Hi readers! I have returned to the happy occupation of blogging at last! The consistency of my posts is up in the air at the moment, just because of the busyness of a new teacher, but I will try to regularly update you all on my new life in Eagle Butte, South Dakota. Last week I started teaching English at the E.A.G.L.E. Center, the alternative learning center with an acronymic name that stands for Education, Assessment, Goals, Life Skills, and Employment, since these are all things the staff wants for our students.
I arrived in town on August 16th, and was greeted by my lovely family who were warming my house for me! My parents had taken most of my furniture out the previous week, and my mom and three siblings drove out on Saturday to bring everything else, as I was in Pipestone, MN that day for a wedding. We visited about our experiences over the last two days, got a lot of my unpacking done, and watched a movie before hitting the hay. I am living in a lovely little three bedroom trailer house, which I am happy to announce is much more space than I need for all the junk I have accumulated throughout my life. I have added a few pictures of my new domicile. I am enjoying nesting in a lot, and cooking has been great fun!
The next morning I left a few minutes before eight for EEEI (Essential Elements of Effective Instruction) training, which was for teachers of Lakota language and culture and all teachers who were new to the district. There were about twenty-one of us total in the workshop, and the presenter’s name was Charlsie Savage. She has been training Eagle Butte teachers for several years now, and she was very energetic and motivating. We had quite a bit of class time, seven hours a day Monday through Thursday, but I really liked having the refresher on many things I had learned in the education program, and meeting many of my fellow teachers. I will only be working with one of those teachers directly at the E.A.G.L.E. Center. Deb is a math teacher, and she joined the EC team last year in October, which is why she missed EEEI training and had to go through it this year. I also had my first company outside of my family on Tuesday afternoon, when Elizabeth drove from Lemmon to visit me! We made tacos and walked around town, and then she showed me pictures from her summer in Brazil.
When Charlsie’s workshop was over, I felt pretty overwhelmed with everything I had to learn about the area, the school, and the people I would be working with, so I vowed I would get some work done over the weekend, (one thing being to start my first blog post!) On Friday morning I went to the E.A.G.L.E. Center to talk with Dr. Birkeland, the principal, and get some materials from her. I got a tidy stack of papers, including what I wanted most, the staff and student-parent handbooks for the EAGLE Center. The program still confuses me, since it is so different from a normal school, but some of it is starting to make sense. EC I is for 7th through 9th grade, and I teach half-hour classes to them during the morning, along with my fellow teachers. I teach two English classes and do back-up for the other teachers, and then I supervise the students as they work on an online reading program called TeenBiz. After lunch, these students are either dismissed to the junior high for afternoon classes or dismissed to go home. Then the EC II students come, who are 9th through 12th graders, and they are all doing independent studies as we their teachers guide and mentor them. In addition to English class, I am also in charge of the Fine Arts class, which I love, since that is kind of my area.
On Friday afternoon Emanuel Red Bear, one of the Lakota teachers, took me for a tour around the western side of the Cheyenne River Reservation, and then on Saturday we covered the eastern side. On Friday night I went with him to Jerry and Rita Farlee’s place for a sweat ceremony, which was a new experience for me. This is a prayer ceremony from the Lakota tradition, which I knew a little bit about, and wasn’t quite sure I felt comfortable with it. However, since I know I can pray to God anywhere and I’ve actually had great prayer times in rooms where there was eastern meditation going on (yeah, my driver’s ed instructor was kinda different), I wasn’t too worried about trying it once. Besides Jerry, Emanuel, and me, Jerry’s grandson, a volunteer working with Habitat for Humanity, and a friend of his were in the sweat lodge. The sweat lodge is a very small tent, and in the middle are heated rocks. During each of the four different parts of the ceremony, the tent is closed and water is poured on the rocks, causing steam. Each of the four parts has a slightly different purpose, most of which I can get behind. During the segments, “God” is praised for being the creator of all things, prayers of intercession are spoken, and at the end the spirits are dismissed.
Besides the murky view of who God really is, the things that didn’t really jibe with my faith were mainly the smudging at the beginning to drive evil spirits away and the dismissal of spirits at the end. As I expected and hoped, the setting really did focus my mind on my prayers in a way that has been very difficult for me lately. I told Emanuel that I thought it was kind of similar to fasting in the way it focused the worshipper’s mind, and he said that was exactly what it was supposed to do, since instead of sacrificing food, one is sacrificing his own comfort in order to focus on “God.” Emanuel and I talked about quite a few things during those two days, and God came up pretty early. Emanuel thinks that God has given each people group a slightly different way to reach God, and that there is no difference between the Great Spirit of the Lakota and Yahweh of the Judeo-Christian tradition. I said that I agreed that each people group could have different traditions and different modes of worshipping the one true God, but told him that I thought it was ridiculous to assert that all religions were true, since some blatantly contradict others. I do not think that I should probably participate in the sweat ceremony again, but I may try praying next time I’m in a sauna.
