Done

We woke up Sunday morning before the alarm, and started our final load of laundry. We spent the morning kind of puttering around in a sort of rushed way, making sure everything was clean and packed. B had made the last trip to the post office on Saturday, with our final 2 boxes (we'd hoped to send back somewhere between 12 and 15, instead we got all the way to 20), so everything left in the apartment was either going in the trash or coming with us. But once we were completely packed, and the apartment spotless, there was nothing to do but wait and hope for the fog to clear. It was back and forth for a while - the sun would almost break through, then the haze would gather on the hills again - but finally, about 90 minutes after it was scheduled to, our plane landed and we left the Village for the last time.

As OFL drove the Honda through the muddy, melty streets, I felt a wave of sadness at our going. We waved good-bye to the people we passed, our students and neighbors, and at the same time that it was painful to think that we'll most likely never see any of them again, still I was so happy to be leaving. It was a hard year.

What finally helped us decide to go was the thought that, if we didn't go, we might always wonder what it might have been like, and maybe regret that we took the easier road and kept on doing what we'd been doing. I think that argument still holds, it was an experience like nothing else I've ever done. Also, I know that between the classes I was taking and the challenges my students presented, my teaching grew significantly. Besides those two rather vague, general comments, it's much too soon to reflect on what our year in Alaska meant, or how it changed us. I guess that understanding will unfold slowly.

It's strange and a little sad to be here, in the city we've thought of as home for the past 10 months, and not be able to actually go home yet. The plan, though, is to fly back to the east coast today, visit our parents for a few days, then drive back to Portland, visiting some friends along the way. I don't know B's plans, but I don't think I'll be posting about that trip on this blog. We called it ten months in Alaska, and that's what we did.

I wanted to say thank you to everyone who sent us packages or letters, or stayed in touch by phone or email. Contact with our friends and families and the real world helped us feel content and connected this year. Especially thanks to our parents who sent us many packages, and to my friend T.G., who, since hearing in December how lonely it got sometimes, sent me an email every single weekday with a song, a comic, or something else to cheer me. But thanks to everyone who sent us love and didn't forget us. We can't wait to see you.

Last week

It's very hard to believe we're down to less than a week left. The snow is mostly melting away, but there are still big stretches of snow here and there between the BIA and school, and lots left on the beach and in the village. The river is fully open and running, and in the lower areas giant puddles of snowmelt have formed, making us very glad we went ahead and bought those rubber boots back in the fall, not sure if we'd get much use out of them. We're wading through almost-knee-deep puddles just to get to school.

As B said below, we're all packed up and our apartment is rather barren and forlorn. We're down to just a few changes of clothes and working hard to get all our end-of-year stuff done before Friday afternoon.

The kids are definitely getting more antsy about us leaving. They ask me every day, "Where will you go? Why don't you stay here? Will you come back to visit?" I don't know how to make them understand that if there was one part of this whole experience I'd like to bring home with me, it's them.

Mail Move

We have mailed 15 boxes home so far. I know this because we have lettered each one and letter "O" went out on Wednesday. We have a spreadsheet with the dates each box was sent, the way it was mailed and whatever tracking information we put on it. We also listed the contents of the boxes. We have lists of what we're leaving here that we need to buy when we get home, what we need to pack to ship home before we go and what needs to end up in our bags to bring with us. We have one more box to ship that is mostly empty right now. It's going to contain any last minute items that we have not yet remembered or been able to send already (such as my French press and our rubber boots). There's nothing on our walls, we're using the few pots and pans we found at the apartment when we got there and I'm down to 4 shirts and three pairs of pants. Internet and phone are cancelled. Mail forwarding is in place. We're ready to go. (This is not to say that we don't leave with some sadness. I'm just illustrating that we're ready.)
My hope is that the weather stays warms so the snow melts enough to make using a 4-wheeler easy. Right now we've got a mix of slushy snow and open ground making neither snow machine nor 4-wheeler a very good option. Last weekend I snow machined to the post office with the sled attached and two passengers in tow. We got stuck in the dirt right away and then the sled detached on the way back. I'm hoping the ride this weekend is easier.

