I'm going to start this post off by reassuring you that I was not lost in the dark. We just started having yoga classes at my school. The yoga classes are for anyone in the community, but they are held in my school building (actually starting tomorrow they will meet in my classroom). It's a small community )not counting the 230 or so boarding students, it's a town of less than 500 people, accessible only by bush plane) and so like any small community (at least in rural Alaska) the school is the lifeblood of the community. I had only done yoga once before, a little more than 13 years ago and it was in Chinese. I'm not the biggest fan of yoga (although actually I did rather enjoy it last night), but this is the only group exercise class here in Galena (we do have a swimming pool though so I do lap swims Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings and now Yoga Tuesday and Thursday evenings).
By the time yoga ended we were approaching dark (next week when we are no longer on daylight saving time it will definitely be dark before yoga ends at 6 pm) and I needed to talk to the custodian and gather up my things before starting home on my four-wheeler. I put on my winter gear (coat and rain paints - because it isn't cold enough for my snow pants yet) since the temperature was somewhere in the teens and then went outside to start my four-wheeler and get it warming up while I finished putting on my gear (hat, gloves, scarves). I then drove about 2-3 miles home.
When I got home I reached in my pocket for my keys and they weren't there. Panic set in. I raced back to school thinking I had probably dropped them in the parking lot when I pulled my gloves out of my pocket. Unfortunately, it was mostly dark by the time I got back to school. I looked through the parking lot, but couldn't find them. I went back into the building (which was still open because there was middle school basketball practice going on in the gym). The custodian had closed my door when he finished so I couldn't get into my classroom, but I share a back porch with two other classrooms. One has the entrance directly across from mine and was clearly locked so I went to the other on. That teacher had a post-it note on the door which said not to disturb him unless you were his wife. Obviously, I'm not his wife, but I walked in anyway. He was apparently taking part in a webinar or something. I simply told him, "I know I'm not your wife, but I can't find my keys" as I walked though his classroom, through the porch and then into my classroom. I checked my desk (hoping I'd simply forgotten to pick them up) and the drawer where my four-wheeler key had been (hoping I'd dropped them when I picked it up, but no luck.
I then started driving slowly back toward home checking for my keys. Part-way there I had some other thoughts of where they might be at school (I really couldn't figure out how they could have fallen out mid-route). I went back to school, looking once more in the parking lot before going back into my classroom (I had left the door cracked open just in case) and checked on the floor around my desk. I thought, "maybe I missed my pocket altogether." Still, no keys. I pulled the door shut and drove home at 10 mph searching the ground the whole way. The further I got the larger the pit in my stomach grew. I got home and knew I had to find our how to get a new key because I couldn't get into my apartment. I live in a building that use to be the officers' quarters when it was an air force base and the students from the boarding school live in the next building in what used to be the enlisted mens' quarters. I walked over the student dorms and explained what happened to the front desk and asked the lady working there if she knew who I needed to talk to. She did and his office was just down the hall (the answer was the director of residence life). By this point it has been more than an hour since I left school the first time. I'm cold, hungry (it's 7:20 pm), frustrated and depressed. Luckily, the director was able to find another set of keys (both front door and my suite), but he did have to walk over there with me (not that he complained a bit).
After I got into my apartment, I sent my principal a text message telling him that I had lost my keys. My heart was in my stomach. He never answered and I don't think I slept too well last night. This morning while I was swimming I could feel the tension in my shoulders. After getting to work I went to talk to my principal. He was really cool about it and really calmed me down. He asked me what keys they were and what they looked like and then told me we'd try to find my keys and if we didn't we'd get me some more keys. I still wasn't happy about losing my keys, but at least the panic subsided.
My principal asked me where I thought I had lost them and I told him that I thought they had probably fallen out of my pocket in the parking lot when I took my gloves off, but in the dark I couldn't find them. He said what I'd been thinking which was to check the parking lot once it got light again. Unfortunately, school starts at 9 am (I start work at 8 am) and this time of year it isn't light yet by 9 am. However, partway through first period he came into my classroom and tossed me my keys. I started to ask where he found them, but then I realized there was still snow and water on them.
