Here are some more pictures of the village and the tundra. As before, I also sent out an email with a more extensive photo album, so if you'd like to see that and didn't get the email, please let me know.
I think that some of our emails are getting bounced back because of people's spam blockers. If you think you should be getting emails from us and you're not, please let me know.
Monday, August 31, 2009
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Cultural Literacy
I haven't been posting much lately because Blogger/Google has been janky - at least my connection to it. The new post page was loading up in a way that didn't allow for new posts. Right now it seems to be OK.
____
Today I was working with a student on remedial reading comprehension. The book we were using, Corrective Reading Book C by SRA, has these sentences that he was supposed to read and use to answer some questions: Susan is a lawyer. The shoes are in the garage. The dogs are in the pen. There are no lawyers, garages or dog pens here. So when he reads the sentences he doesn't comprehend what's going on and can't answer the questions. It's not like he was unable to understand the concept of a dog pen or a garage or a lawyer. I had to explain them and then it was fine. But the culture here is so radically different from typical suburban/urban American culture that we practically need our own text books. After working out of the textbook for a while we went on to reading from Loser by Jerry Spinelli - a book the student chose for us to read together. The first three chapters have been vague sketches of little kids running around a suburban neighborhood. There are no playgrounds or sidewalks or even streets here. So...it's difficult. This is something to remember when looking at "standardized" test scores. Standardized tests don't get normed in places like this so the scores they produce and the conclusions you are supposed to draw from them are questionable.
In other news:
S mentioned that we were able to see some traditional Yup'ik dance the other night. This was because a five year old village boy drowned the day before school started. He was going to be in our kindergarten and he has a twin. I guess he was playing on a boat or piece of wood in the river and fell in. So on Thursday there was a funeral and then a gathering in the school gym. S and I didn't go to the funeral - we stayed at the school to help prepare for the gathering so I can't really report on that. I believe it was a fairly traditional Catholic service. But the gathering was amazing. We made it up when the dance had just begun. There were four to six men seated in a row playing drums. The drums are just a circle of wood with a handle and a skin stretched over them that they hit with a mallet. The men also do the singing. In front of them is a line of women with feather-fans in their hands. The dance is choregraphed for each song with hand and leg movements. In front of these women are more men- in this case it was teenagers and boys- kneeling on a mat doing the dance as well. The music is a relatively simple tune that usually one man starts sings and tapping out the beat to. When he has sung it all the way through the rest of the men and women join in. The whole verse is repeated five or six times with the last two usually being much louder. There's a beautiful repetition to the song as it rises and falls through the verses with the beat always going behind it.
What may have been most amazing was the participation. Yup'ik dance was forbidden in many other villages by Christian missionaries. Our village was lucky to be allowed to continue many of their traditions such as this dance. So it was amazing to see people from four to eighty five participating in the dance. And it seemed completely without pretension, without any commercial forces applying pressure or hidden agendas. I'm sure it's not completely pure. Which is to say that there is pride involved and no doubt some measure of showing off. But given the spectrum of people who were involved, it seemed like they were dancing for each other and for themselves in a tradition that didn't survice every where so we were so lucky to see it.
And then the band started playing county music and all the younger folks line danced. How did that get here?
____
Today I was working with a student on remedial reading comprehension. The book we were using, Corrective Reading Book C by SRA, has these sentences that he was supposed to read and use to answer some questions: Susan is a lawyer. The shoes are in the garage. The dogs are in the pen. There are no lawyers, garages or dog pens here. So when he reads the sentences he doesn't comprehend what's going on and can't answer the questions. It's not like he was unable to understand the concept of a dog pen or a garage or a lawyer. I had to explain them and then it was fine. But the culture here is so radically different from typical suburban/urban American culture that we practically need our own text books. After working out of the textbook for a while we went on to reading from Loser by Jerry Spinelli - a book the student chose for us to read together. The first three chapters have been vague sketches of little kids running around a suburban neighborhood. There are no playgrounds or sidewalks or even streets here. So...it's difficult. This is something to remember when looking at "standardized" test scores. Standardized tests don't get normed in places like this so the scores they produce and the conclusions you are supposed to draw from them are questionable.
