other

Six days off the island, 350+ miles on my jeep, good times with some great friends (thanks for the food and hospitality, jason and heidi and carl and janet and dorothy johnson!). It was great and it’s wonderful to be back on the island, albeit two days late. We got to fly direct from nome, which means an absolutely beautiful hourlong low altitude helicopter flight, complete with extremely low mountaintop fly-bys and swooping and banking through arctic valleys.

And not a moment after I step off the chopper one of our super energetic 3rd graders nails me with a flying bear hug. Life is good.

..and tonight? Hours of lesson planning and organizing? Kinda miserable.

but part of the deal, and it’s a good deal.

Life is good.

other

And sometimes after a day that breaks me the next day is just a bit better, enough to get by on for one more day.

funny, other

*see the post below before you read this one

Provisional Teaching Certificate: 200+ hours of study, work, homework up to date, and two more years of study

Moving to the bush: $1000 of food at Costco + $300 shipping

Teaching science: many, many hours of lesson planning

Coil of magnesium ribbon: $27 + $15 s&h

Combustion pre-lab and lab lesson planning: 6 hours

Setting off the school fire alarm with my middle schoolers despite doing our lab right next to an open window: priceless

other

It looks something like this:

-explain oxidation / combustion

-explain what’s needed for combustion

-light a nail (fail)

-light a candle
+what’s happening?
+cover, remove oxygen–>stop combustion by removing an essential part

-why can’t you light metal?

-light a magnesium strip w/clip (let it burn out)

-re-explain what is combustion? why does magnesium combust?

-kids hypothesize: can magnesium burn w/o oxygen?

-explain why you need to polish the magnesium

-light magnesium, cover

-kids write conclusion

epilogue: light a bunch of magnesium and drop it in hot water (IMPORTANT: near open window)

other

What delicious snack did I just partake in?
a can of ravioli and a can of pineapple

Dinner last night:
ramen, canned beans, fried span, canned oysters, and canned peaches.
(that one was a little bit abnormal–sent my gut for a bit of a ride)

Breakfast when I have the day of lesson plans 100% ready (less common):
oatmeal with dried blueberries and coffee

Breakfast when I don’t (more common):
1 tin of vienna sausages and 1/2 a can of peach halves

Average dinner:
beans, scrambled eggs (from powder), and a biscuit

other, stories

I suppose there’s a good reason that the ‘great books’ are called great. East of Eden was incredible.

And I feel that a man is a very important thing–maybe more important than a star. This is not theology. I have no bent towards gods. But I have a new love for that glittering instrument, the human soul. It is a lovely and unique thing in the universe. It is always attacked and never destroyed–because ‘Thou mayest.’

-John Steinbeck

diomede, photography

halfway break
sea grass (or maybe sea flower?)
sky’s big when you’re up top (look hard, right in the middle of the sunbeam, those little bumps, that’s mainland Russia)
of course, once you’re up to the top of little diomede island, there’s a wall to climb.
it’s a long way to the top, if you wanna rock and roll. mr. moses knows how to rock and roll.
climb to top, climb the wall, enjoy the wind and the air clean as a whistle and the view of the USA and Russia, and the wild. and the microwave tower.
“I love smiles.” ~The Dalai Lama. I think ‘ol Dalai and Catherine would get along.
lets go home
other

You know that feeling two thirds of the way through a great movie or book when you feel the story coming together, the pieces find their places, the characters find their strides, the story picks up, things start to get good..yeah, that feeling.

I’ve got it burnin’ in my bones and man oh man does it feel good.

home sweet home

Editors note: the last post, albeit true, was a wee bit deceitful. My actual commute is a long staircase down a rocky hillside, at the very far side of the picture above, which was taken from the helicopter that dropped us five teachers at Diomede yesterday.

other

So we all sit down one day and Oh hey, one of us got this crazy idea: lets make a model of the universe! And for now we’ll keep it simple, stick with just our galaxy and the Horsehead Nebula. Good? Good.

Here’s how it goes down. We make little models of the planets, all to scale, perfect scale, and we lay them out on a round table. How big were the planets? We used perfect scale…the sun, you can hardly see it, but we managed, made it happen. The sun is 0.015mm. Tiny bright yellow speck in the middle of the table. The planets? It was tough, but we made it happen, nicely painted and all. It was kinda tough to see ’em on the table, and what we presume to be far-larger-than-scale solar winds (it’s warm outside, so the ‘close the window’ idea got veto’ed quicker than a tea party filibusterer pork barrel bill*) kept blowing our planets all askew. So we glued them down and made labels. Easy.

And the horsehead nebula?

The horsehead nebula, in our model universe scaled to fit the solar system–home–on the top of a table, is properly located halfway between the earth and the moon. Nothing some good amateur rocketry couldn’t handle. Oh yeah! Almost forgot to mention, the model of the old horsehead, that was the hardest part. Little bit bigger than twice the size of Seattle.