A little more about spring and my birthday

5 days into it, 30 is going pretty well. My birthday was a fun day. I woke up to a present (a tradition I got used to as a kid and which B has continued to indulge) and pancakes, then came up to school for a few hours. Luckily, Friday was a work day for teachers, no kids, so I was free to go when I needed to, which I did around 10, when my dad arrived. Amazingly, he made a Boston-Phoenix-Anchorage-Athol-Village series of flights with no delays, and arrived just when he expected to. He was super excited to be here, but after I put him to work organizing math worksheets, he got really tired and headed back down to the BIA for a nap. I did a few more hours of work, then headed home, too. I spent the rest of that afternoon finishing up the 6 batches of cookies I'd started the night before, then B got home and my dad woke up right around the same time.

B made dinner, then a handful of my students came over to bake one final batch of cookies and play some Wii, which was really fun and extremely giggly. B trying to teach 5 little girls Wii bowling is really a lovely sight. I opened my presents from B and Dad, and at 8 the other teachers, along with OFL, came over for cookies.

It was a little sad to not be around my friends and family for my birthday. It was great to have my dad here, and obviously B, and the other teachers are all nice people to be around, but all the same I would've preferred to be in NH with my parents and B, or in Oregon with my close friends. I suppose it just means I'll have to have belated celebrations in each of those places when I get there.

Dad stayed for the weekend, and we went on lots of walks around the village. He especially liked the store and went there several times. I don't think he ever quite adjusted to the time difference, especially the midnight sun. He got to meet some of the kids, and stopped by my class one last time on Monday to say goodbye before heading back down to the airport. From what I hear, he had kind of a wild time getting back - a missed flight here and a delayed flight in Anchorage - but is now safely home. It was fun to have him visit and really helped break up the time. I'd been looking to his visit not only on the face of it but also because I knew once we got to that weekend it would mean only 2 weeks left. We are unabashedly counting down the days at this point, and there aren't many left to go.

This Thursday there's a dinner for the seniors (all 4 of them), and then they graduate on Friday. Next week we have 3 full days, then a morning for clean-up and a community feast, and that's it! Next Friday is a final work day and I think some of the teachers are flying out that night. We're leaving that Sunday (or, if the weather is looking bad for Sunday, that Saturday).

I think there'll be more time for reflecting on the year as a whole as the end gets closer, so I won't do it now. But I am definitely feeling a pull of two emotions - super-happy-can't-wait to get back to the Lower 48, and very sad to leave the kids here.

One more thing about spring: it's muddy. Over the last week or so the daytime temperatures have been in the high 30's to low 40's, and the snow is melting like crazy. The river's been looking less and less solid in the middle, and today I looked out the window and noticed that it's fully open. The sea ice is still there, but you can see where it opens past the bay. There are huge puddles, small ponds almost, in lots of inconvenient places, like right outside our front door, and right at the bottom of the steps leading up to the school. Our rubber boots are in full effect.

I'll try to get some spring photos (and a shot of my over the top cookie spread) up soon.

Turning 30 in Alaska

When I was 21, I had to take an astronomy class at City College with a real, live, famous astronomer, Michio Kaku. I remember the day he told us about how Isaac Newton had basically mapped out the laws of the universe by age 23. I remember thinking, wow, I'm in my 20's and I haven't done anything remotely approaching that.

Last night, with exactly one day left in my 20's, B and I were watching a TV show with Stephen Hawking in which he tossed off this little gem: "In my twenties, I spent about 3 weeks doing some new calculations on black holes." Which provoked a little discussion among E, B, and myself as to how we were spending/had spent our 20's.

I never did do anything in the neighborhood of discovering universal laws of nature, or even something as mundane as discovering new things about black holes. I did, however:

Become a teacher
Marry someone who should have been way out of my league
Move to Portland
Get a degree, and then get another one
Have a crazy Alaska adventure

Lots of other things, too, like making friends who I really, really love, and reading lots of wonderful things, and learning to play guitar, and becoming a doula, and I guess if I sat here long enough I could probably come up with about a million tiny, medium and big things that I've done over the past 10 years that are pretty awesome.

I did a lot of truly, purely, incredibly dumb stuff too. I'll leave that for another post, or maybe not.

I'm not afraid to turn 30. My hope for the next ten years is that, in relation to my 20's, I do less dumb stuff and more awesome stuff.

And now, let the wild rumpus start!

On the Farm

Our Fearless Leader has a proto-farm going at his place.  He was out of town this weekend so I took care of feeding the animals.  There are two rabbits, a few chickens and a dog team.  Here are some pictures:

These are the chickens.  I didn't have to do any thing for them actually.

The rabbits.  The things hanging from the cages are their water bottles.  They froze the day before OFL got back.

