Unalakleet: New Teacher Training

Less than 24 hours after landing in Shishmaref we loaded our luggage onto the school truck, drove to the airport, and boarded the plane to Unalakleet for new teacher training. We teach in Shishmaref School in the Bering Strait School District in Alaska. There are 15 schools in the school district and they are all along the coast on Alaska. This is a video the district made and showed us during the interview. It shows a little about the school as well as zooming into where Shishmaref on the map; http://wiki.bssd.org/index.php/Shishmaref_Overview. There are about 20 teachers on our staff plus a lot of aids who come in to help. There were five new teachers at our school this year which was a unusually very high turnover for our site. One school had 15 new teachers!

Our plane from Shish to Nome. This is how they load the plane. We pile our luggage on the runway and they put it in the back. Nice and simple!

The size of the planes still amaze me. This is us leaving Shishmaref and going to Nome where we would get on another plane. Before we go to the airport in Shish we have to call and tell them how much we weigh and about how much we think our luggage weighs. We don't go through security, they don't scan our bags, they don't look at tickets, they don't assign seats. We just get out of the truck, load our luggage, and get on the plane. I am in the very back of the plane so you can see how small it actually is.

 

All of our luggage in the back of the plane.

At the airport in Nome... Notice the caribou in the back of the truck...

 On the plane ride from Nome to Unalakleet we ended up doing what is called a milk run. This means that even though the plane's final destination was Unalakleet, it stopped in two other places before it went there where it dropped off one person at each site. We stopped in St. Michaels and Stebbins before landing in Unalakleet. That means that Mike and I had 10 separate take offs in 3 days.

Yes, this is the first picture we took after landing in Unalakleet. Can you spy why we took the picture?

A beautiful blue sky day in Unalakleet.

It had been rainy for us since we landed in Alaska so it was nice to see all of the blue skies!

A few of the new teachers who were already in Unalakleet met us at the airport with a poster and song and walked back to the school with us.

We spent a little time on the "beach" the fist day. There is a lot of drift wood that washes up onto the shore.

They built these with the drift wood. At first we thought it was just the kids having fun but later we saw they used them to hang and dry out fish. This is Mike with the drift wood.

Lisa with the drift wood!

My awesome photography with my little digital camera : )

All of the schools in our district are either newly built or renovated. A certain percent of the building fund is dedicated to art. This is what you see when you come in the doors of the Unalakleet School. It was really cool to see and you can see the Norther Lights painted in the background.

Some of the school and the school playground.

On the other side of Unalakleet.

Mike taking a video with our new camera so we can make everyone watch it when we get home!

Some of the new teachers, and you can see the place they made to drying rack.

Can you see the fish drying inside?

Driftwood

A fishing boat.

Lisa with the water behind her.

If I remember correctly, these are called "dog circles." Most of the dogs in the villages stay outside. You can see here that the wood is stuck into the ground and the dogs are tied to stay there. If you see a lot of dogs like this they may be a part of a team for dog sledding.

Mike on the last day of training. We were ready to be home.

Our bed/area in the "couples room" at new teacher training. We were in a room with three other couples. You just kind of pick out an area and try to get as comfortable as possible.

On our way home we had a charter that went from Unalakleet to Shishmaref. We flew with Era Alaska which we just had to take a picture of since they are the airlines on the TV show Flying Wild Alaska. (We saw the mom but were considerate and non-touristy so we didn't take a picture of her.)

We were in Unalakleet for 3 1/2 days. While we were there we really bonded with the new teachers in the district and in our school. We explored Unalakleet, met some really great people, shared stories, played Rummy, ate really well, and learned a lot about teaching in Alaska!