College, my job, and some thoughts on culture

When I was applying to NYU, I had a choice in housing between traditional dorms and apartment-style dorms. On my housing form, I originally checked off apartment style, imagining myself in some hip, loft-style Greenwich Village spot, but when my older sister suggested that this might make it hard to meet people, I crossed it out and checked off traditional instead.

I was placed in an apartment style dorm anyway, and my sister’s prediction turned out to be true. I didn’t really click with the other 4 girls in the apartment, and on our floor, everyone kind of kept to themselves. It wasn’t until much later, when I met B, that I realized that other people at NYU were having radically different experiences in the dorms. In B’s dorm, everyone’s doors were open, people would pop in to one another’s rooms just to say hi or hang out, and most people on the floor knew each other.

After two years at NYU, I switched to City College, which didn’t have any dorms, so I lived in apartments for the rest my time in college. And it’s one thing I’ve always been sort of sad about, that I never had that traditional college dorm experience. Which is why I find that I’m really enjoying life in the BIA (our housing unit – it used to be the school when it was administered by the Bureau of Indian Affairs). If we’re up for visitors, we keep the door open – if not, not. While our door is open, people come by to say hi, drink tea, invite us over, offer us cookies, play Wii, or anything else. At first this made me a little uncomfortable. Now, though, after a few weeks, I love it.

My job is turning out to be different from what I expected, in both good and bad ways. Even though I teach reading, writing and math in the mornings, I don’t really feel like a regular classroom teacher. I only teach the first two hours, reading and writing, in my own classroom, then I switch with another teacher for math, since I have different (bigger) kids – my tables and chairs are too small for them. Then, for the rest of the day, I’m on Special Ed duty. So, I feel more like a specialist than a classroom teacher, and I don’t love that. I don’t feel like I’m able to cultivate the same kinds of relationships as when I had the same kids all day. I find that I don’t care as much about my classroom – it doesn’t feel as important to make it cozy and homey, since no one spends that much time there. On the other hand, my days are certainly easier – I have more prep time and fewer lesson plans than the other teachers, and since I’m not a homeroom teacher, I don’t have to worry about taking attendance or handing out forms or establishing coming in or leaving routines. All the same, I think I prefer the more traditional elementary school classroom teacher job I used to have, and I miss it. But maybe it’s just that I’m transitioning – maybe by the end of the year I’ll be totally sold on doing it this way.

I also wanted to say a few things about culture, since B has been writing some interesting stuff here on the blog. He’s definitely right about how many things are unfamiliar to our kids. When we come across new words, we first have to see if the kids know that word in English, and then, if they do, do they really understand what it means. It can make reading choppy, and it’s hard for the kids to comprehend a story when you have to stop a bunch of times and explain things.

But beyond just the language barrier and the isolation, there’s such a huge cultural gap between us and the native people here. It’s something I’m actually having a hard time with, and I’m curious to see how my thoughts and feelings about it evolve over the year. My main reservation is this – when I read about what this culture used to be like, before the arrival of westerners (or outsiders or Anglos or whatever term you prefer for non-natives), and compare that to what the culture is like now, and think about what was gained and what was lost, it seems to me that the losses far, far outweigh the gains. And even though I didn’t cause that change, by being here, especially by being here as a representative of something as fundamentally western as the American public educational system, I feel like a part of it, and right now that’s not a good feeling.

B disagrees with me, and points to the many things that the people here have gained as a result of western contact – access to modern health care, electricity, plumbing (somewhat), technology like snowmachines and guns and ATVs that make hunting and gathering easier, and perhaps most significantly, access to other cultures, places, and ways of life. That last one is the only one I find truly compelling. It’s certainly the case that, prior to western contact, people would have only one choice for their lives. Now, they can choose – stay in the village and continue the (sort of) traditional way of life, or leave. And what’s interesting about that is that even kids who absolutely do not succeed in school can still have a successful life here. As long as they can hunt, and fish, and pick berries, they’ll survive. And for people whose abilities may be limited to the extent that they can’t practice those subsistence activities, the network of extended families that exists here pretty much ensures that everyone will be cared for. But, if someone wants to leave the village, they are really going to benefit from the content and the form of education provided here at the school.

Still, that being said, to me as an outsider, the losses seem tremendous. How do you sum up the loss of a way of life? Here are things that didn’t exist in the village prior to western contact: alcoholism, drug abuse, plastic, gasoline, litter, soda, Catholicism, pollution. In many villages, the traditional dances were stamped out by Catholic and other Christian missionaries, as well as the masks and traditional spiritual beliefs. In our village, dancing exists, although in a much changed form, but the masks are gone and everyone is Catholic. And in a larger sense, one of the native presenters at our inservice training talked about how, prior to western contact, there was a balance preserved among the human, natural, and spiritual elements. Western contact disrupted that balance. Maybe it sounds a little new-agey, but you can see it and feel it – at least, I think you can. Here we’ve dressed the people in our kinds of clothes (and taken away their mukluks and qaspaqs) and housed them in our pre-fab, single family houses (and taken away their qasgiqs) and for what? Have these things, on balance, improved their lives? If so, I don’t see it.

I don’t mean to sound bitter – I’m a complete outsider myself and may only be dealing with misplaced white guilt. Who knows – maybe by and large the native population prefers it this way. But the feeling I feel is not unlike what I used to feel, often, when we lived in New York. We could only ever afford marginal neighborhoods, neighborhoods that were often about to become gentrified but hadn’t quite undergone that change yet. And I always felt guilty, being one of the first white people in a neighborhood that within 5 or 10 years would probably be filled with white people and fancy restaurants and boutiques. Just by living there, I was helping to bring about that change. It feels sort of like that here, to a much greater degree.

I hope B responds with his own post, because I know he feels differently. We got into a pretty heated debate about this one night and it actually sort of started to become an argument, so we dropped it and haven’t really gone down that road again. And, as I said, I have no idea how my own thoughts will change. But so far, this is where I’m at.