4:00 and it's dark


Since my last post, I've been very busy, lazy, and drained of energy. Between teaching eleven difficult students, end of term commitments, dealing with a school that seems to be on a downward spiral, enjoying the rewards of a new relationship, and coping with the shortening and ever-overcast days, I think I can construct some semblance of an excuse for shirking my online obligations.

My students and I seemed to have turned a corner. For the most part, things inside my classroom have been going quite well, considering the rough start we had. Certainly, we are behind (about four years behind to be exact) but things seemed to be coming along nicely. Now that the behavioural issues have settled down somewhat in my class, I have had enough time to worry about just how little I've taught them and how little I know about teaching ESL. Until I got the news today that one of my students was in the hospital because she tried to seriously hurt herself last weekend. We are doing what we can for her, but she has responded so negatively to me virtually every time we interact that I'm not sure I'm doing any good.

Report cards and parent-teacher interviews happened last week. What a long week. Most of the parents came to meet me, which was nice, but, like in the South, the ones who do not show are ususally the ones that teachers need to talk to most, including the student who is in the hospital. So, after leaving the school at 9:00 on Thursday night, I woke up early on Friday, walked the dog, and went back to school until 7:30 p.m. The teachers made and delivered pizzas to last month's "stars of the month", the best-behaved students in each class. After throwing enough dough to make 45 pizzas, I was thoroughly exhausted.

The school situation outside of my classroom is deteriorating quickly. I'm losing faith in our ship's captain. Last year, there were two tools that the school deemed necessary to maintain good student behaviour and a safe school environment: a security guard and an igloo room. The igloo room is a place where students who need to "cool off" can go without all of the embarassment and hassle of being seen in the office day in and day out. Our principal has failed to do two things: furnish the school with the funding for these necessitites; and provide his staff with adequate explanations as to why he has failed to do so. A school with no consequences for misbehaviour is a disaster waiting to happen. The situation has come to a point where, after a seven-and-a-half hour staff meeting, the school has asked the parents to come into a symposium to discuss problems in the school and the community at large.

Outside the school, life is fantastic. Sophie and I are very quickly moving along in our relationship. Virtually no one who has been up here for an extended period is surprised. We hear things such as "Things are more intense here" or "things move much more quickly in the North" all the time. I suppose we have something basic and important in common: we both chose to live here, of all places. The more time that we spend together the more certain I become that it was no coincidence.

Finally, the weather. The days here are getting extremely short. The sun comes up at around 8:30 I think and sets around 3:30. However, until today we didn't see the sun for over a week. It was just a grey haze in the day. The nights, oddly enough, have been fairly clear. Last week, I was treated to by far the most amazing display of aurora borealis in my experience, and coming from Northern Alberta, that means a lot. This past weekend, the clouds opened up just long enough for us to walk Igaak in the light of the full moon.

Yesterday, I had my first taste of an Arctic blizzard, with high winds and a good dumping of snow. I no longer feel cheated by the mild weather. However, the Inuit teachers have assured me that it was just a taste. I can't wait for the real deal. Today, the clouds finally broke and gave us the few hours of direct sunlight we deserve. It was a balmy -18 with the wind chill, but I nonteheless struggled with the idea of keeping my students outside to take in some sun. This place is truly beautiful.

J

Much More


Most of my posts have been pretty heavy thus far. Sure a great deal has been very challenging. I've been on the receiving end of threats, violence, and obscene gestures, but life up here has been very good to me, especially for the past couple of weeks.

At first, my class was chaotic, extremely violent, and intimidating. I asked around for some sort of help from a number of teachers who have been up here for years. I received answers such as, "I put my time in with those guys," and "I would have left if I had had to teach them this year." It seemed that no one was willing to touch these kids with a ten-foot pole let alone come into my class and give me pointers on how to deal with them. No one but Sophie, another Qallunaat teacher. Her encouragement and advice gave me the ideas and strength to put the kids through boot camp and gain control of an ugly situation. Over the next weeks, we became increasingly close and realised that we have an intense connection. We began to spend a great deal of time together, and realised just how much we have in common. We enjoy too many of the same things to describe here, so I will spare you the details.

