Heading to Stebbins

I am currently on my second flight for the day.  Sharosha, Swenson and myself are flying to Stebbins to broadcast the Eskimo dance festival, which is held there every year.  I am pretty excited.  It sounds like a great time to enjoy the local culture.  Sharosh and Swenson will be broadcasting the opening ceremony out to all the other schools in our district using “Live Channel” on an Apple Powerbook through a “Pollycom” unit over a videoconferencing stream.  All 14 other sites in our district will be able to watch.  We were planning to do a webcast allowing anyone in the world to watch.  The event kind of snuck up on us, and that just didn’t work out.  I’m kind of bummed.  That would have been really exciting to have that kind of coverage. It is a beautiful day out.  Not a cloud in the sky, the sun is shining down on white sparkling surroundings.  The sun is just off the horizon to the south, skimming the surface before it falls out of sight around 4:30 in the evening.  There are few places on this earth that are more spectacular (on the nice days).  We are flying in a Beechcraft B200, one of Bering Air’s newer airplanes.  They just flew it up to Nome after Christmas.  They have some pretty nice instruments in the dash of this one.  They say “Chelton” on them.  I have never heard of the company before, but the displays are in color, and show you what is in front of you.  For example, when we were taxing down the runway, it showed a digital runway in front of us, and sure enough when we got to the end, it showed the end of the runway on the display.  Once we were in flight, it showed a series of green boxes going off into the distance.  I assume to show the plot where to fly.  We ended up flying through all of them.  We are currently flying at about 190 Knots, and at 15,500 ft elevation.  We are flying to Unalakleet first, picking up a couple of people, and then heading to Stebbins. We were supposed to be leaving Brevig at 12:40 P.M. today, but the plane that was picking us up decided to head to Tin City, and then Wales before stopping off to get us.  So we didn’t make it into Nome until 3:00 P.M.  I didn’t eat lunch today planning on getting some Chinese food in Nome.  Since we had such a late departure, I had just enough time to run to the Wells Fargo in Nome and deposit a check.   Banking is few and far between in the bush. I was talking to Sharon (our SFA consultant from Washington) who was staying at our house the last couple of nights.   She has been to Tin City before.  It is located between Wales and Brevig on the Seward Peninsula.  It used to be a military station (I assume back in the cold war days) but now only two people man just a weather station.  There is a “road” between it and Wales.  While Sharon was doing an SFA site visit in Wales, she took a ride out there with a couple of the local teachers.  It is basically a deserted city.  There is a hotel, buildings all over the place.  They have a pretty big runway as I understand, and only two people live there. Sharon said she had a little tour from one of the guys that works there, and said that the hotel rooms look really nice with TV’s and the whole nine yards.  I think it would be pretty cool to take a look around.  It’s just amazing to me that they would just up and leave everything like that. C.O. got my snowmachine up and running again.  We pulled it into his shop a couple of days ago, and he worked it over a bit.  Charged the battery up and worked on the chain case.  It is now running like a dream.  We are hoping to cut a hole in the ice this weekend and drop a crab pot down.  If we are lucky in a week, we’ll have fresh king crab for dinner.  Well, we are starting our decent, so I had better get going.  I’ll post a little more after the day is over, hopefully with some pictures.

Who are these kids?

Lets see how today has gone…. Well there was kind of a shortage of students in class today.  We are only missing about 5 today, which is pretty normal for a Monday.  The curious thing is that a couple of the kids that are missing are ones that show up on a regular basis.  To counteract that we have a couple here to day that usually don’t show up.  Now I don’t know if this is happening because we are starting to apply some legal pressure to the families of students that aren’t showing up, or if they are finally getting bored with being at home and watching TV for the last 5 months, and have decided to try something new.  Regardless we have a couple of squirrels here to keep us on our toes today.  One of them is literally like flubber.  He is always bouncing around the room.  His eyes are darting around all the time.  He never seems to be paying attention, but when you ask the class a question, he seems to always have the perfect answer.  So whatever he is doing he is doing right.  He has been to school maybe 20 times all year.  Another student on the other hand has been here maybe 3 times all year.  He does however show up to all of the home basketball games.  I don’t know how he manages to make his way into the crowd, but he shows up anyway. The kids just got back from P.E.  They are always difficult to quiet down.  They supposed to read for 20 minutes.  A very difficult task.  Anything that involves quiet is pretty much impossible in their eyes.  After 10 minutes of continues reminding I have finally succeeded in producing a quiet reading environment. It is pretty stormy out today.  When the wind picks up the blowing snow causes visibility to decrease quite a bit.  At times you are not able to see farther then 10 – 15 feet.  Nonetheless, I just saw the kindergarten class walk out side with buckets.  Not sure what they are after, but I hope they don’t loose any of them.  Over Christmas break a guy in Wales was walking from one house to another in the village.  It was so stormy out that he lost his way, and was never found again.  It wasn’t like he had a long way to go either.  It was a matter of a hundred yards or so, in a very densely housed village. Pretty sad, but a serious warning for others to be careful when they are out in bad weather.It sounds like I will be heading to Stebbins this week for the Eskimo Dance Festival.  I am really excited.  I understand that it is a great learning opportunity.  There is not only dancing, but also classes teaching about the culture.  I will be taking a couple of students, and we will be broadcasting the events.  I’m not sure yet if we will be doing a webcast, or just a broadcast over the videoconferencing system.  If it is a webcast I will be sure to provide a link on my blog for anyone who would like to watch it.  I’ll know more in a couple of days.  I hope everyone’s week goes by quickly.

