A couple of days ago I was teaching a lesson on punctuation. Our text book, which is a pretty good book, told us, "Punctuation is the traffic cop of a sentence." No traffic and no cops in The Village. They obviously know what traffic and cops are but they probably have never experienced a traffic jam and have probably never met a cop. That metaphor is supposed to be instructive. You're supposed to suddenly have a real idea of what punctuation does in a sentence. Oh well.
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Clearly, we are quite isolated up here. But due to the wonders of the 21st century there are ways in which these students have opportunities and experiences that many students in far less isolated places do not. For instance, many students in my writing class finished their first essay of the year today. They had all typed it on their laptops. Every middle and high school student has his or her own laptop for use at school and home. Pretty amazing, right? When the students finished the essay they emailed it to me. All students have email accounts through the same service that all of the staff have. So I downloaded their essays, made comments electronically and sent it back to them. No problems. That is something that never happened to me in NYC or Oregon. However, I think this is pretty commonplace throughout all of the villages in this district.
Furthermore, the students all double spaced, used 12 point, black font and included a heading. I had to remind my students elsewhere again and again of these basic formatting customs. I didn't have to say it once to these students. Also, there was no abuse of the laptops. The students typed their essays using Microsoft Word, saved and emailed them without help. I didn't hear a single note of music or catch anyone on the Internet. Yow.
Also of note, cell phones, high-speed Internet and satellite TV are all here and used widely. But the nearest roads connecting us to a highway system are 500 miles away, the airstrip was closed for over two weeks in a row last year requiring all travel to go through the nearest village (7 miles away by snow machine) and few students have running water.
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this is amazing - printint this to take to work today - hard for the everyday person here to even imagine. Seems like there is going to be some sort of equation that when you get the answer you are going to be pleasantly surprised by - something like isolated communities + technology (-everyday world awareness) = ????? - I was never good in algebra but hope you get what I mean. M.
ReplyDeleteI completely get what you mean. Isolation + technology seems to equate a mixture of knowledge and ignorance about the rest of the US that I haven't experienced before. I think that whereas people here have become substantially more knowledgeable about "down states" culture, we down-staters have not become any less ignorant about rural Alaska.
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