Like most new teachers, I’ve spent a fair amount of time wondering if I am good enough to actually facilitate my students’ learning; I’ve been buried under new terms like: EOLs, DART, iCommunity, SIPs, HSGQE, SBAs, QAS, and that’s before even considering what at first felt like a byzantine system of standards. There have been moments when it feels like I’m drowning in a sea of work, frustration and anxiety. Thankfully though, I’ve gotten the professional and personal support that I need from my mentor and friends so that those frustrations and anxieties have been minimized which allows me to focus on teaching.

I have a better idea what I need to do in order to promote success in my classroom. There are concrete steps and goals that I have in mind and they are all small enough that none is overwhelming in and of itself; that’s important from a sanity perspective. I’ll provide better visual tracking of my students’ progress so that they know what they have to do, I’ll set clearer expectations, I’ll have a timeline published for expected progress. Most of my students are visual learners and I will do a better job catering to that.

It’s nice to have an idea of what I want to do and the feeling that I CAN make it there. That feeling certainly makes sitting in an empty classroom on a Sunday afternoon easier. It makes the noises of bush planes, Hondas and dirt bikes on their way to grand adventures less enticing. Sadly, those are adventures that I never take enough personal time to experience myself. Oh well, I suppose that after the next quarter is over, I’ll need another set of goals – might as well make that a personal set.

Yesterday two of my students came over to visit and one of them brought their little brother (who is elementary school aged) along. We’re sitting around talking and playing Wii Bowling when out of the blue, the young boy asks me, “Do you have a girlfriend?”

Unsure of how much of my personal life I really want to relate to the kids (and by extension, the whole village) I responded, “What do you think.” What followed was a rapid exchange that left me laughing hysterically:

“Yes.”
“Why do you think that?”
“Because you’re pretty!”

So there I am, a 23-year old male teacher with two female students and one male student in my apartment hanging out. And one of them tells me I’m pretty. For a split second I could almost feel the news article in the Nome Nugget announcing the end of my teaching career. Then I realized, “I’m in the Bush, he’s an Eskimo, and it’s not the girls saying this, it’s a younger boy – time to clarify.”

So, I did the only thing I could think, I shot him a quizzical stare. Thankfully, he picked up on it.

“Lots of the girls say you’re pretty! Irene, …”

And then, well, then I started laughing so hard that I didn’t catch the rest of the names.

Kids say the darndest things.

So, with this inadequate explanation (you really can’t understand it until you’ve lived it) you might understand why the fact that our post office has been closed and locked for several days because the workers left town. (Actually only two federal business days, but that follows a Monday holiday.) I don’t even have the worst of the lot by far: one teacher needs to mail her taxes in and I’ve heard of a few people who need money orders so their power doesn’t get shut off – there’s not other place to get a money order in town.

Luckily, someone showed up to open the post office on the 4:30pm flight today and they’ll be in late tonight going through the backlog. Here’s hoping that something more exciting than bills awaits me.

Sadly, Friday ended and he left without getting the heat turned on, leaving me slightly chilly. No worries though! In true Bush fashion, I’ve found a solution that makes it advantageous to live in a small apartment like mine. My oven functions as a space heater when turned on at 550 degrees Fahrenheit! A rather moisture sucking space heater, but an effective one nonetheless.

I’ve been told that he might be able to get it working on Monday. If not though, hey, it’s the Bush and one simply has to accept that heating one’s home can turn into an adventure. (At least I’m not putting a burn barrel by the window and hauling driftwood in to heat the place… yet.)

(Edit: After my principal got phone calls from the Coordinator of Ed Support and the District Superintendent, I feel like I should clarify. Things aren’t that bad for me. I live above the school, so I get a lot of radiant heat – meaning that while a little chilly at times, I’m in no danger of freezing and the problem is being worked on.)

Unfortunately for me, my last shipment from drugstore.com which contained my clippers, toilet paper, paper towels and Kleenex took a month to arrive. When it came today, I was determined that tonight was the night to give myself my very first haircut. There was no sheet whirled around me by a barber, no hot foam on the back of the neck for use with a straight razor and no wraparound mirror. Instead, there was just me, a pair of clippers, a bathroom floor and small mirror.

Needless to say, it isn’t the most glamourous looking haircut – in fact, my first thought after getting it even was, “Did I just pass out and join the Marines?” But, it’s definitely not long and unmanageable anymore; in fact – I fit in with my students pretty well.

The first thing to know about Nome is that it is the only “wet” town in the region. Alaska has what is called a “Local Option” law which allows bush villages to decide to what degree alcohol is allowed into the village. Many towns (including Shaktoolik) choose not to allow the possession of alcohol (dry); others like Unalakleet allow the importation of alcohol but not its sale (damp). It doesn’t take long very long after landing in Nome to recognize the effect this has had on the town. Let’s simply say that drunks are not an uncommon sight and leave it at that…

Nome also has a reputation as a mining town and for those of you familiar with active mining towns in very remote locations, you already know what this means. For the rest of you… Nome is dirty. Nome is dingy and one could even call parts of it ramshackle. There’s a feeling of age, but also of haste; mining booms don’t leave much time for planning, zoning laws and strict oversight.