Storms outside so Im inside

The weekend has been very relaxing.  I have slept a lot and watched a little TV.   It has been storming out the last day or so.  The planes didn’t get in today.  It’s not too cold out, but the snow is blowing pretty hard, which makes visibility too bad for landing a plane.  Nothing too exciting this weekend to talk about.  I hope the week goes by quickly.  Monday always comes so quickly.  I’ll write more tomorrow.

Weekend Visitor

One of my students, Paul, is over visiting right now. He went and took a look at Erin’s treadmill. His face lit up when he saw Erin running on it. He then wanted to see me run on it as fast as it would go. So I put away my computer and went and showed him how fast the thing could go. He’s a pretty good kid most of the time. Weekends are nice 🙂

TGIF

I am looking forward to the afternoon.  We are watching the broadcast at 1:30 so the kids should really enjoy that.  After that we have early out.  We dismiss at 2:00.  After school we have some collaboration time.  I think we are having a broadcast meeting, so we can make the important decisions that make our broadcast go well.  WE have the basketball games tonight at 7:00.  Shishmaref girls are coming to play our girls.  I have a couple of kids videotaping the game.  I called Shishmaref and asked them if they wanted us to broadcast to them, but they said no.  So that was a bummer.  It would be a good experience for our kids.  I am looking forward to sleeping in tomorrow.

Eggs = Cornbread

I took a nap after school today.  Which turned out to be a terrible mistake.  Ask you can see by the time of this blog entry.  I also hadn’t eaten really anything after school, so when I was laying in bed trying to sleep, my stomach started to growl.  I tried to ignore it, but had a hankering for some corn bread.  I had some at the school a couple of days ago, and it was mighty tasty.  So I decided to get up and make some.  Oh by the way.  I was able to make the corn bread because we finally got some eggs in at the store.  You’d be surprised at how many recipes require eggs.  Anyway…  I got up, mixed up the corn bread and threw it in the oven.  Set the timer and went to read up on PHP and MYSQL.  Sounds fun doesn’t it??  Well that got sidetracked by some television.  Until the corn bread was finally finished.  I ate three large pieces while watching TV and washed it down with some cold water.  Quite satisfying.  I was still wide a wake (as I am now) and decided I should just buy the book I was reading on PHP.  You see I found a book that allowed you to download the first 4 chapters.  So I hopped onto Amazon and searched for the book.  They of course had it.  Price was about 35 dollars.  I started to read the reviews of the book and one of them said that the book was not worth the money.  It was very small, had spelling errors, and wasn’t too in-depth.  They said for a cheaper price it would have been perfect for beginners, but not in-depth enough for the price listed.  So I looked around a little more on Amazon and ended up spending 50 dollars on two books.  I am a little worried that this might be categorized under impulse buying late at night, but maybe I’ll learn something from this in the end. After throwing away some money I decided to check out Fark.  Always good for a story.  This is what prompted the blog entry this early morning.  I read this article, which made me feel really sad for the people involved.  Apparently some professor had been working on an instrument for 18 years that was put into the unmanned space shuttle that just recently reached Saturn.  The shuttle left in 1997 and the instrument was designed to collect data from the wind over there.  Well unfortunately the crew that put the instrument onto the shuttle back in 97 forgot to turn it on.  So the poor guy that worked on this thing kind of wasted 18 years of his life.  🙁  There’s a little more to the story if you want to read up on it, but can you imagine?  He seemed in pretty good spirits about the whole thing, which is good.  I can’t imagine the frustration he must be going through.  Well I just wanted to pass that story on.  I had better get to bed.