Here is the water bucket.  It froze over every night so I had to chop it up with an ax before I could fill up the bucket to bring to the dogs.  

It got really cold by the last day with the wind blowing really hard.  That said, it was sort of enjoyable to feel like a rugged outdoorsperson.  Not enjoyable enough for me to want more animals at my house though.

  

Grades vs. Phases

In this school district we have something called the continuos progress model also known as the phase system. The phase system was created so that students could move at their own pace as they progress through their education. There are 19 reading phases, 19 writing phases and 24 math phases. Once you pass all of them you are done. You could finish when you're 16 or you could finish when you're 21 or never. You might finish all of your reading phases but take another two years to finish your math phases. Again, the idea is that a student can move at her own pace.

There's a lot that is good about this. Students are grouped according to ability rather than age, social promotion is bypassed and specially designed instruction - the method of delivering special education services - is built into general education classes.  (This is usually a real problem elsewhere.  Here it's a non-issue.)

Downside is that if the students don't pass the phases (this means passing quizzes in math, completing a particular set of pieces for writing and demonstrating certain skills in reading) then they don't move up to a new grade level. This has resulted in 15 year old students in 5th grade (normally 11 year olds are in 5th grade) and very few students graduating at 18. Also it has led to a great deal of "teaching to the test" in math. Students learn a skill well-enough to pass a short quiz but often don't understand the underlying concept which leads to problems later down the educational road.  Also, you might have students in 4 or 5 different phases in one class making instruction very difficult.

Students here often tell me that the grade system is easier which is why I, and almost everyone I know, graduated at 18. I have often told them that I would have graduated at 16 in the phase system. The debate has been, "Which one is easier?".

Typing this I realize that the phase system would probably be easier for me because I was motivated and held accountable by my parents (and of course, was taught in my first language and the language spoken in my house). In addition, the expectation of my community and most of the community I grew up in was that college was necessary so high school graduation was a must. Here, some students are expected to do well in high school but very, very few people in this community have attended college. The upshot is that many students move very slowly through their phases because there's no real worthwhile goal at the end of high school (because there are so few jobs here) and little expectation to do be successful at school coming from the community.

There are other factors at work here too: drug use and drinking are problematic.  Plenty of kids in my high school drank and smoked pot but for the vast majority of these students they kept their partying to the weekend. Not so here. Many students are up very late every night making school success very difficult the next day. Also, the kids are bored. They don't have to participate in subsistence activities most of the time and there's not much else to do. Bored teenage students without the expectation of school success is a pretty good recipe for failure at school. Finally, the school has a rotating cast of teachers experiencing 30-50% turnover per year.
This is all to say that the question of Grades vs. Phases is not answerable.  My circumstances (and the circumstances of most of my classmates) were such that we were set up for school success.  The circumstances here are quite different.  There's no comparing beyond that.

I have been tagged

I'm not much, usually for chain letters or anything that seems sort of chain letter-ish. However, this is my first time being tagged (by ecocheapo, whose blog you should definitely read), and that's sort of exciting, so I figured I'd go ahead and...what's the verb for doing the thing you were supposed to do according to the tag? I've no idea.

The original tag is simply "7 Random Things About Me" but in keeping with the theme of this blog, I've changed it slightly to "7 Random Things About Me in Alaska"

1. At B's insistence, I've started writing nearly every day.
2. I never thought I'd turn 30 during the winter, but it's shaping up that way.
3. I've never been very good with new languages, even romance languages with their cognates and consistent vowel sounds, and my Yup'ik (all 7 words of it) is laughable. The problem is that there are sounds in Yup'ik I've never tried to make before, and my tongue and throat just can't work it out.
4. I like waking up at 7am better than 6am, but...
5. I hate going to the gym after work, rather than before (or even better, during).
6. I almost never get tired of B. It's actually rather amazing to me that the proportion of time annoyed at each other:time with each other is extremely low. Can I quantify? Let's see, outside of school we probably spend an average of 7 hours a day in the apartment on the weekdays, and if nighttime counts we'll call that 16 hours per day during the week, and then of course pretty much all weekend, so that's (16x5) + 48 = 128 hours together every week. B and I never really fight, exactly, but occasionally one of us gets annoyed with the other, or we have a disagreement that becomes an argument, and estimating very roughly I'd say that probably happens between 1 and 2 times every 2 weeks, so we'll call that .75 times per week, and just to make it easier, we'll say that each time it lasts an hour (I don't think it ever lasts that long, but we'll be conservative). So, that would be .75 hours of bad vibes for every 128 hours together, or 0.5% of our time together. Not bad!
7. I like 13-year olds, but I like 10-year olds better.