In other news:
S mentioned that we were able to see some traditional Yup'ik dance the other night. This was because a five year old village boy drowned the day before school started. He was going to be in our kindergarten and he has a twin. I guess he was playing on a boat or piece of wood in the river and fell in. So on Thursday there was a funeral and then a gathering in the school gym. S and I didn't go to the funeral - we stayed at the school to help prepare for the gathering so I can't really report on that. I believe it was a fairly traditional Catholic service. But the gathering was amazing. We made it up when the dance had just begun. There were four to six men seated in a row playing drums. The drums are just a circle of wood with a handle and a skin stretched over them that they hit with a mallet. The men also do the singing. In front of them is a line of women with feather-fans in their hands. The dance is choregraphed for each song with hand and leg movements. In front of these women are more men- in this case it was teenagers and boys- kneeling on a mat doing the dance as well. The music is a relatively simple tune that usually one man starts sings and tapping out the beat to. When he has sung it all the way through the rest of the men and women join in. The whole verse is repeated five or six times with the last two usually being much louder. There's a beautiful repetition to the song as it rises and falls through the verses with the beat always going behind it.
What may have been most amazing was the participation. Yup'ik dance was forbidden in many other villages by Christian missionaries. Our village was lucky to be allowed to continue many of their traditions such as this dance. So it was amazing to see people from four to eighty five participating in the dance. And it seemed completely without pretension, without any commercial forces applying pressure or hidden agendas. I'm sure it's not completely pure. Which is to say that there is pride involved and no doubt some measure of showing off. But given the spectrum of people who were involved, it seemed like they were dancing for each other and for themselves in a tradition that didn't survice every where so we were so lucky to see it.
And then the band started playing county music and all the younger folks line danced. How did that get here?
Monday, August 24, 2009
First week
I’m hoping B posts again soon because I’m pretty sure we had very different weeks. Mine was many things – exciting, difficult, overwhelming, busy, even fun. Monday was a final workday – although we worked straight through the weekend – so Tuesday was our first day with the kids. I have three separate parts to my day: first two hours I have reading and writing. In that class there are 9 kids (there were only 7 but 2 new ones turned up on Friday – one of the joys of public school, no matter where you go, it never changes). If that seems like a small group, consider for a moment that the kids are anywhere from 8-11 years old, and their reading and writing abilities are all over the place. I mentioned before that our school works on a phase system. I have one student who has finished phase 4 and is working simultaneously on 5 and 6, several who are on phase 6, a few on phase 7, and one who is just beginning phase 8. It’s quite a span, and makes planning a challenge. I’m still sort of figuring out how to design instruction that’s going to get each of them where they need to go.
My third hour is math, and the kids are a bit older. I love teaching math, and so I volunteered to take the higher level elementary group, who are working at about a fifth grade level, expecting that this would put me back in my comfort zone, since almost all of my experience is with fourth and fifth graders. To my surprise, most of the kids in the class are 11-14 years old. Middle schoolers (shudder)! I was really nervous when I found that out because I just don’t know how to work with kids at that age. I was immediately reminded, however, of the summer I spent as a camp counselor several years ago. I had some flexibility in my position, and I spent one of the 2-week sessions with the older boys’ group. I was surprised to find out back then that boys at that age – about 12, 13 – are actually mellow. It’s like they’re beyond the spastic energy of little boys, but not yet at the stage of constantly having to prove their machismo (I assume that’ll come in a few years). So there’s this nice little plateau where the boys are just…calm. This definitely seems to hold true in my math class. The girls are a little jumpier, a little more likely to chomp their gum and roll their eyes, but they’re okay, too. I think I’m lucky to have them for math – the language barrier subsides a bit when you’re working with numbers, and the kids feel more confident.
After math I have a lunch period, and then the rest of my afternoon, in theory at least, is special ed time. Eventually I’ll be working with groups and individual kids, but it’s been a slow process trying to make that schedule. The main problem is that even though the caseload is rather large – about 23 kids in a school of about 115 – our principal feels that many of the kids who have been labeled LD (learning disabled) actually were just delayed due to learning English as their second language, and have made significant gains. He’s hoping to take several of them off the special ed rolls. Then again, he also feels that there are several kids who don’t have IEPs who could use some additional help. So, eventually my afternoons will be full, but for now they’re rather empty. Which has actually been kind of nice as ease into things – it’s given me ample prep time, which I need because I actually have to write and turn in lesson plans, something I have never had to do before.
