Difference

I

In the South, You don't say hello or lift your eyebrows or somehow otherwise acknowledge the existence of everyone you see. It would be crazy, overwhelming, impossible.

Michael Pollan argues that what humans do all day is forget. That is our primary cognitive function. To prove his point in A Botany of Desire, he describes all of the sensory stimulation he experiences while sitting at his desk. His description of everything he sees, hears, smells, feels, and tastes is truly overwhelming and poignant.

One of the things I liked immediately when moving up here was that things were seemingly a lot less busy. There wasn't all of the hustle and bustle of the big and small cities that I had lived in for the past decade. There was no advertising (I didn't have TV), no traffic, no crowds. It appeared that there was less visual stimulation.

Over the past two and a half years, I've started to notice more nuances in the way the wind makes the power lines which are connected to my house sway back and forth. I can more or less accurately judge the windspeed by looking at them swing or at the municipal flag pole waving away. The sky and the clouds have begun to reveal their many patterns and layers and sophistications, and I am coming to intimately know each of the three-hundred sixty degrees of horizon surrounding me. It appears that I have begun to focus more on the natural beauty that surrounds me, and I'm making it up by ignoring the podcasts infiltrating my consciousness through my always connected, if somewhat isolated, iLife.

I have begun to think that there is not less stimulation up here, just less of it is man made.

II

Up here, Noah is like a rock star. Everyone knows his name and calls it out emphatically virtually every time they see him. I love the way the Inuit gravitate towards babies. It doesn't matter if it is a five-year-old girl, or a macho forty-year-old hunter. When someone drives by us on a Honda, it's routine to hear them yell out, "Noah Noah!" and wave. Noah has become accustomed to the attention. He smiles and waves back either from inside his stroller or from on his mom's back. Lately, he has gotten used to random people running up to him, full speed, and scooping him up off the ground, dousing him with kisses and love.




The South is a less personal place. At Christmas it almost seemed as if Noah was waiting for a show of public affection towards him. Sure, some people may give a "beau bébé" here and there, but it pales in comparison to his deification up here, where babies are gods.

Oh, I've been out on the town in Montreal and had people stop to comment on the beauty of something that was walking next to me. But it was not Noah. A man has actually made an illegal u-turn in the street just to stop me and say, "Il est beau en tabernacle!" But the man referred not to my son.

Just this past Christmas, I was waiting outside a shop on Ave. Mont Royal. A man walked past me, turned around, bent over, reached out his hand and said, "Il est vraiment beau". Of course, Noah was not the focus of the man's affection. The man was infatuated with Iggaak.

In Montreal, it's Iggaak, who is the rock star.

Iqiana

Sometimes, I am almost brought to tears in my class. Thursday morning was one of those times. Sophie and I team-teach a split class, and lately, the attendance has become abysmal, especially in the morning. On this particular day, I had 3 students out of seven in my half of the class. They were all late. Sophie had one, who had been on time, but hadn't slept a wink the night before, and thus collapsed on his desk at the stroke of nine.

My students were groggy too. Too groggy to learn about linear relations and proportions. As two of the students slept, the third was hard at work, trying to differentiate between a partial variation and proportional relation. It is a simple matter of finding patterns and analyzing them. For instance, we had a table that looked like this:

x y
1 2
2 4
3 6
4 a
5 10

The student had to figure out 1) what a is, and 2) if the ratio of variations was proportional.
I asked her to complete the table.

"I can't," she said.

"Think about it this way," I replied, "Just tell me what comes next. 2, 4, 6..."

"Seven!"

"No."

"Nine!" She was just guessing. She may as well have said 1000.

"No."

She began to laugh. I wanted to cry. "At least she's got a sense of humour about it," I thought to myself. I looked at the other kids who had made it to class and realised that they were completely disinterested. More than half of them hadn't even bothered to show up.

It began to sink in. I was teaching to the weakest student in the class. It's not her fault at all. She has bounced around from school to school, some in much worse shape than ours, and so she has big holes in her education. However, I began to realise that perhaps my unwillingness to leave this student behind may have been one reason the other kids were completely not engaged in the class. Were they all thinking, "Can we please get on with this shit?"

One of the Inuttitut words that every teacher in Nunavik (I assume) has heard a multitude of times is iqiana. It means, for lack of a better explanation, boring. I think it can be literally translated as "it makes me sleep", but I could be wrong. Students use it for myriad reasons. It means "too hard" or "too easy" or "I'm tired" or "help" and occasionally, it even means "boring". Although you could have heard a pin drop in my class, the word rang clearly in my head. My students were all saying "iqiana".

It seems to me to be a catch 22. This is the only student who comes everyday and tries to do all of her work. Others sort of traipse in when they want to and leave at their leisure, gracing us ever so often with their presence and, here's the problem, still passing! Because I was moving so slowly, they could get by, some of them with really decent grades, by showing up a couple of times a week.

