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.