The kids are adorable, I mean, really. So far my favorite thing is this – when you ask a question, if the answer is yes, more often than not they just raise their eyebrows. This is true of kids and adults, I have no idea why. It’s not like a skeptical eyebrow raise, there’s no attitude, it’s just a quick up and down. For some reason I find this incredibly endearing.
Also this week we climbed the “mountain” in the village (it’s more like a big hill, still pretty amazing), hunted for fossils (and found a few), saw some Yup’ik dancing (incredibly beautiful), which was immediately followed by a fiddle dance (no fiddle, but line dancing!), baked a chocolate cake, and hoped in vain for our next food order to arrive.
I’ll say more about the dancing later, it deserves its own post, but I also want to say, now that we’ve taken two hikes up the hill, that the tundra is beautiful in ways I didn’t expect. From far away it just looks uniformly green, but when you get close up you suddenly see how many different plants and shades are there, as well as flowers who somehow manage to survive the winds, and, if you get down and push aside the leaves, thousands of tiny berries. The tundra is soft and springy under my feet, I almost feel like I’m bouncing up the hill. And as we get higher, rocks, sharp and marbley gray laced with weird orange moss, jut out of the grass like stony streams.
I’ll add one more thing before I close. Our current patterns are a strange combination of lazy couch potato-ness and unusual industriousness. On the one hand we’ve spent a good chunk of this weekend truly just sitting around – sleeping late, playing Wii, reading, watching movies (ok, Battlestar Galactica), going on the internet, whatever. Not just this weekend, we’ve spent a lot of our free time that way. I know it’s one of my goals to spend my time developing some new habits, but I haven’t done too well with that so far.
On the other hand, we’ve been doing things – mostly around cooking – that we haven’t done before. Little things, but they're new. Soaking beans (instead of using canned), baking our own bread, making our own soymilk, sprouting alfalfa seeds. I feel like a hardy pioneer wife. With a Macbook.
My third hour is math, and the kids are a bit older. I love teaching math, and so I volunteered to take the higher level elementary group, who are working at about a fifth grade level, expecting that this would put me back in my comfort zone, since almost all of my experience is with fourth and fifth graders. To my surprise, most of the kids in the class are 11-14 years old. Middle schoolers (shudder)! I was really nervous when I found that out because I just don’t know how to work with kids at that age. I was immediately reminded, however, of the summer I spent as a camp counselor several years ago. I had some flexibility in my position, and I spent one of the 2-week sessions with the older boys’ group. I was surprised to find out back then that boys at that age – about 12, 13 – are actually mellow. It’s like they’re beyond the spastic energy of little boys, but not yet at the stage of constantly having to prove their machismo (I assume that’ll come in a few years). So there’s this nice little plateau where the boys are just…calm. This definitely seems to hold true in my math class. The girls are a little jumpier, a little more likely to chomp their gum and roll their eyes, but they’re okay, too. I think I’m lucky to have them for math – the language barrier subsides a bit when you’re working with numbers, and the kids feel more confident.
After math I have a lunch period, and then the rest of my afternoon, in theory at least, is special ed time. Eventually I’ll be working with groups and individual kids, but it’s been a slow process trying to make that schedule. The main problem is that even though the caseload is rather large – about 23 kids in a school of about 115 – our principal feels that many of the kids who have been labeled LD (learning disabled) actually were just delayed due to learning English as their second language, and have made significant gains. He’s hoping to take several of them off the special ed rolls. Then again, he also feels that there are several kids who don’t have IEPs who could use some additional help. So, eventually my afternoons will be full, but for now they’re rather empty. Which has actually been kind of nice as ease into things – it’s given me ample prep time, which I need because I actually have to write and turn in lesson plans, something I have never had to do before.
The kids are adorable, I mean, really. So far my favorite thing is this – when you ask a question, if the answer is yes, more often than not they just raise their eyebrows. This is true of kids and adults, I have no idea why. It’s not like a skeptical eyebrow raise, there’s no attitude, it’s just a quick up and down. For some reason I find this incredibly endearing.
