A Wild Weekend in Western Alaska

This last weekend was an eventful one. I really should be catching up on my sleep, but instead I'll catch ya'll up on our life!

It's starting to get cold around here, finally. The river is freezing up, and it has been snowing more regularly. I think this time it might finally stay, although today it rained after it snowed, but not enough to completely melt it. Here are some pictures from around the village this week.

On Thursday night our assistant principal came up to the house to tell us that due to some personal issues and politics, I would be chaperoning with Max for the middle school district wrestling tournament. I was super excited, because this was the first time I would be getting out of the village since we arrived! I was told to pack my bags, and to pack extra clothes because some bad weather was coming in (foreshadowing). I wrote sub plans for the second half of the day on Friday, because we were supposed to leave at 1:30. The weather came, and I ended up leaving at 3:00 with 8 kids, because only 9 people can fit on a caravan and Max had left earlier that morning with one more kid. We hurried up, drove up to the airstrip, and hopped on the plane. I realized I probably should have taken my airsickness medication when I got on the plane and the wind was already shaking it and it smelled like fuel. I coached five 7th grade girls through putting on their seat belts, and we were on our way. TURBULENCE. Holy cow, we were flying all over the place. The girls were screaming like we were going to die, or like we were on a roller coaster. It was a short trip, but about 5 minutes before we landed one of the girls woke up from her nap and promptly puked all over the aisle of the plane until we landed. When we landed the pilot looked back with disdain in his eyes and handed the poor girl a roll of paper towels.

I just wrote 2 paragraphs with the gory details of the weekend, then realized I probably shouldn't post it because it could come back to haunt us, but long story short, there were some serious discipline issues.

The face-off before championship matches. 

While we were in Scammon Bay there was some the worst flooding in recent history, which resulted in a sunken boat, 5 boats that floated away, a shipping container that floated away, like 30 propane tanks that settled on the runway, a flooded runway, and a pod of confused beluga whales who also almost ended up on the runway. When we woke up in the morning, the day we were supposed to go home, we found out that the FAA had closed the runway until it was repaired. Max, being the wonderful guy that he is, gathered up the boys on the team and headed down to the runway to see what he could do to help. He and the boys spent 2 hours picking up the mess, moving boats, and walking around in the snow. By the end of the day, we were able to get out of the village. Max sent me with the same 8 kids, headed home on a caravan, and he and another wrestler waited around for a 207. I thought we were in the clear, but I was wrong.

Normally that is all tundra, not water… 

He works out. 

Bering Sea flooding

Scammon Bay

That boat shouldn't be on the airstrip.

Sunrise @ 10:30

Diesel spill

About half way to Pilot the pilot radio'ed back to me and asked if it was okay that we land in Saint Mary's because there was bad weather in Pilot. I said that was fine, and figured we'd have to land for a while and then we'd get home. Wrong again. The pilot radio'ed back again about 2 minutes later, and said Saint Mary's was now out of the question, and our option was to either go back to Scammon, or land in Mountain Village. Again, still thinking we'd get home, I told the pilot to go to Mountain, because it was closer and I didn't want to turn around and go all the way back. Wrong again. We landed in Mountain and the Assistant Principal picked us up and let us know that we'd be sleeping in the library. A few hours later, Max and his other wrestler randomly showed up. I didn't think I'd have any help, so I was incredibly relieved.

We spent our third night on the floor, and were starting to feel the bruises in our old hips. We woke up bright and early Monday morning, after having emailed my lesson plans in for a sub to teach my class. About 10 minutes after we had woken up, and before some of the girls even got out of bed, they came in and told us our plane would be there in 20 minutes. Thank goodness! After a few more minor mis-haps, I flew co-pilot in the 207 with the 2 kids who wanted to go home the most, and Max and the rest of the team followed suit about 20 minutes later. We made it into Pilot, after an awesome fly-by and corkscrew landing, no one puked, and our pilot didn't even text and fly like he usually does.