I don't want to put anyone on the spot here, so I'm not going to out-and-out TAG anyone, but there are a couple of blogs I like, by friends of mine. Blogger-friends, consider this a gentle tap on the shoulder, rather than a tag, and if you'd like to post 7 random things about yourself, why, I'd like to read them: eric, B, Darci, and Mason Jars and Mixing Bowls (do you have a blogger name, MJ&MB?).

The End in Sight, So Warm, and Will We Starve?

Note:  I began this post a week ago and just finished it today. 

We're down to five weeks before we are done with our Alaskan adventure. We've mailed some boxes home already and we've thrown some stuff away. Also, we haven't ordered any more food for several months so the cupboards are starting to get bare. More accurately, we're running out of a diversity of food. We have tons of quinoa and jelly left but we're almost out of, for instance, peanut butter and cereal. We are still getting vegetables delivered every other week but we run out long before the next box arrives. This is all to say, the pickings are slim when dinner rolls around. The situation is as it should be as the alternative to this would be buy a bunch of food that we might not eat and then either spend the money to send it back to Portland or leave it here for someone else. We will probably try to scrounge a little food at the local stores but the shelves are often nearly empty so that can't be counted on. Anyway, no emergency but lean times ahead.  (Update:  I bought soymilk at the local store!  It was $9 but worth it. I also bought two boxes of cereal and some salsa.  Total = $25.00!)

Also, it's 41 degrees out right now. Additionally the sun is up for 15 hours (but seems longer with a drawn out twilight). The snow is starting to melt along the roads where it's thinnest but is still piled several feet in some inconveniently placed drifts.  (Update:  It's down to the 20s and more snow has been falling.  The wind has really picked up to.  When does winter end here?)

I think S and I are going a little stir crazy.  However, my job is all locked up for next year - it's different from the year before and I'll  write about it some time soon.  New jobs are being posted in the Portland area so S is on the job hunt.  Less than 4 weeks to go.

Random moments with kids

I have this one student, C, who came into my class at the halfway point of the year. She's 10 years old but seems younger, maybe because her learning disability has set back her reading level, or maybe because she's spent a few years in the transition classroom, where each year her classmates were a little younger than she. I used to work with her on a pull-out basis in the afternoon where her short attention span and weak short-term memory would drive me kind of crazy. Now that she's in my reading and writing class I enjoy her much more, I think because I've been able to adopt a sense of humor when it comes to her sometimes eccentric behavior. She often will ask or tell me things that seem like total non sequitirs. On Friday I was in the middle of a lesson on the short I sound, literally mid-sentence, when I hear her little voice: "Do you love B?"

Also, a 5th grader informed me, when I remarked on how strange it was that we'd had so little snow all winter and are now getting lots of it, "It's not spring, it's winter." When I tried to argue that according to the calendar, it was in fact spring, he dismissed me with this rock-solid logic: "If it's snowing, it's winter."

And finally, today in Math, a student picked up a laminated equals sign I'd made for a hands-on algebra lesson, wrote me a little note, and taped it to my bin of math supplies. I discovered it on the way back to my own classroom: "What will you name your son if you have 1?"

A child's mind is a nearly impossible thing to predict.

Spring

I will admit that the weather has been quite warm lately - in the 20's, even into the 30's occasionally. And I don't know if we've truly acclimated or if it's just relative, but I never thought the mid-20's would feel balmy. The other day B and I were walking up to school and commenting on how warm it felt. When we got to school we mentioned this to OFL, who said, "Yeah, it's 4 out, and no wind!" 4 degrees, people. There's something very wrong here.

Anyway, despite the warm weather, this past weekend has been our most wintry one yet. We had a major snowstorm on Friday, a real blizzard, which here means something different than in other places. When I was growing up in NH, a blizzard meant, basically, a ton of snow. Here, the term blizzard is less about the amount of snow and more about the combination of snow and wind, which on Friday night was truly impressive. The wind took the wind that was falling, along with the powder already on the ground, and whipped it around so furiously that from the BIA building I couldn't see the school at all.

Our village hosted a dance festival this weekend, and the bad weather kept a few of the other villages away on Friday - and one village that did come ended up with a few people lost on the tundra, which meant some search and rescue teams had to go out looking for them. Luckily they were found and returned safely that same night.

