmmm....  The pumps from the village had no power either.  Well, a night without water isn't really a big deal.  Monday morning came around.  Still no real water pressure, but the slow flow was enough for me to make coffee. After a quick breakfast with coffee in hand, I walked out the door to my classroom.  I'm not sure if I've mentioned this before, but my classroom is in a building adjacent to the main school but not attached.  I first noticed that the entryway light was out.  "It must have blown out when the power failed yesterday," I thought.  As I turned the corner into the classroom and flipped on the lights, I was struck with the reality that the power was still out, and my building was not on the school's generator.  A line from It's a Wonderful Life popped into my head:  "This is a very interesting situation!"  I sipped some coffee and headed into the school to find out what happens when there is no power in my Outhouse.  On finding the principal, he informed me that the power was still out all over the village, but we might not have school because we had no water.  In fact, the water that was in the pipes was unfiltered and unsafe.  I took another sip of my contaminated yet tasty coffee (and I didn't get sick!).  If it wasn't back by 7:30, we wouldn't have school.  Seven-thirty came and went.  No school, but we had a work day instead.  It was really a good thing because over the weekend, we had no time to get work done due to inservices.  For some, it was a little bit of a challenge to do work without access to the internet.  I guess I forgot to mention that before now.  The internet and phone lines were also down.  We really had no way of communicating with anyone outside the village.  If we really needed to get a message out, we would have driven over to St. Michael (only a little over 10 miles).  It was on this day that I was told a very interesting fact.  In rural Alaska, it is possible, however rare, that power can be out for up to two weeks.  So if we are supposed to talk at some point and you don't hear from me, don't panic.  I didn't forget.  I don't hate you.  I'm not ignoring you.  The power's out.  And the internet's down.  And the phone lines are out.  Luckily, the power, internet, and phone lines all came back on in the afternoon.

It would have been nice for that whole fiasco to have ended on Monday.  Unfortunately, they needed to replace some transformers, so the power went out a couple more times over the course of the week.  Which meant we needed to move class to the cafeteria one day and to a minuscule classroom on another.  It was hectic.  I think the only normal day that week was on Friday, and it actually went quite well.

Three Weeks and Still Going Strong

A little place I like to call...shool.

Once again, this is incredibly overdue.  I just finished my third week of school, and I'm happy to say that I still want to be a teacher.  Every one of the students has their own unique challenge which they bring to school each day.  That's really the case everywhere.  Although the school is very small and in an incredibly rural area, the atmosphere is quite similar to a city school.  I talked with Josh (my brother, for those who haven't met him) earlier today, and we realized that many of our students behaved in a rather comparable manner.  I am still enjoying the whole experience.  I have seen some definite changes in behavior for the better over the last week.  We still have a long way to go, but I was very encouraged by this week.

Just this evening, we had a pot-luck dinner hosted at the school.  It was a good mix of typical foods along with some native dishes as well.  I can now say that I have tried both seal meat and herring eggs.  They were very interesting.  I can't say that I'll include them as a staple, but I am glad to have experienced it.  In the past year, I have been much more open to and driven towards trying new things.  I guess that's how I ended up teaching in Alaska.  If anyone reading this is bored with where they are, get out and do something.  Try something new!  There is so much out there that you could live several lifetimes and not run out of things to do.  It could even be as simple as trying to spend a day without saying the word "water."  Yes, it's random, but I've found that I have a lot more fun when I let my imagination free.  Honestly, I'm not sure why this came out in this medium, but it's relevant to my life right now, and I hope it is to yours.

I'll add some pictures later.  Right now, I've gotta return some video tapes.  (edit:  picture added!)

First Week of School (so far...)

Alright, it's been a while since I've had any sort of update.  The last couple weeks have gone incredibly quickly.  My school is part of a School Improvement Grant, so last week was spent in Savoonga, another small village in our district that is on St. Lawrence Island.  The teachers and administrators from four different schools were all present, and it actually wasn't too crowded (although I wasn't sleeping at the school, so I'm not sure how it was during the nights).  We had sessions every morning and afternoon to give us extra training on four different features we are implementing at our schools this year.  It was a long, difficult week, but it made all of us more excited to (get out of there and) start teaching the following week.