Also this week we climbed the “mountain” in the village (it’s more like a big hill, still pretty amazing), hunted for fossils (and found a few), saw some Yup’ik dancing (incredibly beautiful), which was immediately followed by a fiddle dance (no fiddle, but line dancing!), baked a chocolate cake, and hoped in vain for our next food order to arrive.
I’ll say more about the dancing later, it deserves its own post, but I also want to say, now that we’ve taken two hikes up the hill, that the tundra is beautiful in ways I didn’t expect. From far away it just looks uniformly green, but when you get close up you suddenly see how many different plants and shades are there, as well as flowers who somehow manage to survive the winds, and, if you get down and push aside the leaves, thousands of tiny berries. The tundra is soft and springy under my feet, I almost feel like I’m bouncing up the hill. And as we get higher, rocks, sharp and marbley gray laced with weird orange moss, jut out of the grass like stony streams.
I’ll add one more thing before I close. Our current patterns are a strange combination of lazy couch potato-ness and unusual industriousness. On the one hand we’ve spent a good chunk of this weekend truly just sitting around – sleeping late, playing Wii, reading, watching movies (ok, Battlestar Galactica), going on the internet, whatever. Not just this weekend, we’ve spent a lot of our free time that way. I know it’s one of my goals to spend my time developing some new habits, but I haven’t done too well with that so far.
On the other hand, we’ve been doing things – mostly around cooking – that we haven’t done before. Little things, but they're new. Soaking beans (instead of using canned), baking our own bread, making our own soymilk, sprouting alfalfa seeds. I feel like a hardy pioneer wife. With a Macbook.
Monday, August 17, 2009
Backwards things, beginning of the year, and books
We were in Athol a couple of days ago and then when we were at the airport (I mean, “airport”), I thought for a moment that I’d left my toothbrush in the hotel. At first I thought, ‘Oh well, no big deal, I’ll just buy one when we get there.’ But then I realized, unlike most places I’ve flown to, in The Village “just buying one” is not very likely. Okay so, it turned out I had my toothbrush but I was thinking about this and I realized, if I’d forgotten my wallet or keys at the hotel, something that would have made me completely panic in any other situation, it really wouldn’t have mattered. I don’t think I’ve touched my wallet more than 3 or 4 times since we got here, and keys – well, B is either here or at school, so if I lost my set it wouldn’t matter that much. But a toothbrush – now that would be tricky.
School starts on Tuesday. We’ve spent the past 3 days in our classrooms, getting ready. In a lot of ways it’s just the same as anywhere else: figuring out where to put the desks, making the charts and signs and labels, planning the first couple of days. But there’s a lot that’s new for me this year, too.
First of all, this year my job is partly a Special Ed position. B and I spent a long while today sitting with our computers, figuring out our schedules. B is the full-time Special Ed teacher at the school so his job is a combination of pulling kids out of their regular classes for one-to-one or small group instruction, pushing in to support a kid in his regular ed class, working with the General Ed teachers to plan appropriate curriculum for SpEd kids, and doing all the paperwork (there’s a lot). My job is a 50/50 split – in the mornings I’ll teach reading, writing and math. Then after lunch I’m also going to be doing Special Ed. I won’t have all the same duties as B since I’m not a certified SpEd teacher, but I will be doing push-in or pull-out service for a number of kids. And even in the morning, there are a number of things that make my General Ed assignment a bit different. For one thing, I’ll have a different group of kids for Language Arts and Math. My LA group will only have seven students, more like a targeted small group than what I usually think of as a class. My math group will be a little bigger: eleven students. It’s funny, during three years in private school I always assumed that my eventual return to public would mean greatly increased class sizes – apparently not.