I was so happy to have my keys back! What had started as a rough day became a good day. We had an early dismissal (at 2 pm) and then a community Halloween Carnival (in the school gym) from 3-5. I don't live in an area where people can go trick-or-treating, but apparently all the local kids go. One of my friends had invited me over to pass out candy at her place, but after yesterday I was too tired and so I didn't go (plus I'm presenting about China tomorrow night and so I will have a really long day tomorrow and still have to finish preparing my presentation).
Wednesday, October 31, 2018
Tuesday, October 2, 2018
Sometimes you just have to be flexible
This morning I went into work and was expecting it to be business as usual. I had my mind on what we were going to do in my chemistry class, but when I walked into my classroom I saw a couple of test papers sitting on my desk. The tests were for a World Geography class and one of my academic support students had taken them yesterday. I decided I should immediately get them into the interdepartmental mail (World Geography is taught on our other campus) and so I went to the office to do that. I'd never sent anything via interdepartmental mail before so I asked the principal how to do so. He was speaking with the assistant principal, but that isn't an unusual thing so I didn't think anything of it. He told me the drop box was in the district office so after I filled out the envelope (I did know how to do that it was more that I didn't know where the envelopes or the drop box were), I headed to the district office. I asked the ladies there where the box was a popped it into the bin. Then my day began to change.
One of the ladies, C, told me that we had no water and wouldn't for at least six hours. I replied that I'd been at the doctor's office one time when they lost water and had to shut down. Surely, as a school we couldn't, by law, have school without water. I, then told me that in the past when we were notified in advance school was canceled. C and I told me that they would still have to work, but they thought school would probably be canceled. I went back to my classroom to work because no matter what happened, I had plenty of work to do.
As I was working I got an alert of my watch. It was through my app for the local radio station and it said, "No school at SHS in Galena today due to water issues." At first this excited me because I could really use an extra day off. Then I went to talk to my coworker, K. We hadn't heard anything official yet, but she suspected we would have to go over to the other campus and hold classes there. That didn't seem possible to me, but I started think we might still have to do something on the other side (that's how the campuses are always referred to as this side and the other side, depending on where you are when you say it).
I went back to my classroom to continue working and then a few minutes later the principal came in to officially tell me the plan. We would go over to the other campus and basically babysit the kids when they didn't have classes for the other side. He asked me if I had any educational movies that would still hold the students' interest and I said I had The Boy in the Plastic Bubble. So I was going to head over there soon and pick up the movie on the way (I actually live in an apartment on "that" side).
Now you might be wondering, "didn't she post about a message saying school was canceled?" Well, I did, but it isn't that simple. The elementary school (prek-8)was canceled. The high school is actually two schools run sort of like they are two schools, but at the same time run like they are one school. Officially in Galena we have two schools (the Galena City School District also runs a boarding school and some of those kids live in Galena as well): Sidney Huntington School (the aforementioned SHS) and Galena Interior Learning Academy, better known as GILA. SHS is a prek-12 school for kids who live in Galena. GILA is a public boarding high school for students from anywhere in the state of Alaska. While the campus in town gets called SHS and the campus that was made from an old Air Force base gets called GILA the reality is the high school students enrolled in SHS and the high school students enrolled in GILA attend classes together and on both campuses. Thus, there are two issues with canceling the high school classes: 1) Only part of their classes are without water and 2) 230 of our 265 students live in a dorm. When they are not in class they have resident advisors and dorm aides who look after them. However, since this was a scheduled school day they are almost all off duty (there's one who runs the wellness room for sick kids and someone who runs the front desk, but otherwise it's an empty building during the school day). There's nowhere we can send them "home" to if we cancel school.