The snow and wind kept up, off and on, all weekend, though to a lesser degree of intensity. I'd say (and I'm really bad at estimating these type of things) that maybe another 12 inches of snow fell in all? But because of the wind, it's not distributed evenly - instead there are patches of grass that are bare, just feet away from snowdrifts that come up to my waist. It's a somewhat surreal landscape. On the south side door to the BIA building, the drifts must be 7 or 8 feet high. Up on the hills, though, the warm weather has started melting the snow away.

Even though we hardly got any snow this winter, what little we did get stuck around, since it never got warm enough to melt. Now that it's warm enough to melt what's here, apparently mother nature would like to make up for her lackluster winter efforts. Hopefully the warm temps will prevail and this snow won't last. I'm sick of winter. Especially because every time I hear anything from anyone in the lower 48, they're having beautiful spring weather.

Perhaps because of all the changes in the weather lately, or maybe just due to bad luck, I've got a nice little sinus infection going - runny, sore nose, nasal voice, pressure headache, all that lovely stuff. Another reason to hope that something resembling spring arrives soon.

Statewide Testing: System Failure

This week our school is engaged in that beloved educational traditional: high stakes testing. This is the third state I've taught in so I have a small amount of perspective on what constitutes rational testing procedures. The procedures in Alaska, in my experience, are utterly irrational.

This week, all students from 3rd through 12th grade will be tested. (Tenth graders and higher are exempt if they have already passed their high school equivalency test in previous years. Otherwise, they keep taking that test until they pass.) Tuesday is reading, Wednesday is writing, Thursday is math. Fourth, eighth and tenth graders also take the science exam given on Friday. Right away one can see this is problematic. Cramming all of the high stakes testing into one week doesn't provide the students with the best chance of passing or even demonstrating what they have learned.

The tests are not timed but the students are expected to keep working on the day's test until they finish it. You have to apply to the state department of education in order for a student to be allowed to work on a test over multiple days. Students take any where from 2 to 6 hours to finish their tests. I don't think you can reasonably ask any student to work on a test for more than a couple of hours and expect their best work from them.

The instructions that accompany the test require that no one leaves the testing room until all students in the room have finished the test. If we need a bathroom break, we all take the break together in silence with one person entering the bathroom at a time. I'm supposed to lock the room to secure the tests while we're away. In the morning when I get to work I have to sign out the tests and when I return them the principal signs them back in then locks them in the safe. So test security is important to the test makers and this is good. However, all of the tests are in one book. This means that on day #1 a student could theoretically look up the math test questions then spend the next two days reviewing the necessary math. The most vigilant test proctor wouldn't catch this because no one inspects the test page numbers that a student is working on. I don't think this happened at all in my room but it could have.

In sum: 3 or 4 tests in one week, the expectation to work on the same test until completion in one day, one shot to pass each year = fail.

I didn't like the testing scenario in New York when I was there but at least the tests were spread out over a couple of days so that you could maximize the amount of concentration you got from a student. Additionally, the tests in different subjects were spread throughout the year so you didn't have one miserable week in which everyone experiences testing fatigue and wished we could have a regular school day.

Oregon has a much more reasonable testing schedule in my experience. First, all testing was computer based (with paper and pencil tests an option for all). No tests get lost, no worries about security and instant results for reading, writing and science. Also, the tests were truly untimed. You could take more than a week on a single test in order to work on the it a little bit each day. This was a boon for my students who were quick to be frustrated, had short attention spans and/or had experienced a lot of failure at school. (I taught in a program for students with behavior disorders.) Finally, you had multiple chances to take the test each year. If you passed, you were done. If you didn't, you could try again a couple of months later. The best results were kept from all of your attempts and it was easy to track growth or regression.

Conclusion: My experience with testing in Alaska leads me to determine that this is an example of epic failure when better options are at hand.

Wildlife

I've had two run ins with wildlife in the last couple of days. On Saturday the musk-ox herd was visible from the village - just a mile or so away up the hill. The hunting season was over so three of us decided to have a walk up the hill in order to get as close as we could. It was a nice day for a bit of a hike - about 5 degrees with no wind. Even before we got going the herd had moved further away. Throughout the hike they kept moving further and further up the hill. Twice when we were very close to them we spoke too loudly and they took off galloping in the opposite direction. We finally got to the top of the hill (two miles or so) where there is a plateau so we could see them even when they moved away from us. They all stared at us as we approached. We stopped about 100 yards away - maybe less. There's only 40 or so in this herd (which is about half of what they were two months ago prior to the hunting season) and they grouped up like they were circling the wagons. We watched each other for a while until it got cold at which point we slid back down the hill to home.