It's tough to verbalise what we have without sounding corny and cliché. It's not as if we help each other deal with otherwise difficult lives teaching in the North. I love it here. While some of the other teachers are counting the days until Christmas, I find myself wondering if I actually want to go South. Life in le Grand Nord is wonderful, and I am extremely lucky and happy to have found Sophie, someone who loves it here as much as I do.

James.

The Class - Black Monday

Over the past few weeks after boot camp, things had been going relatively well. The students are able to sit in their seats and work for most of the time, with violent, frightening incidents happening less and less frequently. Until Monday morning. By noon, it seemed that all of the hard-won progress that the class had made in the past weeks had dissolved into a puddle of tears, saliva, rocks, and broken bones on my classroom floor.

One student who has a strong work ethic and craves sucess, forgot to take his medication and ended up throwing rocks at my house and threatening my dog's life. Another, normally a good student who can have violent outbursts, threw a volleyball in my face, punched a girl, and spit the biggest booger I've ever seen on her coat on his way out the door. Later, he showed me one of his soapstone carvings. The kid is eleven, and obviously talented. His carvings are better than some of the adult carvings I've seen in the village.

Another showed up with a broken nose. She became upset and tossed her journal on the floor. I reacted by telling her to "stop acting like a child". She blew up. I went down to the office at lunch, about a half hour later, to find her bawling and speaking in Inuttitut. When I went to console her, she stood up, eyes full of tears, bit her bottom lip, and waved a single finger in my face. Twice. I wanted to hug her and tell her everything was going to be okay, but how would I know? So I just took it and watched her walk away crying. I felt the tears welling up inside myself as well. There is nothing like watching a few of your own words take a bad situation and make it worse.

Monday was tough, and the rest of the week was not much easier. Yet, I find myself elated and happy. The kids obviously love being in my class. They do not want to leave at the end of the day or at lunch. It appears that I have at least given them a safe place to sit for a few hours a day. On top of that, a pupil in kindergarten has taken an exceptional liking to me. The smallest child in the school, she is absolutely adorable. She runs up to me and grabs onto my legs every time she sees me. However, it is more than this. Much more.

James.

The Residence

Some of you may wonder why I've taken so long to post. Believe me, if I had the time, I would. The reasons for my two-and-a-half week hiatus from presuming that people read this blog will become clear over the next three posts, which hopefully will come in the next few days.

The first of these three posts is the least exciting, but that is not to say that it is not exciting. The week at the residence was a lot of fun. First off, I stand corrected. Sec six does exist in private schools in Quebec, but not for the same reasons. Sec six exists in private schools in the South as a means to skip cegep. In the North, it exists to ready students for college and life in the South. However, the kids that I was supervising were not even in Sec six. The residence normally houses these students, but not this year, I will save you the bureaucratic details.
The students I lived with for a week come from small villages that do not have enough secondary students to warrant a teacher. Most of them are very good kids. Few of them are very good students.

My week consisted of waking up at 6:30 or 7:00 and cleaning up after the night's chaos. By eight, I had to start waking up the students, which was my most difficult task for most of the week. My knuckles were raw and bleeding from all of the knocking on the first day, which was capped off at 8:30 when one of the residents opened her door and said "Fuck you asshole" to me, and promptly slammed the door in my face. The regular animator (res. supervisor) Eric relieved me a few minutes later, and when he began knocking, she repeated her morning outburst at him, believing that it was still me. Big mistake. She was minutes away from being sent out to her home community.

After waking up the students, I went to the school to teach all day, after which I returned to the residence at 5:30 to look after the kids until 11:30, when I locked the doors and went to bed at aruond midnight. The evenings were great. I spent a lot of time planning, after the first night, when I sat in front of the television, a luxury I haven't had in a long time. I was well on my way into a four hour shift of underproductivity when I snapped out of the hypnotic laziness which follows thumbing through the channels only to inevitably discover that there is nothing on. I wasn't even watching the box, just looking at it, and unconsciously letting it drain my brain of all ambition and intellect. All of a sudden I realised that I was watching a biography of Julianne Moore. I laughed, shut off the tube, and didn't turn it on for the rest of the week.

