The Nether

Day 2:

Today started in the windy dark of Manokotak at 6:00 am. I woke up shivering as my bag of clothing, gear and sleeping bag is still somewhere in the nether. Stumbling out to the kitchen I put some Folgers coffee into the small coffee maker and hit play. I ate an orange for breakfast. With some luck I will find out whether or not my supplies will make it out to the village today. I really hope this is the case. I was able to haggle for toothbrush and toothpaste yesterday with a few oranges. At least I am not completely out of gear. Clean teeth go a long way to making one feel civil.

I reported to the school at 7:30 and walked into a relatively empty building. Herman was keying away at his computer in the office and a few other teachers were making their rounds within the school. He quickly introduced us to the staff and lead me to the room of another language arts teacher, her name was Whitney. I am surprised to find that the demographic for this school (teachers) is primarily from the Great Lake states. So far I have met three from Michigan, two from Minnesota, and one from Idaho. I have yet to question other teachers concerning what brought them here and where they came from.

The first thing that struck me about the students was that no one here seems to have a proximity bubble. Many students come right up, put a hand on, or stand directly next to a teacher. Further, the teachers don’t seem to mind the behavior. I suspect that this is just one of the facts concerning village life. It appears as though the kids are really close with the staff, closer even than staff and students of “normalized” schools. Whitney’s class was seven students, one of which arrived nearly twenty minutes late. I was introduced, and for all intensive purposes, ceased to exist after that moment. In city schools it seems that the kids are much more interested in you. The class was self directed. One of the students had lessons ready to go on Ulysses (the poem not the book), and students read, wrote notes and a summary. After the lesson students played a game, hide and seek through the entire school.

The justification for the game was that this was incredibly popular back in the time period that these kids were studying. The facts surrounding this matter are debatable, yet the out come was the same - the students disappeared into the school for about thirty minutes. While this was going on, I decided to investigate the other happenings in the school. I stopped in on the seventh and eighth grade students and watched as they read a short text in class. They all had the material loaded onto a personal computer, which was a brilliant idea. The students read as a class and also in small groups. This age range seemed to be much more receptive to an outsider appearing in the class and I was able to talk with some of them about fishing and hunting. It was in this class that I noticed a specific trend for each classroom to have a jar of peanut butter and a bag of pilot bread in them. I eagerly snarked down two crackers as I had been running low on calories out here. It turns out that the pilot bread is for students as a sort-of breakfast program. They had incorporated jelly into the program but the kids ate it like candy and the supply has run itself out.

After this class period I decided to nose around the school a little more, I talked with a few of the students that I saw, although most were reluctant to speak with me. The school out here is split up into several different wings. A wing for elementary, a wing for secondary and a specific nook for tech, head start and a culture class. I watched a physical science class conduct a lab on constant velocity in the gym. It doesn’t appear that reading directions is a standard practice out here in the bush. Getting the kids to actually focus on a task and read the simple directions appears to be quite a formidable task. After the science lab, I sat in on the head-start’s gym class. It was something to see about ten little kids run like crazy around the gym floor.

Even here, the kids are much more self guided than in normal school setting. I think that this is an area I must explore more upon returning to Fairbanks. I discovered three frog bean bags within the treasure chest of toys for the toddler’s gym class. I picked them up and began juggling which, within seconds, cause all of the kids to stop what they were doing and group around me. I think I made quite a few friends in that class period and had several play catch with me and other games like. “look at me.” Speaking with the head start coordinator I was given a run down on the village and asked several questions about whether or not I planned on staying.

Fortune has shined on the expedition yet again, our bags have arrived today so we are no longer hungry. It is a marvelous day indeed. The rest of the day at school consisted of milling around and checking in with the other classes. Not to much exciting to report we have arrived smack dab in the middle of testing week. Everything seems to be geared to test prep. Lunch in the cafeteria was better than what we feed our kids back home. Chicken noodle soup with cheese bread, pilot bread cracker, milk and pineapple pieces. I have been directed toward acorn peek, a mountain I plan on climbing this weekend in my spare time. I hear that it takes approximately four hours, seeing that I haven’t really done this in a long time, Im going to give myself a liberal six. I have to collect the snow shoes and ski polls for the excursion later in the day.

We have also managed to set up our internet servers to accept the wireless routers. It seems to be working well enough. Scratch that - we can’t access the websites we need to so .... Yah..... more on this tomorrow.