Sometimes I Wonder

Last week, I had 2 pretty funny things happen in my second period class.  Well, they're funny to me at least.  I don't know if you'll agree.

First of all, we were doing a worksheet on reading maps.  It was our extra skill for the week that was not a part of our main skills, but I thought it was a good thing to practice.  The map that we were using to answer our questions was of the western United States.  An answer to one of the questions was Nevada.  I was going over the page with the class and read the answer aloud.  My student that I can always count on for a good laugh (the one that says potty station and tentacles) said, "That's how you say it?  And all these years I thought it was knee-vuh-duh!"  Oh dear.  My aide and I busted up laughing.  In all fairness, there are some ladies here in the village with the name Neva (pronounced knee-vuh), so I can see how she would get confused.

The other thing that happened was not quite as laugh out loud funny, but it just made me smile to myself.  My students know that I am from Alaska, and sometimes they will ask me questions about what it is like in my town.  Well, the other day one of the boys in my second period class asked me what time it was where I'm from.  I tried not to smile too big as I calmly responded that it was still in Alaska, so it was the same time as Chevak.  Some days I just shake my head to myself.  Maybe we need to review some social studies concepts.  It's always good to have something to smile about though :)   

Porch or Snow Cave? Sometimes it's Hard to Tell the Difference

 

This is a video to show you what it is like to get into our house.  Sometimes it can be quite tricky.  If you can't hear what I'm saying in the video, I'm explaining how the maintenance men from the school made us some very nice snow stairs to get into and out of our door.  They needed to get to the door between the apartments, so they shoveled most of the porch out, which we hadn't seen in weeks because of all the drifting.

Below are some pictures to show you what our door and porch looked like before they shoveled it out for us.  We were basically in a snow cave.  We literally had to crawl up and out of the door in the morning, and then we would have to slide down the other side on our tooshies since the drifting had basically created a mountain of snow outside our door.  If we tried to walk down we would just end up falling anyways, so it was just best to sit and slide.  Some mornings we still have to slide down the other side of the porch, but for the moment we don't have to crawl out of the door anymore.  One morning, another one of the teachers saw me sliding down from the porch and she asked me, "Now how many people can say that they get to do that when they leave their house to go to work?"  That is one way to look at it I suppose :) 

 I had shoveled out a small area in front of the door enough to get it somewhat closed, but then we had to climb up the drift to get out the door and over the porch.  As you can see, this is worse than the previous post where the pictures show the snow in front of the door growing, because we were completely surrounded by snow, it wasn't just blocking the door anymore.  And it isn't just the stairs on the porch that are nonexistent, the entire porch itself is nonexistent.  I'm not sure if you can quite see it, but there is a string tied around the door handle in this picture.  We asked for help from the maintenance men when we couldn't get the door to close.  They tied this rope around the handle to help with pulling the door closed from the outside.  It comes in quite handy some mornings.

 Footprints from where we had to step up to crawl out.  Every time we would take a step, more snow would fall into the doorway, making it impossible to close the door.

 I was trying to take a picture to show the cave like quality of the door.  We were literally surrounded by snow on all sides.  At one point we could actually slide into the apartment as well as out of it.  Honestly, it was kind of fun.

I think this might have been the day when there was just so much snow falling into the door that we couldn't close it.  I propped up a kitchen chair behind the door when I left for school so it wouldn't completely blow open, but inevitably some snow still got into the entryway.  That was a long day of shoveling.