As of today, I have been back in Togaik for about ten weeks. Returning to Dillingham for All District Training, it was a much different experience than last year when I knew nothing. Now I knew where to buy the good coffee, which seat was best for me to stay awake and focused during the dryer portions of the training, and best of all, I knew people. People I liked. People I didn’t like but now knew enough to stay away from (hey, nobody can like everybody, and if they say they do they are a big liar) and people that I knew I would get to know soon enough. There were a lot of new teachers last year, almost the entire elementary core but since 6th grade has officially been moved into the secondary school, I wouldn’t get much chance to get to know them until we flew back to Togiak.
Flying is still not my favorite thing to do but I think it’s getting better for me. When another teacher pled on Facebook for someone to bring her Dramamine for her child, it occurred to me that perhaps part of my problem with flying is simple motion sickness. It also helped that our flight back to Togiak was in a plane with stairs. It is such a small thing but I feel safer in a plane that has a staircase instead of just, basically, crawling through the window. There was an aisle between seats! Such luxury. Not great, but better.
My apartment was just as I left it. Sparsely decorated but in my big suitcase I brought with me a few small items to make it more like home. My Death Star cookie jar found a place on a bookcase and the planetary glasses are now shining in the window of the bathroom. No, I will not drink out of them, but both items were purchased more as art or sculpture, however pop culture-y. Something to look at that isn’t brown or white.
The routine of school was very easy to slide into. Now that I know where to find the staples and Post-its, and how to unjam the copier. My room has changed in some senses because I have almost double the number of 6th grade students in my room at any one time, and this year I am teaching some combination classes of 7th and 8th graders for a total of 51 student contacts per day. This is a record for me, surpassing the year I had 47 in my student teaching class.
One of the biggest chores that I was not looking forward to was blowing up all the ball chairs. The gym compressors were both broken when I returned and I despaired at the idea of having to use my tiny hand pump to pump up all the chairs. I thought about having the kids do it as a “fun teambuilding exercise” on the first day but quickly realized the folly of that idea. Maybe if they all had a hand pump, it would have worked to make it a competition but not one by one. Luckily, the new shop teacher Dave offered to help me using the school air compressor. It still took over an hour to blow up thirty chairs. Carrying them from one end of the building to another was no happy task-those suckers get heavy! But it did make the classroom feel more complete. And the night before school started, I felt ready. Boy, was I wrong.