It leaves me in somewhat of a conundrum. I can continue as is, and risk losing the students who are capable of doing well in the class, while concentrating my efforts on a student who is as unlikely to pass the class as she is hard-working and well-intentioned. Or, I could push the others in hopes that they respond well to the challenge.

I think under most circumstances, this is a slam-dunk. Go after the rest of the class, and differentiate for the one who is slow. Here, however, differentiating a class is sure to obliterate what is left of students' already depressingly low levels of self-esteem. Moreover, I don't know if I have just become jaded, but I harbour some doubt as to whether the rest of the kids will be up to the challenge.

That's one thing about teachers. For all of our supposed altruism, we're often very self-centred. Chances are, I'm probably not that big of a factor in my students' attendance. Indeed, several of these students are repeating this class precisely because they didn't attend when another teacher taught the class. Although this may allow me to escape some of the blame for my students' boredom, it raises much larger questions about what teachers and Faculties and Ministries of Education are doing more generally. After all, it's not just my class that is half-full of sleeping students. Then again, my class is half-full of sleeping students. I digress.

After Christmas, I'm going to try to push them. Maybe the students will surprise me and start to come back. Perhaps the one who comes will find herself capable of keeping up. I hope so.

Making up for the past few weeks

Sorry about the sound quality.



This has been his favourite thing to do for more than a month. He'll drag a chair from the dining room, and sometimes even bring a preferred dish or two to wash. We've been letting him do it, and basically everything else he wants, except play with the oven and stove. Normally, we let him play with the microwave after unplugging it. Last week, I was doing dishes, and Noah began dragging a chair over to the kitchen. I thought little of it. He stopped at the microwave. I didn't really give it a second thought. I heard him playing with the buttons, and slowly but surely, the wheels began to turn in my head. Before I was able to make it over to the microwave, Noah had indeed figured out precisely how to use it. I got there one second too late; one second after the light and familiar hum of the fan had come on; one second after he microwaved the telephone.

In case you were wondering, it only takes one second to cook a cordless phone.

A Little Harsh?

When you come from another province and start teaching in Quebec, you have to do a few things to earn your full citizenship (just as a teacher, for now). One of these things is to complete a probationary period overseen by your school principal. This includes a few meetings, creating a portfolio, and two observations. A probationary teacher is assessed on 120 different criteria which fall under 12 competencies. Just as Quebec moves towards a more holistic philosophy towards teaching students, the education ministry has made evaluation a more convoluted and confusing process, even for teachers.

Last year, I finished my probation, and passed my evaluations, basically with flying colours. My principal had very few criticisms of my teaching, and, having never taught in a primary class, I'm sure she felt a little under-qualified to do so (this is speculation). However, she mentioned that sometimes, I can be "a little harsh" with my students. I prefer to say that I treat them like adults, and am very direct with them. Nevertheless, I'm a sensitive guy, so I've spent a lot of time reflecting on her comment (I've of course ignored all of the good things she had to say).

This past week, we had parent-teacher interviews. The parents of one of my students came into my classroom. The father shot a look at his wife when they entered and she let him pass, then turned, and shut the door. The student is not the strongest in the school, so I thought that perhaps they were anticipating hearing bad comments from me and didn't want anyone to hear. This was not the case.

They sat down, and I broke down their daughter's grades for them. When I was finished, I said that she was, for the most part, a polite and enjoyable student to teach, to which the father responded, "Look, James, I know my daughter can be a smart mouth, and that she's very sensitive. But one time this fall, she came home during school hours and just shut her door. That wasn't like her to be missing school (very true), so I went in and asked her what happened. She told me that there was this time when you thought she swore at you, when she didn't (also true), and ever since then you've been treating her differently. I asked her to give me an example, and she told me that once she was in your class when you were watching a video and you told her that she was talking to much and that if she didn't be quiet you were going to kick her out of school."

"Now, I support everyone who comes up here, nurses, construction workers, teachers, and police, but I can't support someone who says they can kick my daughter out of school."

"Let me tell you what I remember," I replied. "Your daughter was speaking in my class. I warned her, and she continued, so I said 'You have a choice, you can be quiet, or leave.' She left. I followed her into the hall and told her that leaving was just like skipping, and that she would have a detention if she walked out. She kept going."

"I'm not here to kick anyone out of school. That's not part of my job, and I'm also not here to make students feel bad. But, they're not allowed to talk out of turn in my class."

That night, after the parents left, I began thinking to myself. I had been completely caught off guard by the father's concerns. I thought that the student and I had a pretty enjoyable relationship. The principal's remarks began to resonate in my head. Perhaps I had been "a little harsh" with her.