Today was a different type of run in. I was walking from my classroom to the office about 30 minutes into the start of the day when a parent who was carrying a large plastic tub said I should follow him because he had something I've never seen before. When he got to the 4th/5th grade classroom he opened the tub to reveal a baby spotted seal. Apparently it had been inside its mother when she was killed yesterday. It was white with some gray mixed in and had gigantic black eyes. Apparently the fur will turn brown later but for now the white acts as camouflage. The kids were amazed at its huge eyes and they took turns petting it. They were told that the seal would be sent to Seward where it would be raised and then brought back to The Village in about six months to be released (assuming it survives captivity).

I know it's 80 degrees in New England but we've got a baby seal in the school and musk-ox nearby. Take that.

New Podcast is up

The newest podcast (Every Atom #3) is available now. Enjoy.

Back to Athol

B, E, and I are off to Athol this afternoon for a final district-wide inservice for first year teachers. The district has set it up so that it coincides with a big dance festival, so we decided to stay in town an extra night. We're leaving right after school today and will hopefully have some good pictures to share when we return.

Also, we promise to have our new podcast up by sometime next week.

A postscript to yesterday's thoughts

I realized after posting yesterday that I was mixing up some facts and some generalizations, and leaving out some things, too.

First of all, when I say something like, "Everyone bottle feeds," that's not really a fully accurate statement. I have no idea what everyone does. I can report that I've never seen anyone breastfeeding, but what do I know? Maybe there's some cultural taboo against breastfeeding in public and maybe everyone is feeding their babies breastmilk in a bottle.

Second, B pointed out that we have little idea of what our students eat at home. It could be the case that they get mostly nutritious meals at home, and it's only at gatherings that all this unhealthy snacking is going on. In either case, it's still distressing to see a community consume so much unhealthy food, but I certainly don't have the full picture and shouldn't pretend to.

Third, the consumption of unhealthy food is a result of a number of events, most significant among those being the presence of western culture. I can assure you that no Yup'ik person ever smoked or chewed tobacco, or drank soda, or ate M&M's, before the qassaqs arrived. To me this doesn't serve as an excuse for parents to let their kids eat lots of unhealthy food, but it does create a more full context for this problem, and shares the responsibility around.

And speaking of sharing the responsibility around, we also need to look at where the food is coming from - not historically, but currently. Both stores in town sell nearly all processed foods, which includes tons of soda and candy. And guess what's for sale at the school store? Soda and candy - oh, and chips. And if it's a special event like a movie night, we'll throw in popcorn and ice cream, too. I find this especially terrible coming from the school. The stores are out to make a profit (and it's not within the scope of this blog post to tackle the myriad problems of capitalism), and candy and pop sell. The school store has a greater responsibility, to my mind. I know that trying to sell fresh fruits is a difficult if not impossible proposition here, but I'm certain we could replace chips and candy bars with dried fruit, pretzels, or graham crackers. Still processed foods, yes, but so much better. Then there's also the fact that in this state (I don't know about other states or federal law) recipients of public assistance can spend their food stamps on snack foods like soda, chips, and candy.

My point is, there's a lot of nuance here that I think I missed last night.

Yuraq

I went to a yuraq (dance) festival with M, one of our fellow teachers and neighbors, this past Sunday. Actually the festival was three nights long, but I only went for one night. M was planning to drive over each of the three nights, since the festival was only in The Bay, about 7 miles from us. She did go on Friday, and I planned to go with her on Saturday, but we had major wind gusts all day and that afternoon M came by to tell me that the temperature was dropping as low as -50, and she wasn’t going. So we went on Sunday instead. We left here at about 5:30, and got there very quickly – before 6. The ride over was a little scary, as I’ve only snow-machined to and from the post office and the airport, rides of 5 or 10 minutes each (and when I say “I snowmachined” of course you know I mean “I rode on the back of a snowmachine that someone else was driving.”) This ride was pretty fast, and in parts kind of bumpy (I think it’s especially bumpy when you’re on the back) and I don’t know, I think it being a new experience made it a little extra scary.

