It's the little things in life...

When you live in the bush, it's the little things in life that become important.

Last night, Lindsey invited me over for dinner.  She had gotten a head of cabbage, and made corned beef and cabbage.  It's amazing how tasty that cabbage was!  And cabbage is one of those veggies that doesn't have a lot of nutrients or flavor.  But...oh man...was that a gourmet meal!

The ability to go to the store and get something as silly as birthday candles is also something that you don't think about.  For Rick's and Lindsey's daughter's birthday, we didn't have any candles.  So what do you do?  There's no Wal-Mart.  There's no Walgreens.  Well...there is, it's just a $500 flight away for a $3 pack of birthday candles.  So, what do you do?  You light a lighter and have her blow it out...11 times, once for each year she is old and one more time for good luck!  Yes...that's how we roll in da bush!

Internet also is very important when you live up here.  It's a life-line to everyone from back home, all the news in the world, etc.  When the internet goes out...bad things happen.  A couple of weeks ago, the internet went out for a week.  We were pretty sure the village was going to riot if the company didn't get up here and fix the internet issues.

You don't realize how important the little things are (like cabbage) until they're gone.

More Tobacco Awareness

So, today I made my health class (all 6 of them) go present their videos and posters they had made to the grade 3-6 classroom.  I was highly impressed by the effort and presentation.  It started out a little slow, with mostly me talking to the kids, but the high schoolers started to pick it up and took over.  One of my star athletes talked about how smoking really effects how you play sports.  A couple of my girls talked about how smoking effects pregnant women and their babies.  They also helped the kids come up with a list of terms to use when they search on the internet for pictures (we have internet filters that block students from certain sites).


Here's two more videos they made.  Enjoy!

What Snuff Can Do to You

Stop Smoking

Tobacco Use

So, tobacco use among students is a pretty big issue here.  We have a Tobacco-Alcohol-Drug (TAD) policy for the student athletes, which means they are not allowed to use those things during sports seasons.  We've actually had quite a few students get kicked off of the teams for violating the TAD policy, mostly for tobacco products.  We've got students as young as 3rd graders being caught with tobacco.  The most common form among students is snuff (a form of smokeless tobacco).


Because tobacco (and even drugs and alcohol among some students) is such an issue, we started a Natural High Challenge.  A natural high is an activity, art form, or sport that you LOVE to do and makes you feel good inside.  It doesn't involve any drugs or alcohol.  The idea is that everyone has a natural high.  The students all made posters, depicting their natural highs, and could enter a contest for money if they wrote an essay to go along with their poster.


Also in response to the use among students, I've had my high school health class make anti-tobacco videos.  Here's two of them.  Hopefully I'll have more to post soon.

Facts About Smoking

Deadly Tobacco

And so begins February...

So, our internet has been out for a week in the village.  Which doesn’t seem like a big deal, until you realize how much you use it.  I’ve been utterly bored!  And the internet company was not helpful about getting it up and running again.  Luckily I noticed tonight, as I was doing my dishes, the pretty lights on my internet box (which sits in my window, next to the sink).  It’s funny how excited we all got when it came back on!  It’s ridiculously slow though.

It’s also been ridiculously cold up here.  Pretty sure it hasn’t been above zero all week.  The moisture from my breath freezes on my coat as I walk to work.  Sometimes it makes me wonder...

(I love postsecret.com)

Anyway, I’ve got a killer tax refund coming back to me.  Pretty excited.  Last year, I went to Oahu on my tax refund.  This year, I’m going some place warm and sunny.  I just want to lay in the sun in a bikini and thaw.

Other news in the bush:  Basketball season is in full force.  Last week both our girls and boys basketball teams went down to New Stuyahok (also known as just Stu) last week.  They left Wednesday after school.  Now, you have to realize, when there’s only 21 high schoolers in the whole school, and 15 of them are on the basketball teams, that really leaves your lesson plans in a lurch.  Especially when two of the five students that are left haven’t really attended school since January.  It also means that when 75% of your high school leaves for sports, so does 75% of the village (if not more).  This week is the Elks tourney in Naknek, which means they’ll all leave again on Wednesday.  AND, if that doesn’t draw enough of our students away, there’s also carnival in Stu starting on Tuesday.  For all of you crazy Colorado folk, it’s not like the flashing lights and fast rides carnival.  It’s more like a festival;  cultural events take place, sometimes dog-sled racing, and other fun stuff.  Anyway, anyone who doesn’t leave for basketball will probably go down to Stu for the week for carnival.  Just another week in...paradise?

And I’m going to leave you by dispelling a few myths that seem to be in everyone’s head:  

1. Alaska is not always dark in the winter.  Even on the shortest day of winter, I had 6 hours of daylight.  Right now, the sun is coming up sometime between 8 and 9ish (not sure when exactly because I'm teaching) and setting around 7pm or so.
2. Alaska does not always have snow.  This is unfortunate right now, and apparently rare.  Recently, it’s been bitter cold (think -20) and very windy.  Not the best conditions for snow.  But very good conditions to keep our 2 or 3 inch layer of deadly ice in tact.  Currently, the lower-48 has more snow than my village.  It’s irritating.
3. There’s a significant difference between “Alaska” and the “Lower-48.”  They might as well be two different countries.  It’s not something you truly understand until you live here though.

Students in the Bush

The first question I was asked for the first month that I was up here was "How are the kids different?"  And depending on the situation, would depend on which "kids" they were talking about.  Sometimes they were talking about kids in Colorado, other times it was kids in Alaska.  The kids in Colorado and the kids in Alaska are not too terribly different.  It's just different circumstances that make the kids different.  When it comes down to it, they're still kids.  Their work ethic isn't much different between the two places, they have relationship problems with the boy/girl friends, some of them have great home-lives and some of them don't, and they love sports.

Because of the circumstances of the high schools in the villages, there are a lot of students who live in other villages that come up to our school because there's no high school in their village.  They stay with extended family or live in boarding homes while their here.  The boarding home parents get paid for taking in kids, of course, and they usually have kids of their own at home.  They also have the right to send the students back to their homes if they get out of hand up here.

Education up here is very focused on the SBAs, which is the state-mandated test (similar to the CSAP in Colorado).  The SBAs here though are much more important to most of the students, staff, and parents than the CSAPs ever were for anyone I knew in Colorado.  I guess that is definitely a major difference between the two places.  Don't get me wrong, everyone knows it's important to pass your state-mandated test (CSAP, SBA, whatever) because of No Child Left Behind...but in Colorado, that's as far as it goes.  In Alaska, the students have to take an exit exam to graduate high school, which is taken for the first time at the end of 10th grade.  They are tested on reading, writing, and math, and the material is supposed to align with the Alaska state standards, which funny enough, is the same idea with the SBAs.

Most of the kids here are very technology savvy, too.  Our school district is a Mac 1-to-1 school, which means every middle school student has access to their own Mac laptop (although they cannot take it home).  Every high school student has a Mac laptop that they can take home, after they pay a $40 fee.  They end up with a lot of skills using the different programs.  We use a program called Remote Desktop to monitor the students while they are working.  We can take control of their computers, freeze their screens, or just monitor them.  Pretty cool!

All in all, the students in the bush aren't much different than students in the suburbs of Colorado.  They have their issues, but their kids...what kid doesn't have problems, right?