When I got back, I called into school, incredibly tired, but the sub wasn't cutting it so I got asked to come in as soon as I could. When I got back, I was shocked to see… All my supplies were still where I left them, the kids were mostly happy to see me, and they actually listened to me once I reminded them that their teacher was back. That felt really good. It is starting to feel like I have better control over them as a whole. There are still those few outliers, who get sent home regularly for pulling doors out of door frames, or punching instructional assistants, but as a whole, they have been quite manageable.

Trying to be Thankful…

I know that November is a month about being thankful for all that we have, and I have so much to be thankful for…

I am thankful for having a loving family that taught me to be a respectful and kind adult through modeling those behaviors from day one.

I am thankful for having someone by my side day in and day out who understands my frustrations, and helps me to be positive even when I don't want to be.

I am thankful for a job that pays me enough so that I can live how I want to, regardless of how frustrating that job might be at times.

I am thankful for the opportunity to live somewhere so different from the place I call home, and I am thankful for all that I am learning while we're up here.

I am thankful for being home in my warm house, after a good day at school, but a very frustrating evening.

On another note....

Max and I have been encouraged to partake in cultural gatherings by many people, especially the postmaster, Abe. He is one of the elders who is in charge of eskimo dancing. This is what eskimo dancing is, even though its from a different area:

By the way, today was a beautiful day, and Max and I had a wonderful afternoon walking around in the sunshine. 

A list of things I miss, and other updates too

(In no particular order)

1. My dog

2. Cheap food

3. Beer

4. My family

5. Woahink

6. Fingernail polish remover

7. My Chacos

8. Temperatures above 30 degrees

9. The clothes I left behind

10. My pony

11. Fingernail polish remover

In other news…

Quarter 1 is done! Our conferences are on Monday, which means Monday and Tuesday are both short days! I haven't met many of my students parents, which means I sort of don't know what to expect but I hope that some of them show…
I also finally got a social studies curriculum, which is nice because I was really struggling teaching Alaska state history, having never been in Alaska and having never taken an Alaska state history class myself.

Overall, my classroom is getting a bit easier to manage. I've had some help from the administration, and the principal gave me the go-ahead to go super strict on my class. The first day that I implemented it, kids didn't believe that I was serious, and by the end of the day I had 5 kids that had been sent home. Since then though, they believe me and have been giving me a little more respect.

Speaking of respect, one of my students punched another student's mom this week.

Halloween was great, other than having to teach kids on the day when all they can think about is candy. But we made it through! The kids all dressed up at the end of the day, and then we did a parade through the school where the 6th graders picked up the 5th graders, and then they all came and picked us up, and then the parade continued through all the other classrooms (except through kindergarden, who the parade leader forgot about) and into the gym. There were judges who picked the best costume from each grade, and everyone took the kids pictures. It was QUITE cute.
Around 4:00 the kids started swarming up the hill toward teacher housing, where they knew they would get the most candy. We went through 3 bags of candy, and saw some pretty cute kids, and some pretty greedy adults who had their 1 year old asking for candy, and also had a bag of their own to fill (like the kids candy wasn't for them also…).

Max and I were ninjas. He made me a duct tape sword. 

Looking at the weather widget on the side of this blog, it says that it feels like 3 degrees out, despite the fact that it's really only 26 degrees. I believe it, I just walked to the post office and the dry cold air hurt my nose. Our mudroom is officially an arctic room now, as it is about 20 degrees colder than the rest of the house. Thank goodness we have 2 doors, to keep the house a little bit warmer. This week the weather report has a low of 10 degrees, and it's also supposed to snow quite a bit in the next few days. I think we're about to have snow (for the rest of the year) finally. The natives are very confused about why it's still not snowy out. They're tired of rain, and melted snow. I'm excited to see some real snow, and some actual snow build up. Maybe we won't have to go down quite so many stairs from our house to get outside!

We're into November now, so maybe my next post will be something about me being thankful… Who knows though :)

I've been eating strange things lately.