School and Alias

Another beautiful day out today.  The sunset was comparable to the sunrise of yesterday.  The kids are getting more unruly everyday it seems.  The morning started out alright, but we had had a couple students show up after first hour that usually don’t attend.  So not only do they not know the routine, but they are also the ones that are discipline problems.  So that changes the dynamic of the classroom tremendously.  I think I’ll try to shoot a little video tomorrow and get it posted on here.  I’ll see if I can get it compressed enough to fit on the server. Erin and I stayed at school for lunch, so we could have three of our kids serve detention.  After lunch went pretty well.  I worked with a couple of the high school students to prepare them for the broadcast tomorrow.  We wrote up the segways, and they are now tasked with rehearsing them for the live show.Lesa Meath is here visiting again.  She is the Alaska teacher mentor from Fairbanks that comes up every month or so, to help out first and second year teachers with whatever she can to hopefully retain more teachers in the state.  She was kind enough to take Erin and my class for the last hour of the day.  We were able to spend some much needed time assessing what we need to accomplish for the rest of the year.  So the last part of the day was great. After school Lesa and I sat down to discuss things that I wanted to work on for the rest of the year as well as things she could do to help to help me out with my goals.  After we finished our meeting, Erin and I headed home.  After some dinner, C.O. and AnnMaire came over to watch Alias.  I got an IM from Katie asking if I was going to watch it, and a call from Lyndi for the same reason.  So the Alias fever is breaking out.  Gotta go watch.  🙂

Ebates

Guess what everyone!!!!  I finally got Erin to see that there is a reason to have a blog.  You may notice the new addition to the shopping column on the right hand side.  That’s right…. ebates.  Erin stumbled onto this site while shopping on the internet (which we do A LOT of up here).  Basically how it works is you go to the site, sign up, and search for a product or store.  If it is one of the 700 stores that work with ebates.com they will track your order via a pop up window.  When you make your purchase, ebates gives you some sort of rebate.  Some are percentages others are like coupons giving you a discount.  Four times a year ebates mails you a check of your cumulative rebates.  Erin has received one check already, so it really does work.  It doesn’t cost a thing and I think Erin believes it gets you into heaven earlier.  🙂  You know how I talk about computers all the time.  Well with her is all about the savings she’s made with ebates, or the deals she has found on drugstore.com. What else happened today…..  Schools was a little crazy.  The kids were a little worse than usual.  Which is a bit frustrating.  After working with the same kids for over a year and half it gets old seeing them pull the same crap you dealt with last year.  We have kids that should be in Jr. High that are acting like they are in 2nd grade.  It’s tough when they don’t have any idea how students act in school.  So they get stuck in their little petty games. Enough negativity for the day I think.  We had an amazing sunrise this morning.  I unfortunately don’t have a digital camera, so I had to enlist Paul to go out and take a picture for me.  He did one better and used the built in pano stitcher on his canon powershot s500 (a sweet camera).

After school, I sat down with one of the Jr. High students (Sharosha) and he built the boys basketball page on the Brevig website.  He resized pictures, compressed videos, and typed up the little review.  I am hoping I can get a few kids excited about the webpage, and hopefully can get them to take over the project.  I have started to scale down the difficulty of the site.  Removing a lot of the layers I have used in the past. Wales (one of the schools in our district) just came out with a new website.  It is really nice.  Very professional looking.  They used PHP, which is way above my head.  I am intrigued by it and downloaded part of a book on how to create your own site with PHP and MYSQL.  The cool thing about sites designed using these techniques is they are database driven.  When a page loads it goes back to the server for info in each part of the page.  Giving you the opportunity to have up to the minute data on your site.  I also want to figure out how to incorporate a way for people to post feedback on topics on a site.  Stuff I need to read up on and learn how to do.  The problem is PHP and MYSQL is all done in code.  So it takes the visual part out of it.  The end result it fun, but he building process is pretty boring unless you like to look at code.

Kids don’t like HTML

Well it’s going to be interesting to see how the broadcast ends up this week.  We are getting some clips in, but we don’t have our anchors picked out yet.  So they haven’t practiced a script resulting in poor fluency when they are live.  I stayed after school yesterday pretty late getting some video editing done.  I finished up a clip about the basketball games last weekend and imported the clip our class is doing on the Tsunami in Asia.  I need to find some pictures to add into the clip.  I’m running into some difficulties with that.  I need ones that are pretty high resolution, so they don’t look pixilated on the TV. Class is going pretty well this morning.  I have 6 that showed up for SFA.  They are tired, but seem to be working pretty well.  Only mild prodding to get them going. I am trying to make the website a little easier to edit.  In all of the new pages I create, I’m going to get rid of the layers, and hopefully train in some kids to take it over.  I am having trouble getting kids interested in web design.  I’ll see if I can get someone to make the basketball page.  They should be interested in the topic.  We’ll see how it goes.

Vikings on TV?

Monday morning is always a tough to get out of bed.  I of course slept in till noon on both Saturday and Sunday.  So needless to say it was difficult to get to sleep last night.  C.O., AnnMaire, and Paul came over Saturday to watch the first two episodes of Alais season 4.  Erin figured out a way to burn the episodes off of the dish, which will be cool.  On Sunday we got up and watched the Vikings lose to Philadelphia.   I worked on the KTS website a bit last night, but basically just relaxed. We have a news broadcast this Thursday at 2:00.  Things are coming together pretty slowly this time.  We didn’t have our normal planning meetings which means we aren’t all on the same page.  It also doesn’t look like we have very much footage this time.  We’ll see how it goes.