...and now it is Thursday!  Four school days already in the books.  I have to say, it has been an interesting week.  I'll preface this by saying that my students are good kids.  Let me continue:  they are kids.  We've been working all week on listening and following instructions.  Some moments are good; some are incredibly taxing.  In between the times when we practice our routines, we've started some individual reading time, math practice, and writing practice.  Every night, the students need to complete a "Read and Respond" paper.  Right now, most just want to read a little bit, so they can complete it and turn it in.  One of my goals is to move the students closer to reading because they really enjoy it.  Does this give me an extra excuse to read awesome stories to them?  Yes!  Right now, we are reading The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.  (Thank you to everyone who gave me feedback on good books to read.)  Many of my students have already seen the movie and said that they enjoyed it.  I'm excited to see how the rest of them respond to the story.

On Tuesday, we start our normal school schedule.  We will no longer be focusing almost exclusively on how things will work.  Reading, Math, and Writing will predominate.  We have a very structured curriculum, and much of it is completed on the SMARTboard, so I will need to take some time this week to make sure I know how everything is supposed to work.  I'm sure it will be loads of fun.

Happy Labor Day everyone!

North End of the Beach at Stebbins

Subsistence Living

Living in extremely remote areas has a variety of perks and challenges.  While food is extremely expensive in stores and ordering online is also quite costly (especially if you want fresh produce), it is also quite common (and even necessary) to use the natural environment to provide for oneself.  It's really a simple concept.  You use what's available.  This week, I got to see it in two very different ways.

We turned our truck around to catch this!

First of all, my school owns a net for fishing.  On Sunday, we started putting it out and pulling it in every evening.  Our goal:  to catch and fillet as many salmon as our freezers can hold.  In our first four days of netting fish, we caught 100 salmon!  Most of them were silvers which are excellent for eating.  A number of them were chum.  The chum are easily the worst salmon out there.  They are commonly referred to as "dog salmon" because people use them to feed their dogs.  Our typical evening this week consisted of pulling the net in around 5:00 p.m., disentangling the fish from the net, rinsing them off, taking them up to our complex to be filleted, rinsing the fillets, and vacuum sealing them.  The whole process does not take very long when everyone is involved.  I think it took an hour when we pulled in 33 which was our biggest catch of the day this week.  On a related note, we went berry-picking this morning.  It took a while for us to find them.  It's probable that the reindeer ate a significant portion of them.  Regardless, I now have some blueberries!

Stebbins is visible in the background.

Two of the cabinets are visible here.

But subsistence living goes beyond the typical foraging for food in some situations.  Take first-year teaching in Bush Alaska for example.  You come into it with practically no supplies or resources to speak of.  Once again, you use what is available to you.  Fortunately, I had both in my new classroom.  Unfortunately, I had way to much of them!  When I entered, I found three rather large movable cabinets. All three were spilling over with, well, everything!  Wednesday afternoon was spent removing everything from each cabinet.  I was able to spend Thursday putting things away that I wanted to keep and throwing out everything else.  Friday (yesterday) I was able to put on some of the finishing touches.  It is finally starting to look like a classroom!  I am rather excited to get things underway.   Quite a bit of planning is left to do before I am really ready for the first week of school, but I have a decent idea about what is going to happen.


Here are some more classroom pictures:

Supplies have been removed.

Everything is now strewn about.

Here are extra bookshelves and another big cabinet is visible in the back. 

My cleaned-up desk area

Reading Corner

Part of the rest of the room

A Foggy Start For A New Home

One week down!  Overall, training went well.  But it was more an introduction to the things that we will need to learn as we progress throughout the year.  None of us really felt like there was really enough time to learn what we had thrown at us.  At the very least, we have now been exposed to the Reading curriculum.

Regardless, it was a fun week.  The new teachers were all fantastic.  A wide variety of ages were represented.  And everyone brought unique experiences with them.  It was neat to talk with some of the more experienced teachers who were simply new to the district.  So many interesting stories were shared.  It has been fun to get to know my Alaskan family better.  We played volleyball with students, played poker with gummy fruit snacks, and even polar bear plunged the Norton Sound!

Today was a long day.  We were supposed to leave for Stebbins at 2:30.  Unfortunately, we were delayed by just over 5 hours.  Fog was covering the village, so the pilots would not be able to see the runway.  Just another typical day in Alaskan air travel.  We've now been informed that flights have the tendency to leave anywhere in between 6 hours early and 6 hours late.  I'm in Stebbins now.  I haven't seen too much of the town because I went straight to the apartment to get settled in.  I didn't bring much, so I'm mostly ready now.  Not too much on the agenda for the next couple of days.  Going four-wheeling is a distinct possibility.