Thus, I took my papers and my computer to the other campus. I had just arrived and was about to head to my apartment to get my DVD when my principal stopped me. Change in plan. He'd had students asking about where I was because they wanted to ask questions on how to do academic things. He decided he was going to set me up in the dining hall and have me help students during the periods that they had me. Unfortunately, I had brought no books nor whiteboards (I have individual whiteboards that I use a lot during academic support since in academic support I am helping individual kids with whatever they need help on, mostly math). The dining hall director had a big easel pad of paper (because the GILA side is an old Air Force base the buildings are all separate buildings so the dining hall isn't next to any classrooms) and the art teacher was going to be working in the dining hall as well having the kids were on some art projects. She had some markers.
As the day progressed it eventually morphed into the kids attending their regularly scheduled classes in a variety of different locations. For the classes we made due with what we had available (Which was sometimes difficult because often the kids don't carry books around. For example the have a copy of their math textbook in their dorm room and then use another copy in class. I have additional copies in my classroom that they use when they come to academic support). Sometimes we had to get creative. For example, I had a student who needed to work on Algebra II. He didn't have a book, but one student had a book. So he used his phone and took pictures of the problems that he needed so he could work (actually several students did this). In another case a student needed to study for a trigonometry quiz (I was helping her). We started with practicing the problems on a worksheet she had previously done, but had with her and then I googled worksheets on the material she was studying and we used those problems to help her study.
Lunch was a bit challenging. Normally only about half of the students eat lunch on each side. Today all the students and staff ate lunch in the GILA dining hall. We started lunch ten minutes early serving the kids who were already in the dining hall first. Then the kids were dismissed to lunch by building to stagger their arrival in the dining hall. The food was a wider variety of items because more people had to be fed then were planned on. The dining hall manager kept encouraging people to leave the dining hall as soon as they finished eating. Before long we ran out of trays and people had to just balance their food in their hands (they were served in disposable serving dishes, but the individual items had to be balanced). Then, we ran out of seats and people were told to take plastic cutlery and eat outside in the grass (thankfully it was a sunny warm day, although warm is relative. The high today was about 55 F which for Alaska in October is quite warm). After a while she was kicking everyone out because they had to get the tables cleaned off to turn the dining hall back into classrooms (there were three classes, including mine, using the dining hall as their classrooms).
By the end of the day I had filled pages and pages (front and back) of the easel pad with lots of math and a decent amount of chemistry. Sometimes I had two or more students working simultaneously on different parts of the page (and on different subjects), but overall it worked.
After school was over I had a student asking me if first period academic support would be in the dining hall tomorrow morning. I told him the water was supposed to be back on by 2 pm (school ends at 3:55) so hopefully everything would be back to normal tomorrow. When I went to the SHS campus at 4:30, there it was still without water. I do hope everything will be back to normal tomorrow, but if not, I now know what I need to make the day more successful. I think everyone has learned enough that tomorrow will be an educational day even if we still have no water.
One of the ladies, C, told me that we had no water and wouldn't for at least six hours. I replied that I'd been at the doctor's office one time when they lost water and had to shut down. Surely, as a school we couldn't, by law, have school without water. I, then told me that in the past when we were notified in advance school was canceled. C and I told me that they would still have to work, but they thought school would probably be canceled. I went back to my classroom to work because no matter what happened, I had plenty of work to do.
As I was working I got an alert of my watch. It was through my app for the local radio station and it said, "No school at SHS in Galena today due to water issues." At first this excited me because I could really use an extra day off. Then I went to talk to my coworker, K. We hadn't heard anything official yet, but she suspected we would have to go over to the other campus and hold classes there. That didn't seem possible to me, but I started think we might still have to do something on the other side (that's how the campuses are always referred to as this side and the other side, depending on where you are when you say it).
I went back to my classroom to continue working and then a few minutes later the principal came in to officially tell me the plan. We would go over to the other campus and basically babysit the kids when they didn't have classes for the other side. He asked me if I had any educational movies that would still hold the students' interest and I said I had The Boy in the Plastic Bubble. So I was going to head over there soon and pick up the movie on the way (I actually live in an apartment on "that" side).