*I proudly know next to nothing about politics.

stories

A lotta years ago I began to wonder if I would find myself in Alaska someday, and now some day is today and hey oh, look, I live in Alaska. Four or five years ago I began to wonder if I’d find myself teaching in a village in Alaska, and in April I signed a contract and on Saturday the wheels of paperwork began to turn..my initial teacher certificate should be here in a few weeks, the certificate that will make good my contract to go teach in an Alaskan village. It’s happening!

Day by day was the tale of the past six weeks. This “Summer Field Experience” bit of the certification program was the most intense thing I’ve done in my life. It was like the most difficult finals week I had during college, cloned and stacked five times over. Worth it? Like gold, baby, worth its weight in gold.

Learning? Well yes of course, all the things we were there to learn we did learn in spades: classroom management, disciplinary literacy (beating kids with books? why yes…in a way..sorta..but not), assessment, standards, GLE’s, strands, philosophy, lesson planning, behavior management, and oh so much more. And then some extra things too. One big extra thing, really. This: no matter how good I am at not judging, I still do. That one I learned the hard way, and I can only hope and pray that from learning it the hard way I’ll do better next time. Yeah, there’s a story behind it, even written up as my last Summer Field Experience journal entry. I wouldn’t feel ok posting it here, at least not for a while.

And now what? Four weeks of reading, organizing, planning, goofing off, and tutoring–the time will sail by–and ka-pow I get on a jet plane for the north. First to Unalakleet for some training, then a plane to Nome, then a helicopter to home sweet home, Diomede.

Day by day, one day at a time, that’s been the tale alright. But when I hit the brakes and look around I’m struck breathless by where I am and the trade I am privileged, honored and humbled to be a part of. It’s surreal, unreal and beautiful.

The best part? In five or so weeks, subtract the unreal part.

:D

other, stories

Below this and the picture are some select parts of a post by Tom Engelhardt about memorial day. Scroll down and look at the list of towns. Those are the hometowns of the soldiers who’ve died this May while on duty in Afghanistan. There are twenty two towns, each recently struck by war’s curse: the death of a loved one. Year by year the wounds heal, but the scars are forever.

It’s Memorial Day and there’s a scarred town on my heart: Bellevue, Washington.

Thank you so much, Joe. We miss you  :’-(

_________________________________________________________________________________

May is the official month of remembrance when it comes to our war dead, ending as it does on the long Memorial Day weekend when Americans typically take to the road and kill themselves and each other in far greater numbers than will die in Afghanistan.  It’s a weekend for which the police tend to predict rising fatalities and news reports tend to celebrate any declines in deaths on our roads and highways.

Quiz Americans and a surprising number undoubtedly won’t have thought about the “memorial” in Memorial Day at all — especially now that it’s largely a marker of the start of summer and an excuse for cookouts.

[…]

Count on one thing: there will be no Afghan version of Maya Lin, no Afghan Wall on the National Mall.  Unlike the Vietnam conflict, tens of thousands of books won’t be pouring out for decades to come arguing passionately about the conflict.  There may not even be a “who lost Afghanistan” debate in its aftermath.

Few Afghan veterans are likely to return from the war to infuse with new energy an antiwar movement that remains small indeed, nor will they worry about being “spit upon.”  There will be little controversy.  They — their traumas and their wounds — will, like so many bureaucratic notices, disappear into the American ether, leaving behind only an emptiness and misery, here and in Afghanistan, as perhaps befits a bankrupting, never-ending imperial war on the global frontiers.

[…]

Afghanistan has often enough been called “the graveyard of empires.”  Americans have made it a habit to whistle past that graveyard, looking the other way — a form of obliviousness much aided by the fact that the American war dead conveniently come from the less well known or forgotten places in our country.  They are so much easier to ignore thanks to that.

Except in their hometowns, how easy the war dead are to forget in an era when corporations go to war but Americans largely don’t.  So far, 1,980 American military personnel (and significant but largely unacknowledged numbers of private contractors) have died in Afghanistan, as have 1,028 NATO and allied troops, and (despite U.N. efforts to count them) unknown but staggering numbers of Afghans.

Spencerport, New York

Wichita, Kansas

Warren, Arkansas

West Chester, Ohio

Alameda, California

Charlotte, North Carolina

Stow, Ohio

Clarksville, Tennessee

Chico, California

Jeffersonville, Kentucky

Yuma, Arizona

Normangee, Texas

Round Rock, Texas

Rolla, Missouri

Lucerne Valley, California

Las Cruses, New Mexico

Fort Wayne, Indiana

Overland Park, Kansas

Wheaton, Illinois

Lawton, Oklahoma

Prince George, Virginia

Terre Haute, Indiana.

As long as the hometowns pile up, no one should rest in peace.