When we got to the school in The Bay (which is much bigger than ours, The Bay being a village more than twice our size), it was pretty empty; apparently we’d gotten the starting time wrong and were an hour early. M and I got some good seats in the gym and over the next hour it filled with people from 6 villages. Most of these villages host their own festival, and each one brings a big crowd, with some people traveling up to 5 hours to attend. Lots of kids and families from our school were there. People were getting ready with headdresses and qaspeqs, or buying snacks or raffle tickets. Around 7 things got going. Before each village danced, an elder from the village (or 2 or 3) would give a little talk. I don’t know what the talks were about as they were all in Yup’ik, but from a little translation I was able to squeeze out of the student next to me, one was about loving and taking care of your children, and another was about speaking Yup’ik to prevent it from dying out. I know that one was about religion, as there’s no Yup’ik way to say “Jesus Christ,” but other than that, the talks were lost on me. I like listening to Yup’ik though, so I didn’t mind. It’s got a rhythmic, active sound to it. Anyway, finally the dancing started, and I’m sorry to say that after about an hour I started to get kind of bored. I’m sure that if you know a lot about Eskimo dancing, each dance seems special and unique and interesting, but for the uninformed, after a few they all begin to look and sound alike.

Each village danced for about an hour, and though the evening was decidedly more formal than the impromptu dance that was held here in our village in the late summer, just after a funeral, it was still pretty casual. People from other villages could join in and drop out at any time, and the point seemed to be as much for personal enjoyment as public performance. I don’t say this as a negative thing, on the contrary I like this aspect very much and I wish more performative art were so open.

It was much more interesting for me to watch our village dance. Many of our students joined in, and now that I know a fair number of parents and other adults, I definitely felt more of a connection than I had the last time I was in the audience. Also, M was one of the dancers for our village, which is kind of a neat thing. She was the only qassaq (non-native) dancer to perform all night. I took a lot of pictures and video, which I’ll try to upload at some point, though our Internet connection is prohibitively slow for that kind of thing.

Anyway there were two main things I took away from the experience. One was this real split of emotion. On the one hand, it’s a truly beautiful thing to see an old tradition like this being celebrated and handed down and really loved by everyone – elders, grown-ups, teenagers, down to the littlest kids and babies. It’s particularly sweet to watch a pre-teen or teenage boy or girl, especially if he or she has recently mouthed off to you, completely lose their awkwardness, inhibition and practiced aloofness, and dance. Then on the other hand when I looked around, everywhere I saw the same things I always see at gatherings: everyone chewing tobacco, pounding chips and candy bars, and washing that down with cans of pop. It’s distressing how unhealthy people’s eating habits are, especially when we’re talking about tiny kids, 2 or 3 years old. You know I have never seen a baby breastfeeding the whole time we’re here? Everyone bottle feeds – how crazy is that? I can’t even begin to guess how expensive formula must be here. Anyway, the eating gets me down, and so does the chew, because it seems like a pretty straight path to bringing up a whole generation of unhealthy kids, which, if you’re trying to preserve a culture, doesn’t seem like the right way to go about it. It’s painful to see the culture being so loved and taken care of on the one hand in the form of dancing, and so callously tended to on the other, in the form of the children.

On a completely different note, the second stand-out for me was the insanely terrifying ride home. Please don’t misunderstand me, I’m certain that M is a great snowmachine driver and that my mortal terror had nothing to do with her competence in that realm. I think it was a combination of factors: the extremely late hour (about 1:30 am) and the knowledge that no matter what time I got to bed, the alarm was going off at 7; the darkness (again, 1:30 am); the cold (not terrible, but not pleasant either. Strangely, the part that got the coldest was my thumbs. Is that weird?); the bumps (hard to see coming because of the darkness); the trail (mostly okay, but in some places little more than ice over dead tundra grass); and the speed – yes, I’m a big wimp, but I’m telling you, with all those factors in place 40mph begins to feel more like 80.

Like I said earlier, the dancing did get boring after a while, but I kept reminding myself, “Very soon this will be in the past and you will probably never see anything like it again,” and that helped. In about 2 weeks B, E and I are going to Athol for a district in-service that coincides with a big, international dance festival there, and then in April our village will hold a yuraq festival, and then that’ll probably be it.

Podcasts that I Have Known

When I can, I listen to a lot of public radio. Unfortunately, there's no radio up here of any kind and you can't stream radio over the Internet because our connection is not sufficiently robust for that kind of thing. So I've turned to podcasts. Podcasts started out as a sort of "audio blog" about 12 years ago. In 2000, a program was written so that you could automatically download podcasts when new episodes came out. In the same year, the idea of a "podcatcher" (automatically downloading a bunch of podcasts that you are subscribed to) was developed. Apple's iTunes incorporated podcatching into its software in 2004. That's when podcasting took off. Fast forward to today and I've got the means to stay sane and feel somewhat connected to the rest of the world.