What really got to me was the last thing he said. "Look, I support everyone who comes up here but..." This was really a slap in the face. It was as if he said "I like everyone who comes her, but not you, qalunaat." I thought about it increasingly throughout the evening, and brought my concerns up to Sophie.

She basically laughed it off and said that the student had arrived home in the middle of the day when she was supposed to be at school, only to find her dad there asking her tough questions. She made up the best story she could.

My mind was not at ease. A few weeks ago, we had a guest who happened to have been in the school when there had been a very loud and embarrassing misunderstanding between the principal and a parent. He is married to an Inuk, and has been around the schools in Nunavik a long time, and he cautioned that we have to constantly remember that the Inuit speak English as their second or third language. "They speak less English than we think they do," he had warned me.

Perhaps the message had been lost in translation. Maybe she thought I had threatened to kick her out of school. Maybe I was being "a little harsh" with her. Despite Sophie's always sound advice, I went to school the next morning intent on being a little more sensitive to this girl's situation.

She gets one-on-one help during one of the classes, and I noticed that she had forgotten her workbook. So, after getting the rest of the class in motion, I brought her book down to her. At recess, she came into class as I was speaking to another teacher and handed me her workbook. I smiled, and she opened her mouth. I thought she was going to say "thank you". Instead, she burped in my face. I could tell that she hadn't really meant to, and she looked a little embarrassed. Yet, she didn't turn away, or try to stop her extended belch. I laughed.

A Visitor

Because there is not very much room at the overpriced hotels in town, we tend to get visitors every year. What normally happens is the principal of the school will get a call from some company, government agency, or from the school board asking if any of the teachers will house someone for a couple of days. The principal then either takes the visitor in, or farms him/her out to one of the teachers. The teachers are compensated more than adequately for their troubles.

We have housed engineers, surveyors, nutritionists, other teachers, psychologists, students, and so on. We enjoy doing so not only for the money, but because we basically lack unfamiliar stimulation, and it's nice to have someone new to talk to. We've certainly had some interesting guests in our house. Some of them we've contacted after going South, and will continue to do so even after we've left for good. This September, we had a remarkable visit from a wonderful man.

A few days after the MSO concert in Kangiqsujuaq, we received a telephone call from a man in Kuujjuaq. Sophie spoke briefly with him, and then hung up the phone. She asked me if we wanted to have a visitor in our house. My eyes turned into those reels from slot machines, and both stopped on the $$ sign. A bell went off.

"Uhh, yeah."

She then explained what she meant. There was an artist in Kuujjuaq who was doing portraits of Inuit in Nunavik, and wanted to visit a smaller village than Kuujjuaq. He could not afford to stay at the hotel (at $260/night), and he had run into one of our friends who happened to be in Kuujjuaq working as the photographer on the OSM Nunavik tour.

Sophie had asked him if he had encountered any suspicion from the people in Kuujjuaq.

"No," he replied. "I am very lucky. When people see my portraits, they think I'm a magician."

At first, to tell you the truth, I thought he was being a bit pretentious, but after I met him, I knew that he was genuine.

The next day, he arrived on the plane and hitched a ride into the village. That's when we met Pierre Lussier. A bearded man in his early sixties, Pierre greeted us with a smile as we helped him bring his gear into the house.

The day after he arrived, Sophie began to introduce him to the people at the school. He made a couple of portraits of people who worked there and spoke to the staff. One of the teachers asked him, "How long do you plan to stay?"

"Oh, not long," he replied. "Only about ten days."

"TEN DAYS?" I thought to myself when I heard about this. "Wow, that's a long time to have someone in your house. I think I'll tell him that he can't stay ten days."

But I didn't. Pierre was nothing but a pleasant guest. He did the dishes, babysat Noah, and even washed the f*&#ing floor! In the evenings, we had dinner amongst stimulating conversation, mostly about Pierre. He's a modest man; it was difficult to get stories out of him, but we insisted. He told us about when he moved with his wife and four daughters to Italy, when he met Emilda Marcos, and when he went to Vietnam as a tourist during the Vietnam War.

During the day, he drew portraits of elders, adults, and children in town. He also found the time to draw a couple of landscapes. Sophie worked tirelessly as his agent, finding people for him to draw, and taking photographs of his portraits to give to the models. He did encounter some suspicion from elders and others, but for the most part, people were very receptive. Indeed, when even one of the most cautious saw the finished product, her suspicions melted away, and she let Pierre work his magic. Here is a sample:


The second night that Pierre was here, I looked at one of his drawings, and my own suspicions melted away as well. I spoke with Pierre, and he said that he didn't know how he could repay us for our hospitality. I said I had an idea.

A little over a week later, we brought Pierre to the airport, and as he left, we all had tears in our eyes.

James.