Cookies and Caribou

Posted on January 30, 2015 by Keely

The cookie girls came by tonight. We have a weekly deal, now, which brightens up my Thursdays. This Thursday was a little different, though. When one of them had called me at school earlier, I’d expressed my regrets: I had a dinner to get to and couldn’t make cookies with them. She was sad, but we agreed tomorrow would be fine. She asked if I could bring home the schoolwork she’d missed today so that she could swing by to pick it up, and I agreed on the condition that she not stay long, since I had a lot to do.

At around six-thirty, there was a knock on the door. I was on my way out, ready to tuck my cabbage salad under my arm and run through the cold night to the school building for the potluck, but when I saw the girls’ big brown eyes peeking out through frosty tunnels of winter gear, I had to let them in. I gave the young lady her homework, and she held out her hand in its grubby glove and offered me a wadded-up paper towel.

“what’s this?”
“Fry meat! You said you wanted us to bring you some” It was indeed meat, brown and greasy in its questionable paper towel vehicle. I popped a cube into my mouth and chewed. Tender. Sweet. Unfamiliar.
“What kind of meat is it?”
“Caribou.” This was my first caribou. I spotted a long, pale hair on one of the other chunks, smiled, and popped it in my mouth.
“Really! I’ve never had caribou before. It’s good!” I said, chewing.
“I’ll tell my auntie you liked it. Let’s go.” (this last to her sister)
“Wait, let me give you something.” I went to the cupboard and pulled down a treat “You guys will have to share, and this has to be a secret because I don’t have enough to share with everybody, but this is something special my parents sent me from Maine. You can only get caribou here in Alaska, and you can only get these in Maine, so it seems like a fair trade. It’s called a whoopie pie.”
“what is it?”
“Chocolate cake with frosting sandwiched in the middle”
“Yum. Thank you.”
“you’re welcome, girls. Thank you so much for sharing with me”

I should have said mahsi’. It’s the only word I know in Gwich’in, so I should start putting it to work.

They left and I finished throwing my cabbage salad together and flew out the door, savoring my last chunk of fry meat. It really was delicious, but that wasn’t the biggest reason for the grin on my face.

Schoolteacher Snapshots

Posted on January 26, 2015 by Keely

Right now I’m lurking in the other secondary classroom while the kids play on the internet. Every Monday the P/T (principal/teacher) opens up the internet for the kids to surf freely. They come in to download music and movies and to play games that they can’t usually play. Wednesdays are gym nights, and, on Fridays, we project a movie on the smartboard and make some pizza or popcorn. With only 30 kids in secondary, it’s no big deal to make snacks for all of them and to cram them all into one room for a reward.

I like that. It’s something I could never have done in Arkansas. Sometimes at P-dub, I had thirty kids in one room for instruction. Here, it’s unusual to have more than ten.

Last Friday, I filled in for Jake and ran movie night. I had to turn some kids away at the door for bad behavior during the week, and I swear they spent two hours banging on the doors and shining flashlights through the windows. They wouldn’t leave us in peace. If we’d been anywhere else, I would have called the cops just to scare them, but here there are no cops, and I didn’t have parent contacts for any of them. I gave up on chasing them off every few minutes and went with ignoring them, which worked after a while. They left the deck trashed and me steaming mad, but I guess it goes to show how much that one little privilege means to them.

When it’s fifty below, attendance is optional for kids. Preschoolers don’t come, but most of the older kids show up, which has a lot to do with free hot lunch. They always come bundled up, but when it’s this cold out it’s kind of comical. Nowhere else in the states would you find the majority of fifteen-year-old girls willingly wearing snowpants all day at school. They wear snowpants and boots in gym class.

When we talk about land use and industry in social studies, they always think creating jobs is a stupid reason to develop wild land.
“Can’t they just go hunting? A moose can feed a whole village!”
I swear my sixth grader said that. I try to play the other side, so, for the first time ever, I’m teaching students who think I’m some kind of oil baron tree-killer.

I got on a seventh grader’s case one day for slacking during writing. “I’m not one of your Arkansas city girls!” she said, and burst into tears.
NOWHERE else in this country would someone imagine that I’d taught “city girls” in Arkansas. I kept her during lunch and sat beside her to get a feel for what the real problem might be.
“I’m just a regular girl from a regular village” she sobbed.
She has no idea how unique her circumstances are.

In social studies, we’re studying Alaskan language revitalization. There are 20 native languages spoken in Alaska, but less than 5% of Alaskans speak a native language. The kids know that Gwich’in is a dying language, and it saddens them, but one my 7th graders is adamant that the best part of knowing Gwich’in is talking behind people’s backs. She’s not too hot to teach me. Other students like knowing Gwich’in because it allows them to connect with elders and to understand their ancestors. They found out that my name is an Irish one and asked me if I could speak Irish.
“Nope. My family hasn’t been in Ireland for generations”
“Huh. Can you do any irish dances?”

A woman pulled a wagon up to the school today, and instead of wheels it had little red skis. I asked her about it.
“Oh, in the spring we’ll put the wheels back on.”Brilliant.

Take a comfy temperature and subtract it from freezing and you’re looking at the temperature in Venetie today. My fingertips spark visibly blue on switchplates and doorhandles and the cold spills in under the door, liquid thick. The world is all cotton candy pink and blue, and the air is perfectly still (frozen stiff?) so the mountain looks close enough to touch (like the aurora last night looked like chimney smoke: I’d never believe it’s so far away) and the chimney smoke floats straight up in a pink plume and then falls back down.