Here are the ones I listen to:

1. This American Life - This is an NPR show that is the most popular podcast in the country most weeks. There's not much more I can tell you about this one because you probably know it already.

2. Stuff You Should Know - This is from How Stuff Works. On the weeks when This American Life isn't the most popular podcast, this one is. The two hosts present 20-30 minute episodes with titles like, "How Do Lobotomies Work?" and "What Exactly is Facism?". Good times.

3. Radio Lab - Another NPR radio show. This is the best thing on radio in my opinion. Radio Lab is a science podcast brought to you by a science writer (Robert Krulwich) and a musician (Jad Abumrad). These guys take advantage of all of the possibilities of radio. Radio Lab is an hour long and they only do 10 or so shows per season because the shows are made with so much attention to detail. However, if you subscribe to the podcast you can hear shorter episodes that they produce in order to hold you over between regular episodes.

4. The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe - This is a podcast produced by the New England Skeptical Society. This, like Stuff You Should Know, strikes a really nice balance between being well-produced (though not with the production values of This American Life or Radio Lab) while also feeling homemade. The SGU is an hour long show about science and skepticism with the mission of fighting pseudo-science and the belief in the paranormal as well as educating the public about science. Pretty nerdy but I like it a lot.

5. Planet Money - This is produced by This American Life. It's usually about 20 minutes and comes out twice a week. These guys make the housing crisis, the economic downturn and other complicated economic issues clear and interesting.

6. Science Friday - Another NPR show that airs Fridays. A general science show that fans of science already know about, I'm sure.

7. Are We Alone? - It just keeps getting nerdier. This is produced by the SETI Institute. Rather than being a bunch of nutty UFO believers, these are scientists and skeptics who produce a show that has much less to do with ETs than you might otherwise think. It's mostly just a general science podcast. The hosts are totally willing to be completely foolish to help make the show interesting.

8. Cory Doctorow's Podcast - Doctorow is an author and digital rights activist. In his podcast he mostly reads stories and novels he's currently writing. I like his writing a lot and listening to him read his own stuff is pretty great.

9. Wire Tap - This is a radio show from the CBC hosted by Jonathan Goldstein. Goldstein is a regular on This American Life. The show features people that Goldstein says are his family and friends. Sometimes it seems like they're actually those people just being natural and sometimes it seems like they're actors working from a script. Strange and funny.

10. The Moth - The Moth is a non-profit organization that conducts live story-telling events. Each podcast is one story told live in front of an audience with no notes. They are sometimes hilarious, sometimes terrifying and sometimes sad. Each one is only 15 minutes long or so.

There are many more podcasts I listen to each week but these are my favorites. I'd love to hear about any others that I should be listening to. Of course, when we get back to Portland I'll probably go back to listening to the radio and cut down on the podcasts.

Some Useful Companies

Here's a short list of some of the non-obvious companies (obvious being Amazon, iTunes, etc) that we have ordered stuff from in order to make this year more comfortable. You might find some of these companies useful whether or not you live in rural Alaska.

Full Circle Farm: This is a CSA from Washington that sends boxes of fresh, organic fruit and veggies to remote areas of Alaska. Every week we get a box of food that we could not get otherwise. It's not cheap and it doesn't always come on the day it is supposed (due to the weather here, not because of them) but it is always awesome.

Azure Standard: This is a bulk health food retailer. They deliver all over the western part of the US and also ship. We ordered most of our dry food from these folks: pounds and pounds of soy beans, almonds, quinoa, etc. The website claims they only ship UPS but they will ship USPS which is far cheaper (and the only option here).

Vegan Essentials: These folks carry all kinds of vegan products: shoes, food, clothes, bath & body stuff, etc. Most importantly they will ship cold and frozen food. We ordered margarine and some soy meat stuff from them.

Fred Meyer Alaska: These guys also ship cold and frozen stuff in Alaska. They tend to take forever to get it out the warehouse but we were able to get frozen fruit for smoothies, veggie burgers and frozen vegetables.

Vegan Chocolate of the Month: This was a birthday gift from S to me. Usually I'm more of dark chocolate and nothing else kind of person. But these chocolates are amazing. They also do non-vegan chocolates.

New Podcast

The new podcast is up and available. Enjoy.