Now you might be wondering, "didn't she post about a message saying school was canceled?" Well, I did, but it isn't that simple. The elementary school (prek-8)was canceled. The high school is actually two schools run sort of like they are two schools, but at the same time run like they are one school. Officially in Galena we have two schools (the Galena City School District also runs a boarding school and some of those kids live in Galena as well): Sidney Huntington School (the aforementioned SHS) and Galena Interior Learning Academy, better known as GILA. SHS is a prek-12 school for kids who live in Galena. GILA is a public boarding high school for students from anywhere in the state of Alaska. While the campus in town gets called SHS and the campus that was made from an old Air Force base gets called GILA the reality is the high school students enrolled in SHS and the high school students enrolled in GILA attend classes together and on both campuses. Thus, there are two issues with canceling the high school classes: 1) Only part of their classes are without water and 2) 230 of our 265 students live in a dorm. When they are not in class they have resident advisors and dorm aides who look after them. However, since this was a scheduled school day they are almost all off duty (there's one who runs the wellness room for sick kids and someone who runs the front desk, but otherwise it's an empty building during the school day). There's nowhere we can send them "home" to if we cancel school.
Thus, I took my papers and my computer to the other campus. I had just arrived and was about to head to my apartment to get my DVD when my principal stopped me. Change in plan. He'd had students asking about where I was because they wanted to ask questions on how to do academic things. He decided he was going to set me up in the dining hall and have me help students during the periods that they had me. Unfortunately, I had brought no books nor whiteboards (I have individual whiteboards that I use a lot during academic support since in academic support I am helping individual kids with whatever they need help on, mostly math). The dining hall director had a big easel pad of paper (because the GILA side is an old Air Force base the buildings are all separate buildings so the dining hall isn't next to any classrooms) and the art teacher was going to be working in the dining hall as well having the kids were on some art projects. She had some markers.
As the day progressed it eventually morphed into the kids attending their regularly scheduled classes in a variety of different locations. For the classes we made due with what we had available (Which was sometimes difficult because often the kids don't carry books around. For example the have a copy of their math textbook in their dorm room and then use another copy in class. I have additional copies in my classroom that they use when they come to academic support). Sometimes we had to get creative. For example, I had a student who needed to work on Algebra II. He didn't have a book, but one student had a book. So he used his phone and took pictures of the problems that he needed so he could work (actually several students did this). In another case a student needed to study for a trigonometry quiz (I was helping her). We started with practicing the problems on a worksheet she had previously done, but had with her and then I googled worksheets on the material she was studying and we used those problems to help her study.
Lunch was a bit challenging. Normally only about half of the students eat lunch on each side. Today all the students and staff ate lunch in the GILA dining hall. We started lunch ten minutes early serving the kids who were already in the dining hall first. Then the kids were dismissed to lunch by building to stagger their arrival in the dining hall. The food was a wider variety of items because more people had to be fed then were planned on. The dining hall manager kept encouraging people to leave the dining hall as soon as they finished eating. Before long we ran out of trays and people had to just balance their food in their hands (they were served in disposable serving dishes, but the individual items had to be balanced). Then, we ran out of seats and people were told to take plastic cutlery and eat outside in the grass (thankfully it was a sunny warm day, although warm is relative. The high today was about 55 F which for Alaska in October is quite warm). After a while she was kicking everyone out because they had to get the tables cleaned off to turn the dining hall back into classrooms (there were three classes, including mine, using the dining hall as their classrooms).
By the end of the day I had filled pages and pages (front and back) of the easel pad with lots of math and a decent amount of chemistry. Sometimes I had two or more students working simultaneously on different parts of the page (and on different subjects), but overall it worked.
After school was over I had a student asking me if first period academic support would be in the dining hall tomorrow morning. I told him the water was supposed to be back on by 2 pm (school ends at 3:55) so hopefully everything would be back to normal tomorrow. When I went to the SHS campus at 4:30, there it was still without water. I do hope everything will be back to normal tomorrow, but if not, I now know what I need to make the day more successful. I think everyone has learned enough that tomorrow will be an educational day even if we still have no water.
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