The week was difficult, if only for the lack of sleep, until Sunday night, my last night. Around eleven, I answered the telephone only to hear an obviously drunk Inuk wanting to speak with one of the residents. She wasn't there, but he insisted, begged, and offered me money to get her on the phone. About twenty-five minutes later, the student was sitting outside when I went to lock the door. I told her about the call, and she responded that she feared for her safety. After speaking with her for a few minutes, we went inside and I locked the door.

At eleven-thirty five, I heard a knock. I assumed that it was one of the three missing residents. I opened the door to indeed be faced by one of the tardy kids, but also a couple of other Inuuk men, who I assumed were accompanying him. Immediately, I stopped all but the resident from coming in. The largest of the Inuuk, who is taller than me (gigantic by Inuit standards) slurringly sputtered "I want to see my cousin". Instinctively, I thought of the conversation I had had a few minutes earlier. I asked "Who is your cousin?" to which the man responded "Do you want me to fuck you up?"

I tried to diffuse the situation, asked his seemingly sober friends for help, and explained that the residence visiting hours were long over. However, he was determined to get into the residence to "see his cousin" which to me, always thinking of the earlier phone call and conversation, was a euphemism for "rape one of the residents". After five minutes of repeatedly answering no to the question "do you want me to fuck you up?" I suggested that he leave before I called the police. He quipped "Fuck the police. If you call the police, you're dead!", turned on his heel and headed for the door. I reached for the handle to close the door, only to see him throwing a haymaker from his hip in an effort to let me know he was the bigger man. I rolled with the punch, which deflected off of my cheek, and I grabbed him and restrained him, while yelling "Call the Police!" to the residents. The man's friends helped me remove him, which I appreciated dearly, considering I probably would have had to knock him out to do it myself. After I slammed his arm in the door a few times, he finally gave up and left before the police came.

The cops were busy. It took them about half an hour to show up because they had had four calls in a few minutes (there are two of them in the village). They showed up to make sure he was gone and advised me to come in the next day to give a statement. The next day at school, I asked the centre director, a man of some stature in Kangirsujuaq what I should do. Without hesitation, he responded "Charge him."

I went into the police station, where I still wasn't sure what to do. I was unhurt, tired, and confused. The cops made the decision for me, and pressured me into charging the man. They told me that they wanted to "get him" for other things he had done, and made jokes about the horrible ways they planned on detaining him. After leaving the building, I felt dirty and used. The village has been so heavy in the past couple of weeks that I still haven't had the chance to go in, identify his mugshot, and drop the charges.

Why? Well, as a first year teacher, I don't want to cause any trouble for myself. Selfishness aside however, I also do not believe that sending the man out of the community to a Southern jail for a month is a good remedy. It temporarily removes the problem and is a band-aid solution, which may only infuriate him further and teach him a few new tricks. Southern justice does not seem to fit up here. It is the community's problem, and having someone in Montreal deal with it seems to be an excercise in hiding one's head in the sand. Many people, Inuit and Qallunaat alike, have advised me to charge him. It seems to me that they want him to be charged for all of the other things that he has done to the community, and not what he has done to me. I welcome any and all suggestions about what to do, as it eats at me constantly.

My only regret from the week was that this happened on my last night. I was not able to go back in the next day and show the kids that I wasn't afraid, and that I cared enough about them to not let a drunken tirade drive me away. Alas, the school board has decided that I am too expensive to continue to relieve the overworked animators, and has recalled the head animator from Kuujjuaq for the time being. Nonetheless, I now have an enormous amount kind of respect for Eric and Roland, the animators, who have repeatedly borne the brunt of such outbursts. Also, I have gained the respect of some of the residents themselves, who watched the whole thing go down.

Challenges

Okay, finally I will post about teaching. No caribou hunting or fishing trips. I have written before that teaching up here has its challenges. Now I will elaborate.