The other thing that makes it different is that our school district works with a phase system rather than a grade model. Now the kids all do officially belong to one or another grade because that’s how the state requires it. But for all purposes, at school it’s their phase, not their grade that counts. Generally the expectation in elementary school is to get through two phases a year. So this all makes sense on paper, in fact in theory I like it better than a grade system, which assumes that all ten-year old children are at the same place academically and puts them all in fifth grade. With a phase system, the kids are where they are until they move up. Now, here are the tricky parts. One, some kids take forever to move up, so then you have 15 and 16 year olds who are basically in the equivalent to 8th or 9th grade – you can imagine that someone in that situation isn’t very likely to stick around till he’s 21 or so to finish high school. Second, you end up having multiple phases in one class – for example, in my morning language arts class I have kids in phases 5-8. So that’s complicated in two ways (follow me here, make an outline if this is getting difficult). First, the phases can be very different, so you have to teach a bunch of different things at the same time. Or, on the other hand, some phases have a lot in common but you have to be careful that you’re really differentiating – so if you’re teaching, say, the skill of pre-reading, that’s going to look different to a kid in phase 6 than it would to a kid in phase 8. And, the third reason that the phase system in general is not quite as neat as it looks on paper is that, at least in our district, it relies on lots and LOTS of testing. Each phase in each subject requires at least half a dozen assessments to complete.
So these are the kinds of things I’m thinking about as I get ready for the first day.
In other matters, I wanted to say thank you to everyone who contributed to my book list. I promised I would post it here and I’ve been lazy about doing it because I’ve wanted to look up authors – lots of people just sent in titles. But I finally got that done, so here’s the list. Feel free to add your own suggestions in the comments.
Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Underneath by Kathi Appelt
Lowboy: A Novel by John Wray
So.B.It by Sarah Weeks
Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates
The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit by Lucette Lagnado
The invention of Everything Else by Samatha Hunt
The Monsters of Templeton by Lauren Groff
The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery
Not me by Michael Lavigne
A Cold Day for Murder by Dana Stabenow
Tortilla Curtain by TC Boyle
Mindset by Carol Dweck
Earth Abides by George R Stewart
The Evolution Book by Sara Stein
Caveman’s Valentine and Jury Duty by George Dawes Green
If Not Now, When? By Primo Levi
Rosa Lee by Leon Dash
A Prayer for the City by Buzz Bassinger
Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card
Up Country by Nelson DeMille
Born on a Blue Day by Daniel Tammett
The Help by Katherine Stockett
Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen
The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls
Before You Know Kindness and The Double Bind by Chris BohjalianAlso my friend Holly recommended a web show called "Anyone But Me" and tells me you can see it at
http://www.afterellen.com/taxonomy/term/4782
Monday, August 10, 2009
Back in Athol
When we arrived in The Village on Thursday, aside from being a little sick from the flight, I think we were both struck by how beautiful this area is. The flight revealed the surrounding area as a series of twisting rivers and lakes of all sizes - nearly more water than land. The tundra is characterized by the full spectrum of greens and blues and almost completely flat. A few villages were visible during the flight but the area is largely absent of humans - at least as seen from the sky. Looking down from the plane or the surrounding hills, it's absolutely stunning.
However, we're back in Athol for district-wide training. Athol is not beautiful. It's a frontier town that seems completely dedicated to utilitarianism. Despite the relative urbanity of Athol (and its conveniences), I'm glad we're not living here.
As for the trainings, what's been most disappointing for me is is the almost complete lack of training around special education. Special ed wasn't mentioned at all in last week's 3-day training and appears only once on the agenda for the next two days for 1.5 hours (which conflicts with school staff meetings). This is all too typical in my opinion.
Some other notes:
- Our shower emits a high pitched whine right before it goes completely cold for a couple of seconds
- We were informed by a student who followed us home from the post office that we'd hear the words "gay" and "retarded" a lot at school
- Our apartment is well heated - so much so that I slept without blankets the other night. It was 45 degrees out.
- Our airstrip is apparently one of the worst in the area- it was closed for 14 days in a row last year. The school nearly ran out of food. Good times!
We return to The Village on Wednesday night. Looking forward to it.
However, we're back in Athol for district-wide training. Athol is not beautiful. It's a frontier town that seems completely dedicated to utilitarianism. Despite the relative urbanity of Athol (and its conveniences), I'm glad we're not living here.
As for the trainings, what's been most disappointing for me is is the almost complete lack of training around special education. Special ed wasn't mentioned at all in last week's 3-day training and appears only once on the agenda for the next two days for 1.5 hours (which conflicts with school staff meetings). This is all too typical in my opinion.
