Muktuk...a local Eskimo treat. Whale skin and fat.
This week started off with an inservice day. I love inservice days. We had about 3 hours worth of meetings, but the rest of Monday we had to plan for the week. It’s nice to be able to get ahead of the game a little.
The honeymoon phase is over. The kids are starting to act more like themselves and we’re having a few more discipline problems than the first two weeks, but overall it’s still going well.
Thursday night we had an open house. All the teachers had to be at the school from 6:30-8:00 pm. The entire village was invited to come meet the teachers, have dessert, and hear the principal speak. I haven’t gotten any feedback from our principal and have no idea what he thinks of me. However, he did introduce me as the “dynamite science teacher”. I guess that’s good. I only had a handful of parents actually come meet me. It was a pretty relaxed evening. The bad part was that it took my usually planning time and I definitely didn’t feel like lesson planning for the next day after 8:00 pm.
Since you couldn’t attend the open house yourselves, Tim and I decided to take some short videos of our classrooms so you can see where we spend 70 hours of our lives each week.
Tim and I (and the rest of the teachers) seem to be getting burnt out from all the extra hours of planning. Friday morning we got to the school around 7:00 am and the power was out. One by one all the teachers trickled into my room to sit around and talk. Everyone was stressed out that their lessons weren’t going to work. They didn’t know what to do, but it seemed no one had the energy to think of a solution. The power did come back on about 8:30, so our lessons could go on as planned.
Power outages have been all the rage this week. The power has flickered on and off several times a week since we got here, but this week it has been going off for 3 or 4 hours at a time. Saturday morning it was off when we woke up. We had no electricity or water. It came back on around 10:30 and then went off again right as we started to make lunch. This morning the power went out in the middle of sacrament meeting. Tim and I waited about 15 minutes to see if it would come back on and then headed to the school in hopes we could use the phone there. Unfortunately, the power was off there too. So church was very short and sweet for us today.
From zero to three . . . Last weekend I finally got a key for my 4-wheeler! I ordered two keys from Anchorage. This involved pulling the ignition out of my 4-wheeler to get a number for the order. I tinkered around for about an hour trying to get the ignition out. Finally I gave in and asked Tim for help. I also called Warren for help and finally went next door to ask a fellow teacher, Greg, for help. Greg just popped it right out! Anyway, the point is that the wires on my 4-wheeler could no longer handle being pushpin-hot-wired. I was going through several pushpins a day, since they were melting on every 4-wheeler ride. Friday morning of last week, Theo, the middle school math teacher came to me with a 4-wheeler key and explained that last year she had borrowed my 4-wheeler and had lost the key. She couldn’t find the key anywhere, so the previous owner had just used her spare key (the one I lost promptly after arriving). Theo had just reached in the pocket of her jacket she had apparently not worn in a very long time and discovered the long last key. That afternoon I received my two replacement keys from Anchorage. So in one day, I went from zero keys to three keys. Although, I was very grateful that Theo found the original key since my replacement keys were cut wrong. I had to send them back to be recut.
The honeymoon phase is over. The kids are starting to act more like themselves and we’re having a few more discipline problems than the first two weeks, but overall it’s still going well.
Thursday night we had an open house. All the teachers had to be at the school from 6:30-8:00 pm. The entire village was invited to come meet the teachers, have dessert, and hear the principal speak. I haven’t gotten any feedback from our principal and have no idea what he thinks of me. However, he did introduce me as the “dynamite science teacher”. I guess that’s good. I only had a handful of parents actually come meet me. It was a pretty relaxed evening. The bad part was that it took my usually planning time and I definitely didn’t feel like lesson planning for the next day after 8:00 pm.
Since you couldn’t attend the open house yourselves, Tim and I decided to take some short videos of our classrooms so you can see where we spend 70 hours of our lives each week.
Tim and I (and the rest of the teachers) seem to be getting burnt out from all the extra hours of planning. Friday morning we got to the school around 7:00 am and the power was out. One by one all the teachers trickled into my room to sit around and talk. Everyone was stressed out that their lessons weren’t going to work. They didn’t know what to do, but it seemed no one had the energy to think of a solution. The power did come back on about 8:30, so our lessons could go on as planned.
Power outages have been all the rage this week. The power has flickered on and off several times a week since we got here, but this week it has been going off for 3 or 4 hours at a time. Saturday morning it was off when we woke up. We had no electricity or water. It came back on around 10:30 and then went off again right as we started to make lunch. This morning the power went out in the middle of sacrament meeting. Tim and I waited about 15 minutes to see if it would come back on and then headed to the school in hopes we could use the phone there. Unfortunately, the power was off there too. So church was very short and sweet for us today.
From zero to three . . . Last weekend I finally got a key for my 4-wheeler! I ordered two keys from Anchorage. This involved pulling the ignition out of my 4-wheeler to get a number for the order. I tinkered around for about an hour trying to get the ignition out. Finally I gave in and asked Tim for help. I also called Warren for help and finally went next door to ask a fellow teacher, Greg, for help. Greg just popped it right out! Anyway, the point is that the wires on my 4-wheeler could no longer handle being pushpin-hot-wired. I was going through several pushpins a day, since they were melting on every 4-wheeler ride. Friday morning of last week, Theo, the middle school math teacher came to me with a 4-wheeler key and explained that last year she had borrowed my 4-wheeler and had lost the key. She couldn’t find the key anywhere, so the previous owner had just used her spare key (the one I lost promptly after arriving). Theo had just reached in the pocket of her jacket she had apparently not worn in a very long time and discovered the long last key. That afternoon I received my two replacement keys from Anchorage. So in one day, I went from zero keys to three keys. Although, I was very grateful that Theo found the original key since my replacement keys were cut wrong. I had to send them back to be recut.
Akutaq: eskimo ice cream. The white chunks are crisco.
Tim and I have had a few interesting foods since we arrived here: akutaq (a-goo-duk), muktuk, and bear. I’m not very good at spelling in Yup’ik, but I looked up all the spellings, so I think they’re right. Akutaq is “eskimo ice cream”, traditionally it is berries and fish mixed in seal oil. The more modern akutaq is berries, sugar, and crisco and sometimes fish. It has no resemblance to ice cream. It’s not even served frozen. It’s bearable, but not good. Muktuk is whale blubber along with the skin. The skin is about 1/2 an inch thick, bluish-black in color and has the consistency of an eraser. The blubber is very chewy, salty, and a bit fishy. I don’t feel like I need to eat it ever again, but apparently, it’s quite the treat. We’re told by some Alaska Natives (not to be confused with Native Alaskans), that bear is disgusting. I guess that you never know when you’re going to get a pocket of fat or very tough meat. Tim and I were lucky. We ate a very young bear and there were no fat or tough meat surprises, but it was very bland. We added lots of pepper and salt.
