Second hand living

As the youngest child of five, I was actually quite lucky in terms of hand-me-downs.  Clothes that were the height of fashion when my sister wore them were outdated enough when I grew into them that I was rarely subjected to unique horror that is previously used clothing.

However, when I divorced and needed to set up my own household, gently used furniture became a staple.  This time, thanks to my sister and parents' generosity, I was handed down nearly every piece of furniture I currently own.

Now as I plan my move North, I am finding myself furnishing a new home sight unseen in a place where shipping is a definite concern.  Not only in terms of cost but also in regard to the logistics of getting everything from the post office to my apartment with no car or ATV to my name.  So it came as a pleasant surprise to find out that part of the teacher culture up there is for teachers to routinely sell off their used items at great discount.  For example, the teacher I am replacing didn't want to haul many of her household items back to Indiana and offered them to me.  For minimal cash, I bought from her:
a 12" cast iron skillet
a crock pot
a vacuum sealer (for all those salmon I plan to catch)
a Kurig coffee maker (since there is already a coffee maker in my apartment, I am going to use this in the classroom as a tea station)
the contents of her pantry and deep freezer.

This last one is major since there is only one grocery-type store in town with appropriately elevated prices.  At this point, with the dry goods boxes I mailed last week, I should be fed at least until my first paycheck comes in.

And today, I agreed to buy another teacher's tv/dvd combo, again at a greatly reduced price.  $80 for a 32" flat screen that retails for $325 seems like a good deal to me.  This teacher is working toward her Master's degree in math (ugh) so she decided to eliminate as many distractions as possible.  I am more than happy to do my part in helping her out.  Since I am part of a "Dish family", one contract shared by 5 people brings that cost way down also.

I gots tv.  I gots food.  I gots two ways to make coffee.  I think I'll survive.

Boxes and boxes and boxes

I received an email cc this week, including me as part of the "New People Who Don't Know What They're Doing" group regarding shipping of goods to Togiak.  Until I physically get there, I have no official address.  I will have to go to the Post Office and register for a Post Office Box in a town with no door to door mail delivery.  Anything sent there, I will have to shlup from the post office about 3 miles away, and hope someone is willing to give me a ride every once in while.  After my first pay check, I may send myself a wheeled cart that can convert into a sled.

But I have to consider the cost of bringing everything I think I will need with me when I fly up.  I just joined Club 49 with Alaska Airlines which gives me 2 checked bags free but they have to be under 50 lbs.  And I need to be mindful that I am all alone in this venture (see shlupping).  So I have been sending one large flat rate box per week to the school itself.  Two were filled with school supplies that I have spent years collecting/gathering/hoarding and I finally feel vindicated in buying dozens of ten cent spiral notebooks every year when they go on sale at Fred Meyer each summer.

Dry goods from my kitchen filled the next two boxes.  I was warned in my initial interview that last year a newbie sent a flat rate box filled with dry staples such as flour, sugar, rice but the box didn't survive the trip so well, and the postmistress is still complaining about having to clean it all up.  To avoid her ire, I reinforced all my boxes with duct tape on the inside, lined each with a plastic garbage bag (to be reused later) and hella packing tape on the outside.  Like, a crazy amount of tape.  Enough  that I am fairly certain they would bounce if dropped.  Which I am sure they will be.  And water logged.  And urinated on by all the dogs who fly and insist that the cargo area is their own personal porta potty.  Maybe I won't reuse those plastic garbage bags after all.

