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.
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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?