Classroom management represents one of my biggest challenges so far. There have been dozens of violent or near-violent incidents between students in my classroom. These obviously did not start this year; they have a long history that has followed this special group of students throughout their careers in school. It is a pattern I work very hard to break.

Since instituting boot camp in my class a couple of weeks ago, things have gone from total chaos at all times to a slow but productive pace interrupted still all too frequently by bullying, teasing, threatening, and punching. Just last week, one of the students whom I thought had turned a corner, turned around and threatened to hit the "shadow". She is someone who is paid to give one of my students one-on-one help because he went to school in French for grade four and five, was pulled out of school by his parents for a year, and returned to take school in English last year. She does far more than that. She acts as an interpreter, a motivator, and an extra set of eyes and ears in the classroom.

I thought that this was an extremely tense and serious situation that required a swift and ruthless response from the school's administration. Suspension, intervention from the parents, something. It didn't come. Granted, the little guy was left to stew over his inexcusable actions in the office for a few hours, but he eventually came back to class that same day.

I've also written about handling the students myself, something I thought I would never do. After a week and a half with no security guard, the school hired a new one. Thank God. Hopefully he sticks around long enough to help us get our classes back under control. The thing is that there are very few immediate and serious consequences for students who do something utterly disrespectful, such as try to bully a person, no a figure of authority, who is there to help them. We had a meeting about such instances this week, and hopefully things will get better on this front.

That said, I think things have been going relatively well on the behaviour front. After all, I'm in one of the best villages up here. Other schools are far more heavy when it comes to this sort of thing. What seems challenging to me is doing something I am utterly and completely untrained to do: teach ESL to twelve year olds. Twelve year olds that are well behind even the village's standards for progress the year before they head to secondary school. At times, I feel lost with them. Where do I want them to be at the end of the year? Can I get them ready for High School over the next nine months?

The first day I arrived here, one of the teachers who taught half of these kids last year (My class, which was grade six, was split into 5/6 and 6/7 so two teachers could split the chaos among them hoping that they would both survive. Only one stayed.) told me of the challenges ahead of me. "You have to take kids that are at a grade four level and get them ready for Secondary school," or something of the sort was what she said to me. My realism kicked in even before I met the kids, and I responded, "That's impossible." Although sometimes I think my remarks ring true, I believe I can still give these kids some skills with which they can make it next year. Sure, they will still be weak students, but hopefully, they can work with the knowledge I help them to gain this year.

Something else, something more profound, eats at me. It's the struggle that I'm sure goes on inside all Qallunaat teachers who come up here. Part of me believes I am really helping these kids learn valable skills in a setting that is not completely foreign to them. Yet, part of me believes that the school is not OF the community at all, but a white, southern concept of learning imposed on these kids and their parents for the last fifty years. Who am I to teach an Inuk how to live and think? Seems to me that only the Inuit, resilient and resoourceful beyond comprehension, have the goods to survive, thrive, and perpetuate in the harsh Arctic climate.

I recall one of the first conversations I had about teaching up here. It was about four years ago, and my graduate advisor and I were at lunch after the first year history class for which I was his teaching assistant. I told him what I wished to do. He responded by saying something such as, "Sounds noble and fantastic," yet warned me "as long as you are not doing it out of white liberal guilt." Words of wisdom. Although I'm sure guilt somehow plays into it somehow, as does money and other selfish desires that I feel the need to fulfill, I've become less and less cynical over the past couple of years. I'm here to help these kids and to help myself as well. Most of the time, it's a lot of fun too. Reflections such as these can sometimes get a little heavy.

This week, I have taken on the added responsibilty of relief residence supervisor, for two weeks out of the next month. The job entails looking after fifteen or so English Secondary Six students. Sec six, which exists nowhere else in Quebec, gives certain kids from all over Nunavik the opportunity to take an extra year of schooling befre graduating. Hopefully, some of them will go on to Cegep or do good things in their community of both. One of the supervisors has to spend the next five weeks in Kuujjuaq while they look for someone to take over the French counterpart in Nunavik's capital (?). It will be tiring, but hopefully a lot of fun too.