Testing, testing

When I interviewed with the men who would soon become my new principal and assistant principal,
Sam and Dale respectively, they asked the usual question about my teaching history.  I led off with my most recent assignment; 6th grade Science to 135 students at a, frankly, very wealthy school.  Teaching "rich" kids vs "poor" kids is a post unto itself, but I focused on the ways this job strengthened me in ways I hadn't expected.  Like the fact that I don't consider myself a scientist and yet have been offered three science jobs in the past five years.  The first (at Laurelhurst Elementary for you Portland readers) was a short term fill in for a teacher who left very abruptly under suspicious circumstances the details of which I never did find out.  After a week, I loved the job, the school, my fellow teachers (side note: my daughter's third grade teacher is now the Sped specialist there but on my first day she came in and gave me a huge welcome hug, not only making me feel great that she remembered me, but establishing my cred with the students who witnessed it) and the students.  I was offered the job for the rest of the year with the expectation that I would continue on forever.   But alas, I didn't have the necessary endorsement at the time to teach the single period of 7th graders I had so they hired someone else.  I found out later that if I had only taken the official "yeah, you know enough to teach this subject" test, I could have been hired, but no one gave me that option.  (sigh)

Fast forward to my Togiak interview.  Sam and Dale seemed thrilled that I not only had experience teaching Health but enjoyed teaching it as well.  In the course of our conversation, the two men danced around the topic so I finally blurted out, "Are you asking me if I'm okay teaching Sex Ed?"  Yes, they were and yes I was.  I think Sex Ed is one of the most important topics to teach middle schoolers (and younger, in appropriate ways, obviously) because so many parents are too squeamish to do it and because it is so easy for kids to find out faulty information on their own.  Pregnant from a swimming pool, anyone?  Getting full blown AIDS from mosquitos?  I could go on and on, but you get the point.

However, the classes they wanted me to teach the birds and the bees to are outside of my current endorsements, so I agreed to take the test this summer.  Which I did.  And promptly failed.  By one measly point.  I blame my poor study habits and lack of discipline for my failure.  I cracked a book or five but didn't do the prep work I knew I should have.  So now I am scheduled to take it again and have already prepped better than I did before.  First off, I gave myself ten days until testing day.  I also printed out the testing company's guidelines for what is actually on the test.  And I plan to not only skip a weekend strawberry picking trip in Washington that took me way off track last time, but I plan to not break my leg before the test.  Again.  Or ever. 

UPDATE:  I took the test again, and this time I passed!  Now I am just waiting for the testing company to send me my official scores but as far as I know, I am good to go.  Whew.

One Month to Go.

Exactly one month from today, I leave for Alaska.  Here is what I know: I will teach 12 sixth graders-evenly split genderwise, possibly teach Health to 7th and 8th graders as well, live in a pet-free bottom unit apartment with electric heat, a deep freezer and thin walls.  The town of Togiak has two stores, four churches and a library run by volunteers, mostly teachers.  The only way to get there is by plane or boat, so I have decided to not be afraid to fly anymore.  I will be flying in little tiny planes on a routine basis so my irrational fear just needs to be over.  I don't have time for it.

Before getting to Togiak though, I will spend nearly a week in Dillingham, the only town of any size nearby.  The first day of New Teacher training includes a morning of salmon fishing and an afternoon of learning how to use a traditional Native Alaskan knife, called an ulu.  I am lucky that I was taken on a wonderful Alaskan cruise years ago, and bought an ulu for my kitchen so I have a little experience with them.  Other trainings will include things like a primer on Native culture and a full day of a classroom management system called PBIS that I have taken before.  I am very interested to see how it will be adapted to this very different student population I will serve.

Once the training is over, I finally get to see Togiak, my home for ten months.  There will be four days of vacation/optional unpaid work days and two paid to get my classroom set up, curriculum figured out, lesson plans roughed out and schedule coordinated with everyone else.  School starts for kids on Aug 27th, a day dependent on the end of the moose hunting season since kids in a subsistence village don't come to school if they can hunt moose to feed their family.

One month from today, I will board a plane, layover in Seattle, pop in to Anchorage for an hour, then finish up in Dillingham.  Before then, I need to pack clothes for ten months, arrange for phone, tv and internet service, send up dry goods to stock my kitchen/bedroom/bathroom, join Amazon Prime, organize my home and say goodbye.  Yeah, I can do that.