Nothing that floats in the sky over teacher housing could possibly be a normal color.

Venetie Kickball

Posted on January 25, 2015 by Keely

For some unholy reason, they made me the middle and high school P.E. teacher. If you’ve ever known me, and especially if you knew me in middle or high school, you know this was a horrible mistake. P.E. is first thing in the morning for thirty minutes. The kids troop in late in snowpants and boots, and they want nothing but to play kickball, so I let them. I don’t want to pick a fight first thing in the morning, and I don’t care what they do as long as it’s somewhat physically active. I’ve resigned myself to kickball for the time being.

Kickball was a thing at my school, too, and throughout every spring there was a constant dread in my mind of the hideously embarrassing moment when I’d come up to kick and everyone would move in close, chuckling. It sounds like such a cliche woe, but it happened every time we played (and we played a lot) for the five years I attended that school. I was such a joke in all things sports, and rightly so. I really did suck. It hurt though. I definitely have some organized sports ptsd, and here I am a gym teacher. Blah.

Venetie kickball is a little different from what I was expecting when I tossed them the ball the first time. Because they have to play in their pintsized gym, and often with very few players, who range in age from twelve to twenty, the rules are modified. It took me a few days to figure out what was going on. It’s actually pretty genius: I’ve seen the kids make it work with as few as two players.

Venetie Kickball

There are six bases: the four corners of the gym, plus the two halfway marks on the long sides.
The pitcher rolls the ball from anywhere. When the pitcher has the ball, the runners can’t run.
You (almost? I think I saw it once) never get an out by tagging a base. You have to hit the runner with the ball. No head shots. They throw viciously hard, but the risk is understood. No injuries yet.
If the offense runs out of kickers, the runner closest to home is forced to run. Since the defense can’t tag bases, they have a pretty good chance of dodging the ball and making it home to kick. This is how they manage with only two players.
If it hits the ceiling, it’s an out.
If it doesn’t cross halfcourt, it’s a reroll.

When it gets hot, instead of taking off their sweatshirts and snowpants, the kids open the fire door and let the cold air into the gym. Sometimes, since the door is in the corner with third base, someone will wing the ball at a runner and it will fly through the open door into the still dark schoolyard. Inevitably, half the kids will run out and track snow all over the gym floor when they return. I saw one really great wipeout, but the girl got up laughing.

That’s pretty much it. It’s fun to watch because there are these big, athletic high school boys playing with these tiny, gangly sixth grade girls, and it somehow comes out pretty even. There are built in mechanisms that make the game work for the funny situation we have out here. I like that. It’s modified and unique like so many other things in this place.

Speed limit sign on the old airport runway. Wonder what sort of vehicle it's directed at.

Speed limit sign on the old airport runway. At what sort of vehicle is it directed? Who is supposed to enforce it?

Cookies

Posted on January 16, 2015 by Keely

I just sent four of my kids out the door, still sticky with chocolate fingers from the cookies they devoured.

This morning, my scintillating sixth grader marched up to me. “What time should I come to your house for cookies tonight?”
“This is the first I’ve heard about making cookies for you”
“So what time should I show up? 8?”
“I’m not making any promises, but if I let you in and I make cookies, you have to read to me while I make them.”
“OK. See you at 8”

She brought her sister and three friends, and they took turns reading Ella Enchanted to me while I whipped up a batch of Fannie Farmer’s chocolate chip wondercookies with oatmeal. They’re pretty cute.

They say it’s fifty below

Posted on January 6, 2015 by Keely

But I don’t really have a clue. I suit up in all my layers to trek to school (I’ve walked farther in grocery store parking lots) then peel off the bibs and the parka and the neckwarmers and the gloves and hat and get down to the business of teaching school. It hasn’t felt cold yet, but I haven’t really stopped to wallow in it or to dip my bare toes in the snow or anything dumb like that. I have been warned not to touch metal with my bare hands and to always cover my mouth and nose when I’m outside so I don’t get frostbite in my lungs.

I stopped on the walk home last night to watch the northern lights. They were green and shifty, like some sort of seaweed in turbidity, swaying in and out of view. It wasn’t a great show, but it was my first, so I reveled in it until I started to feel the chill in my hands.

My kids are delightful. They’re funny and charming and smart. I have the privilege of teaching writing, so I have them journaling a few minutes a day. Yesterday, in response to the “if I were a superhero I would be…” prompt, one girl wrote about how she would have ice powers and she would battle lava girl. She would shoot lava girl in the toes with a big ball of ice power, and Lava Girl would turn into a rock. Today, one boy wrote about something he’s proud of and told me that studying Gwich’in makes him proud and helps him understand the way people used to live.

One of my favorite things about living here is my walk home (again, think of walking across a parking lot) for lunch at noontime. The dawn and dusk spill out over the whole day, and they stain everything pink with the sideways-falling dye of light.

When you can see chimney smoke at all (most of the time it is dark outside) it is pink like cotton candy.

This is what I see when I step out of the school for my lunch break. Is it the cold that makes my eyes water, or am I simply appropriately stunned by the magnificence of the arctic? I’ll try to take some better pictures, soon.

Housekeeping item: I’m poaching the school’s internet, so I don’t have facebook. If you want to get in touch with me, send me an email or write me a comment or gchat with me sometime.