Here's my "weird food" count thus far:

1. Moose
Fantastic, better than beef, and it's how Max and I are getting paid for our 2 weeks of coaching volleyball!
2. Stink Fish
White fish that has been aged in a cardboard box for at least 3 weeks, and then eaten raw. I tried it while I was sick and couldn't really taste it, but apparently it smells much worse than it tastes. It was sort of greenish in places, but Albert didn't care! He picked it up (with his rubber gloves on) and just started chomping away on it!
3. Seal
Today I tried seal, straight off of the rib. It tasted very gamey, and was very very tender and full of fat. I didn't particularly like it, but it wasn't terrible. They say it tastes just like muskrat. So....

I think now that they think I'll try anything, they're going to keep bringing me weirder and weirder foods. I'm game though, and I'll keep you posted. I think I might be getting offered fish eggs soon, they had mentioned them...

Here is our moose savings thus far

Life in 4th grade has been difficult this week. As you may already know, each year around this time the state of Alaska gives out PFD checks to every resident who has lived here for more than 2 years. It is around $1,000, and regardless of age you get the same amount of money. Many families have up to 11 children, so that ends up being a lot of money. These last few weeks many students have cool new toys, and things which often cause arguments in the classroom, and many families have bought new TVs, snow machines, and other things the kids are all so excited about. I have some kids who haven't been getting a whole lot of rest, and that has made it difficult for them to be functional during school.

Today, either related to this or not, I had a few too many fights, and I got hit by a student a few too many times to me make me feel like I had a good day. It was rough, probably the worst so far. It is really hard to get screamed at, kicked, hit, and lied to by students without having the power to do anything about it. 

With that being said though, a couple teachers walked in to my classroom after school, and were shocked that I had a smile on my face. Actually, they were shocked that I wasn't crying at my desk, and that they had never caught me crying at my desk. They told me tales of teachers past, who had spent a good hour crying at their desks at the end of every single day of school. They asked me how I do it, and I told them the following things:

1. I don't have feelings or a soul

2. I can put it all behind me really easily

3. It's not really my problem, at the end of the day

4. I follow the advice a wonderful coach once gave me, which is to "Fake it 'til ya make it." Meaning (to me), I might not be a great teacher right now, and I might not be able to keep my class under control all the time, but by God, until that's true, I will pretend like I am and like I can. Thanks, Jayme!

So far, so good (enough)

In other news, I changed my school laptop background from Beau (which made me miss home every time I looked at it) to a rotation of motivating and positive quotes. I recommend it, to anyone who often times feels like they never want to go to work again.

An Update in Pictures

Hiking up to the Airstrip about 2 weeks ago

Pilot from the Airstrip

Population 500 plus

Yukon Baseball

I can smell you. 

Moose nose

Porcupine skin

A moose head

A Cat, from when the airstrip was first built... 

Starting to freeze. Pre-snow

We've been cooking- Moose roast is worthy of licking the plate

Bullying, Snow, and Socialization

These last few weeks have been incredibly hectic.

In my classroom the fights and the bullying have picked up. I’ve been spending a lot of time putting out fires, and teaching lessons to help them be more positive. It seems that I’m teaching them social skills that are very similar to the social skills I was teaching when I was student teaching in first grade in Ashland. I find myself using the term “Use your words” to keep them from hitting each other with shoes, chairs, or whatever else is in their hands. A few of them are catching on, however on Thursday I asked a student if he used his words before he hit, and he said “Yeah! I said Geeze!” so maybe I haven’t explained it explicitly enough.

The teaching is getting easier because my students seem to slowly be getting back into school mode. I don’t know if I’ve explained this clearly enough though, up here literacy rates are incredibly low. One of the main factors of literacy that we don’t often take into consideration is that in the lower 48 we are constantly reading road signs, billboards, menus, as well as BOOKS, especially over the summers when there is no school. Up here, students don’t have any of this. There is nowhere for them to go to get a good book, and one teacher told me that she gave books to her students for Christmas one year, and then realized that those books were used as fire starter. The kids I know in the lower 48 are always practicing reading, whether they know it or not, but up here there is nothing to read. There are no menus in this whole village, there are no road signs or billboards, and there is no library outside of our quaint school library.