Some other notes:
- Our shower emits a high pitched whine right before it goes completely cold for a couple of seconds
- We were informed by a student who followed us home from the post office that we'd hear the words "gay" and "retarded" a lot at school
- Our apartment is well heated - so much so that I slept without blankets the other night. It was 45 degrees out.
- Our airstrip is apparently one of the worst in the area- it was closed for 14 days in a row last year. The school nearly ran out of food. Good times!
We return to The Village on Wednesday night. Looking forward to it.
Photos
A word about photos: as we've said before, we're trying to protect confidentiality by not naming our village or our school. Along those same lines, we're limiting the pictures we put here on the blog. So, here's a link to some pictures.
We've also emailed a link to some more extensive photo albums to many friends and family members, but if we accidentally left you off that list, please email one of us and we'll send you that link.
We've also emailed a link to some more extensive photo albums to many friends and family members, but if we accidentally left you off that list, please email one of us and we'll send you that link.
Saturday, August 8, 2009
Arrival in The Village
B described Athol a bit in his last post. It was strangely like a beach town in winter – the long grass and the house on stilts and the flat landscape. It reminded me of being in Baja in February, weather wise. It was actually pretty sunny off and on, but chilly, and breezy. Our three days of training there were rather brutally boring. Lots of information that would be most useful to brand new teachers, and poorly presented, too. It’s tough to have to sit through three hours of reading strategies when you’ve been teaching it for several years already. The last day was a little more interesting because it focused on cultural information about the Yup’ik people, but we were both glad when it was over.
We flew out of Athol that afternoon with E, our next-door neighbor, also a new arrival here, as well as OFL and his wife K (you understand, we’re trying to be super careful about confidentiality here – not so much for our principal or neighbor, but for the kids and families.) Between the five of us, the pilot and our bags, the tiny charter plane was completely full. B and I sat in the back. I had my eyes firmly shut for the takeoff, but eventually I was able to look out the window a bit. The river delta is amazingly beautiful – first of all the tundra, it’s mostly flat with small hummocky hills here and there, and when you look out at it you can’t believe how many shades of green there are. Then the river off in the distance, and everywhere pools, lakes, ponds, streams, so that it’s hard to tell where the river actually ends and the land begins, or if what you’re looking at is land with water in some parts, or water with areas of land in it. So everything is green, and blue, and then the clouds of course, and as you look out the window of the plane you can see the clouds moving over you in the sky and under you in the watery stillnesses.
So anyway, I was doing okay, keeping the nausea at bay with mint gum and mind control, when OFL said, “Look – musk ox.” The pilot decided to help us out by circling around the spot, making sure we all got to see. That did it – I was over the line into complete misery, alternating between feeling like I was going to hurl and like I might pass out. I tore yet another piece of gum out of the package, unzipped my jacket, tried to squeeze my head down between my knees, and managed to avoid both.
We landed in The Village (yes, that’s how we’ll be referring to it, that confidentiality thing again) after about an hour of this torture. Actually, by the time we got close enough to see it from the air, I was feeling pretty good. The Village is sort of a Y-shaped area, with the right side (if you’re looking at it from the Bering Sea) on a spit of land with the sea in front and the river behind, and the left side moving upland and inland. It’s in a small bay, with hills curving out on either side into the sea. Altogether there are about 350 people here, 110 of whom are students at the school. The houses are mostly pre-fab, rather dreary looking. In fact the nicest building by far is the school, which dominates the view here. It’s a big, bright blue building up on top of the hill with a large cupola (which OFL tells us has been an engineering disaster). Directly down the hill, accessible by a long flight of wooden stairs, is the teachers’ building, which used to be the school when it was run by the BIA. Our apartment does have a sort of classroomy feel to it, probably due mostly to the large chalkboard in the entryway and the brand-new carpet, which is identical to the carpet in both our classrooms. It’s nice enough though – it has a fridge and a giant freezer, a brand-new stove and couch and bed, and more than enough space, three bedrooms in fact. Which is useful, because it means we get a room to share and then each get our own space too, something we got used to back in Portland.
Thursday night we were busy unpacking all our boxes (well, not all, we’re actually still waiting for a few) and I couldn’t believe it when B told me it was 9:55. To look out the window you might have thought it was 5 or 6pm. The sun didn’t go down until about 11:30, and it wasn’t fully dark until well past midnight. It’s made it hard to go to bed our first couple of nights here.