Underlying it all is the history of the town though. Everyone knows about the, Iditarod the annual dogsled race that commemorates the delivery of diphtheria serum from Anchorage via dogsled. Fewer people know that at one point, Nome was the largest town in Alaska; that the US Postal Service refused to allow the town to change it’s name to Anvil City in 1899 or that few of the original gold rush structures have survived numerous fires and violent storms. The history is what draws me to the town, it is what makes me want to visit it again sometime. It isn’t a place I’d like to live, but a place that would be interesting to study and learn about first-hand.

Note to readers: I spent less than 48 hours in Nome, most of that holed up inside a building training. I only spent 3-4 hours exploring the town (and that was spent on Front St.), this is what my viewpoint is based upon and is therefore reflective of a short-term visitor and not someone who lives there.

I’m told it’s not snowing 40 miles away in Shaktoolik, just windy and cold, which is apparently what winter looks like there. Until later!

Well, it has been about 5 weeks now and I can clue you in on how a relationship in the Bush works. It looks quite a bit different from a normal relationship – in fact, it probably resembles internet dating in quite a few ways.

First, there are (usually) nightly instant messenger sessions to answer the all important questions that people apart usually want to know, “How was your day?” and “What have you been thinking about?” It’s an instant messenger conversation because long distance phone calls are expensive and besides, neither of us has a telephone. VHF handsets, which are common for communication in the region, can’t cover the 40 miles between the two villages, nor do we want everyone within the range of the radios listening in on idle chitchat and personal conversations. Usually, nighttime conversations are multi-tasked with cooking, cleaning or working on lesson plans.

Then, maybe once a week, usually on Friday evenings, we find two or three hours to set aside and actually talk to hear each other. Usually, I’m reminded of what a poor substitute text is for voice – so many nuances and feelings simply aren’t conveyed through words and emoticons alone. Unfortunately, copper doesn’t carry the conversation, instead it goes over an internet program called Skype, a voice-over-ip or internet telephone system – which is carried over our satellite links. And the delay between speaking and being heard is about a second, which results in a fair bit of talking over each other before someone realizes it and lets the other finish their thought.

This week – we did something new. A video dinner date using Skype. And like my mentor teacher told me the experience would be, it was one of the highlights of my week. (Along with a reminder that I haven’t had a haircut in almost two months now.) Hopefully this becomes part of our routine as it’s a better substitute for actually seeing one another regularly that we’ve found.

Before coming to the Bush, I never really thought that 40 miles would be long distance. It’s less than an hour’s drive most places – here it is a 6ish hour window of time when the plane might show up, if the weather is good, followed by a 20 minute flight. That’s after forking out $160-$200 for the plane tickets. In a lot of ways, that 40 miles is more like 400. Come winter though, snow and ice will cover the landscape and Norton Sound and I’ll be able to snowmachine there and see her instead. It is odd to think of winter as the season of mobility and travel opportunities, but that’s life in the Alaskan Bush.

Today, I was lucky enough to find a cucumber and some carrots in the Native Store (it’s right across the street from the school) and in the afternoon, I took a trip down the street and found Romaine lettuce, a tomato and some a brace of oranges in the Corporation store. All this leads to a fantastic rarity… a salad for dinner! My normal diet consists of grains and meat, so this is quite a treat.

Six months ago, if you’d ask me what I’d be doing at the beginning of August, I would not have had an answer for you. Certainly I would not have imagined the truth. Well, that is not quite the truth… I have always dreamed of at least visiting Alaska, but if I had said I would be living here, it would have been with a jocular smile on my face. It would have been the type of smile that said, “Just kidding; I’ll probably be living in the rat race like everyone else, trying to eek out a living and pay off student loans.”

Now though, well, here I am, smiling at the memory of stepping into the Detroit airport at 5:30am on the 29th of July to board the first of four flights that would take me to my new home. Quickly covering the distance between Detroit and Las Vegas (an area I had spent 45 days earlier in the summer exploring), a short layover put me on the plane to Anchorage. Two-hundred and fifty pages later, the clouds broke and the awe-inspiring sight of the Chugach Mountains became visible through my window. Thankfully, I was met at the airport by a group of Bering Strait School District (BSSD) veterans and new teachers who were participating in this year’s Welcome Wagon event, designed to help new BSSD teachers make the transition through Anchorage and prepare for their new life away on America’s last frontier.

Two days, a cancelled flight and a side trip to Whittier later, I found myself on my third flight, bound for Unalakleet, knowing that I would be in my new home before nightfall (I beat sunset by a good six hours, arriving in Shaktoolik around 6pm.) A short layover, a trip to meet a fantastic group of people at the District Office, and a serendipitous run-in later, I boarded the smallest plane I’ve ever been on for a 15 minute flight along the shore of Norton Sound.

In what seemed like the blink of an eye, I was back on the ground, being greeted by the few teachers at my site who hadn’t been on the plane with me. You know what though? It’s felt like home since my feet hit the dirt and still, almost three weeks later, it still does. And you know what? I’m having a wonderful time in “Alaska, Alaska.”