This is also a Title 3 school, which means about 90% of the students in the school are considered English Language Learners, even though they’ve all spoken English since birth. They speak a different dialect though, “village English”, which is the polar opposite of the academic English that we teach in. They ask things like “what time it is?” and “there practice?” and when they’re kidding they quickly follow their joke with “I joke.” It’s quite funny, because so many words just get dropped, and Max and I have started picking it up also. Just wait until we come home for break.

Last week, to help me be a better teacher for my specific students I attended a Constructing Meaning workshop, which is a program similar to SIOP or Sheltered English Instruction, but a tad bit different. I think it will really help my class to be more successful. The most important thing I learned is to use sentence frames when I want my students to speak or write, so they don’t have to reinvent the wheel everything they work, and it shows them the English they should be using in the academic setting, with correct syntax which is often difficult for my students.

Alright, enough teacher talk…

 

The full moon up here was beautiful

So are the sunrises (at around 9:15)

This weekend has been great. We’ve been much more social that normal. We’ve got 2 Netflix videos waiting for us, and we haven’t even had time to watch them! On Friday night we ate dinner with our neighbors Sara and Anthony, and then drank non-alcoholic beer and played scrabble. It was a wild night, and we all reminisced about our college days.

Real Snow! 

Yesterday we woke up to a few inches of snow, so of course Max and I walked across town to the store for the heck of it. It was pretty chilly. It continued to snow and then rain for the rest of the day. We got Internet of our own, which is sort of a big deal, so maybe you’ll be hearing from me more often on here. We also cleaned the house, and took our loads of trash to the dump. I drove the school truck, so that was the first time I had driven in over 2 months. Pretty exciting. While at the dump we saw some pretty gross things. Moose season just closed, so there were tons of moose parts everywhere including moose racks that people in Oregon would kill to hang on their walls. We also saw a dead dog that someone had tied up at the dump and shot, that was incredibly sad but I had to keep my cool and not make any connection with the fact that it was someone’s pet, because that’s what they do up here. Dogs live outside and are fed when the people want to feed them. They aren’t loved like a family member, dogs are just animals and at times are as disposable as the animals they hunt for food. It’s definitely a different mentality up here than in the city, you don't see people taking their dogs outside for a potty break in the middle of the night, because dogs don't come inside.

Last night we ate with Sara and Anthony again and another friend, Tom, who teaches 2^nd grade. Max and I made a moose roast and biscuits, and we played Apples to Apples and stood outside in the rain. It was a great time, and we all ended the night sitting around talking about things we wanted to do with our lives, and at midnight we sent Tom home with my book of 1,000 Ultimate Experiences and I don’t doubt he’ll pick something great and do it this summer. I look forward to hearing what he’ll pick.

Max has been working really hard too, coaching wrestling and we’ve both been coaching volleyball, and he’s been subbing almost everyday. That leaves a lot of cleaning and catching up for the weekends, because we don’t usually get home until around 8:00 and we’re exhausted from playing volleyball (which I can’t complain about). It’s definitely been a bit of a roller coaster up here. There have been really great times, in the classroom and at home, but there are also terrible days. Those terrible days are generally Mondays, so keep me in your thoughts tomorrow. The kids come into the classroom after 2 days of roaming around and staying out late. They bring problems from home into the classroom, and it is often very hard to get any teaching done on a Monday. I have really been working on spending a few hours after school settling down, so that by the time I come home I have convinced myself that I had a pretty good day, and I can be happy and relax.

I saw some wildlife on my walk to the school last weekend.

I have some more photos that won't load today, so I'll post again soon with all the photos I've been wanting to post!