Friday we came up to the school for a while (which is where we are now, it’s the only place we can get good internet access at the moment) and checked out our rooms. The school is nice, and I say that relative to other schools I’ve worked in, not relative to my expectations of what bush school would look like. Like any school, the classrooms have a sort of disorganized, summery feel to them, the result I’m sure of teachers packing up and moving from one classroom to another. My classroom is at the end of the elementary wing, with two small windows that look out over the north side of town and the ocean (I think it’s north. I’ll have to confirm). Because it was the music room at one time, it also has a soundproof practice booth, which I am still trying to figure out how to use (suggestions welcome). B’s room isn’t really a room yet, he’s waiting for some walls to go up, but I’ll let him tell you about that.
Yesterday we also took a walk around the village with E and our other neighbors, H and G. H is a teacher at the school and G is her husband, he’s from another village not far from here. The kids came running from around the village to meet us. We walked to the post office, on the far end of town, where there were a few more packages waiting for us (including one from my parents – thank you!).
We were invited to dinner at H and G’s, and afterward we all walked up the hill in the other direction, away from town, to where the stone people are. They don’t really look like people, just big cairns, but they’re imposing nonetheless. They’re near the edge of the hill, and the wind is wild up there. We stopped along the way to pick tiny berries (they call them crowberries or blackberries, but they don’t look like our blackberries back home). From the cliff you could see how much farther the sun still had to go before it would set.
Later last night we tested out our new soymilk maker (round one was failure as B put in two whole cups of soybeans rather than use the cup that came with the machine, round two is cooling in the fridge as we speak, I’ll let you know) and again got to bed too late. However this morning I slept till ten, so I’m feeling well-rested for the first time in about a week.
There’s more to say but I’ve gone on for a while, and I want to let B say some of it. We’ll try to post pictures soon. We’re doing well. We miss Portland for sure and already last night I was feeling the stirrings of wanting to go out and do something. Only there’s nowhere to go and nothing to do. Trying to plan for that so it doesn’t make me crazy. It helps that this place feels foreign and new, and that it’s beautiful.
We flew out of Athol that afternoon with E, our next-door neighbor, also a new arrival here, as well as OFL and his wife K (you understand, we’re trying to be super careful about confidentiality here – not so much for our principal or neighbor, but for the kids and families.) Between the five of us, the pilot and our bags, the tiny charter plane was completely full. B and I sat in the back. I had my eyes firmly shut for the takeoff, but eventually I was able to look out the window a bit. The river delta is amazingly beautiful – first of all the tundra, it’s mostly flat with small hummocky hills here and there, and when you look out at it you can’t believe how many shades of green there are. Then the river off in the distance, and everywhere pools, lakes, ponds, streams, so that it’s hard to tell where the river actually ends and the land begins, or if what you’re looking at is land with water in some parts, or water with areas of land in it. So everything is green, and blue, and then the clouds of course, and as you look out the window of the plane you can see the clouds moving over you in the sky and under you in the watery stillnesses.
So anyway, I was doing okay, keeping the nausea at bay with mint gum and mind control, when OFL said, “Look – musk ox.” The pilot decided to help us out by circling around the spot, making sure we all got to see. That did it – I was over the line into complete misery, alternating between feeling like I was going to hurl and like I might pass out. I tore yet another piece of gum out of the package, unzipped my jacket, tried to squeeze my head down between my knees, and managed to avoid both.
We landed in The Village (yes, that’s how we’ll be referring to it, that confidentiality thing again) after about an hour of this torture. Actually, by the time we got close enough to see it from the air, I was feeling pretty good. The Village is sort of a Y-shaped area, with the right side (if you’re looking at it from the Bering Sea) on a spit of land with the sea in front and the river behind, and the left side moving upland and inland. It’s in a small bay, with hills curving out on either side into the sea. Altogether there are about 350 people here, 110 of whom are students at the school. The houses are mostly pre-fab, rather dreary looking. In fact the nicest building by far is the school, which dominates the view here. It’s a big, bright blue building up on top of the hill with a large cupola (which OFL tells us has been an engineering disaster). Directly down the hill, accessible by a long flight of wooden stairs, is the teachers’ building, which used to be the school when it was run by the BIA. Our apartment does have a sort of classroomy feel to it, probably due mostly to the large chalkboard in the entryway and the brand-new carpet, which is identical to the carpet in both our classrooms. It’s nice enough though – it has a fridge and a giant freezer, a brand-new stove and couch and bed, and more than enough space, three bedrooms in fact. Which is useful, because it means we get a room to share and then each get our own space too, something we got used to back in Portland.