Let's begin

It all began with a girl.  Or so many people thought.  But the idea of moving to a remote Alaskan village has been with me for much longer.  Back in my married life, my now-ex husband and I would joke about moving to Barrow just to see what it would be like to live in a place with weeks of no sunlight in winter and no moonlight in summer.  But when the marriage dissolved, so did the dream.

Then I met the college professor from Anchorage and fell hard.  She encouraged me to get my teaching license, which I did in the single hardest challenge I had ever faced.  Other than negotiating life as a finally out lesbian and a single mother and a divorced woman with few financially viable skills, that is.  The relationship didn't survive but the revived notion of moving North, way North, did.

In the winter of 2013, I went to live in Medford, Oregon for two weeks, working for striking teachers at an exorbitant daily rate.  I ignored the politics of the strike and looked at it as a chance to work in a new district, excited to have two groups of my own students every day after six years of working as a substitute.  The experience taught me that school districts are mostly the same but some things stood out: in Medford I had two or three paraprofessionals in the room with me at any given time, whereas in Portland paras only come in for severely disabled students; classroom management is the same as far as kids are concerned but teachers who don't have good skills in this area are dazzled by those who do (more than once I had to console a crying colleague who couldn't control their class).  I told them subbing is the best way to learn how to keep a class in order, and shared some of my many stories of classes gone awry.  The main takeaway from Medford though was that I could teach anywhere.

Fast forward to my last birthday.  During a quick visit to my parent's, I mentioned that I planned to go to the Educator's Job Fair for the first time in many years.  My mother chimed in, "You know, you don't have to stay in Portland now that Wendy is in college and seems to like it there" meaning I should move back to my hometown of Seattle.  This got me thinking, hard, about where I should focus my attention.  Returning to Medford seemed like a good idea, though I wonder how the other teachers would react if they found out I had worked their failed strike (really, their demands were ridiculous). 

At the fair itself, I took a different approach than I had in the past when I had gone to this specific form of torture.  No fancy suit, I wore my regular work clothes.  I brought updated copies of my resume but no reference lists or elaborate lesson plans.  My attitude was...not cocky or arrogant but rather a little tired and weary of subbing while acknowledging that my time as a sub taught me skills I would not have had otherwise (see classroom management above).  I didn't intend to come off as desperate for a job but more as someone ready for a change.  I explained to everyone I talked to that my daughter asked me to stay in Portland for the first year she was away in college but since she was thriving, it was time for me to move on.  I got a lot of knowing nods at that instead of the blank incomprehension when I tried to convince people I subbed by choice, not because no one would hire me in Portland.

I talked to people from Medford, Palm Springs (mostly because their booth person looked so lonely-no one stopped to talk to her), Anchorage (where the Superintendent grilled me about my intentions, clearly wanting to weed out people who hadn't done any research into bush teaching), and Ashland before being asked if I could interview right then and there by the Bering Straight School District.  This thrilled me no end, and I feel like I pretty much nailed it (and was proven right by an offer two weeks later).  I decided I was done but in a spare glance back, I saw the South West Regional School District with its Alaska flag draped over the table.  I thought to myself, "Hmmm, I wonder where that is?" and stopped to see.

It turns out, this pivotal moment changed my life.  I met two very nice women who asked me to interview, again right then and there, this time not bothering to take me to the official interview room at the convention center.  The discussion covered the usual teacher questions, then turned to realities of living in an area so remote it is literally impossible to drive there, a town with 1 store but plenty of high speed internet and salmon.  I left feeling that this might, finally, be The One.

Another interview, this time by phone, and a week later, I had a contract signed, sealed and delivered.  The position, 6th grade teacher to 12-14 Native Yupik children.  The school, a PreK-12th grade school with a student population of 200.  The town, Togiak Alaska above the Bristol Bay, a subsistence fishing village of 820.  Sounds perfect to me.  I leave in 6 weeks.