Thursday night we were busy unpacking all our boxes (well, not all, we’re actually still waiting for a few) and I couldn’t believe it when B told me it was 9:55. To look out the window you might have thought it was 5 or 6pm. The sun didn’t go down until about 11:30, and it wasn’t fully dark until well past midnight. It’s made it hard to go to bed our first couple of nights here.
Friday we came up to the school for a while (which is where we are now, it’s the only place we can get good internet access at the moment) and checked out our rooms. The school is nice, and I say that relative to other schools I’ve worked in, not relative to my expectations of what bush school would look like. Like any school, the classrooms have a sort of disorganized, summery feel to them, the result I’m sure of teachers packing up and moving from one classroom to another. My classroom is at the end of the elementary wing, with two small windows that look out over the north side of town and the ocean (I think it’s north. I’ll have to confirm). Because it was the music room at one time, it also has a soundproof practice booth, which I am still trying to figure out how to use (suggestions welcome). B’s room isn’t really a room yet, he’s waiting for some walls to go up, but I’ll let him tell you about that.
Yesterday we also took a walk around the village with E and our other neighbors, H and G. H is a teacher at the school and G is her husband, he’s from another village not far from here. The kids came running from around the village to meet us. We walked to the post office, on the far end of town, where there were a few more packages waiting for us (including one from my parents – thank you!).
We were invited to dinner at H and G’s, and afterward we all walked up the hill in the other direction, away from town, to where the stone people are. They don’t really look like people, just big cairns, but they’re imposing nonetheless. They’re near the edge of the hill, and the wind is wild up there. We stopped along the way to pick tiny berries (they call them crowberries or blackberries, but they don’t look like our blackberries back home). From the cliff you could see how much farther the sun still had to go before it would set.
Later last night we tested out our new soymilk maker (round one was failure as B put in two whole cups of soybeans rather than use the cup that came with the machine, round two is cooling in the fridge as we speak, I’ll let you know) and again got to bed too late. However this morning I slept till ten, so I’m feeling well-rested for the first time in about a week.
There’s more to say but I’ve gone on for a while, and I want to let B say some of it. We’ll try to post pictures soon. We’re doing well. We miss Portland for sure and already last night I was feeling the stirrings of wanting to go out and do something. Only there’s nowhere to go and nothing to do. Trying to plan for that so it doesn’t make me crazy. It helps that this place feels foreign and new, and that it’s beautiful.
Monday, August 3, 2009
We are now in Alaska
We arrived in Anchorage this morning at midnight. We went to the scuzziest hotel I've been to for 4 hours of sleep. Then we flew to the "city" where the district office is. I forgot my fleece on the east coast. If you found a black, zip up, Northface fleece it's mine. Please send it priority (it's only 46 degrees here right now).
The inflight movie on the first leg (to Salt Lake) was the new Star Trek. That was S's intro to that world. I thought it was excellent (you know, for what it is). The second leg of the trip featured "My Life in Ruins." We watched "Watchmen" on the laptop instead. The old biker guy sitting next to us got into a fight with his wife. She found a different seat for most of the flight. He had a very odd way of moving wherein he did not move very much but when he did his movements were very fast and violent. Anyway.
We're in the district office now. There were a bunch of us on the last leg of the flight and they picked us up at the "airport" (just a warehouse as far as we could tell). We filled out a bunch of paperwork (even though we sent them voluminous amounts of paperwork already), got our computers (new MacBook Pros- one each!) and now we are waiting to be driven to the hotel.
I think we're going to try to find some food now- no meals since 4 PM yesterday (and that was a bad burrito at the airport in Boston). Three days of district training and then we go to the village on Thursday night.
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