I went over to Orville and Barb LaPlantes’ house for supper on Saturday night, which was really fun and relaxing, even though we weren’t able to have a bonfire like we’d been hoping, because it was too windy. I had quite a time finding the right turn to their house, which isn’t that surprising if you know the weakness of my sense of direction. We had a delicious supper, Winston and I fed the ducks and geese while the big boys played basketball, and then we sat on the porch and visited. Their daughter Abby went to Bible School with my sister Julia, which is how I got to know their family. The next morning I went to church at Emmanuel Lutheran, and then tried to get some work done for the rest of the day.
The next three days were workshop days, and I met many more of the teachers and got a lot more information about the school and the area. I’ve eaten fry bread at least four times in the last week, and I could get used to it very easily! We actually started classes on Thursday, though many students will probably not start regularly attending until after the fair and pow-wow on Labor Day weekend.
Now it is Wednesday, and we have been in school for almost a week, which means I have been rather delinquent in getting this post done. Now we are on break for the fair, so I need to hurry up and fill in the rest of the details. Quite a few students have shown up at least once, many more haven’t, and our list is growing a bit almost every day. Students can come into the E.A.G.L.E. Center this year during the first two weeks of any given quarter, and I’m glad they have that restriction, because one of the ninth graders came to the Center from the high school two weeks before school got out last year, so it was really hard to know what to do with him. In English, I guess he mainly did word searches. He occasionally still asks for one of those, but that’s not going to happen anytime soon, since he has plenty of other work to do.
I won’t tell you details about every day, because that would be tedious and I would never get caught up then. I think the best thing to do is to give you my daily schedule, so that you get an idea of my life at the EC so far. I have to be to work by six, though I usually attempt to get there earlier to have a moment to settle in. I mainly do have preparation time for the first half hour anyway, because during that time Dr. Birkeland meets with the EC I students, who are in seventh through ninth grade. At 8:30 we have either social skills class, vocabulary building time, or drug-related seminars. At nine we start going through our regular rotation with EC I. This program is capped off at fifteen students, and right now we have about ten. They are divided into two groups: eighth grade and seventh & ninth grade, since the ninth grade is mainly independent study anyway. After these groups are done with half an hour each of English, social studies, math, and science, they go to either lunch or TeenBiz, which is a reading program that most of us work with, though it is mainly my responsibility since I am the English teacher. I am getting trained in that over our break, and we will start it with the students sometime next week.
After I am done with TeenBiz I work for two rotations with EC II students, who are ninth through twelfth graders. At this point they are separated into five groups, and I think it will stay that way, though we still do not know how many students we will have altogether. Next week will be the test, since everyone will start coming to school more or less regularly. (Some of our students do struggle with consistent attendance, though.) They have been coming to my English “area” to get assignments from me and ask me questions about requirements. I am still working that out, since not all of the materials I have gotten about students’ portfolio requirements for graduation make sense to me. I also am not sure which books have question packets and tests already made up, but I have been doing a lot of hunting and have found some useful materials in file cabinets. However, I am still very apprehensive about interpreting the requirements in the hand-me-down plans I have, and hope that what I am giving to and requiring of my students is somewhat close to what the administration is looking for.
After those first two rotations of EC II students, I eat lunch, and when I don’t have lunch duty I am free to either eat leftovers at the E.A.G.L.E. Center or go to the cafeteria, which has pretty decent food. I suppose I should explain what the EC looks like. The Center itself is a small building with a few offices and one big room that is semi-divided in the middle by a kind of wall that does not reach the ceiling. There are ten or eleven staff members in the building every day, including the principal, the secretary, three academic teachers, one long-term substitute, the computer lab manager, and the behavioral and special education staff. When one walks into the front of the building, my desk is on the left side all the way in the back corner. I have a whiteboard, and the drinking fountain is right by my desk, which is the way I like it. If you didn’t know, I have a bit of an addiction to water. There are two long tables stuck together coming straight out in front of the white board, and this is where my EC I students sit during their class. This is also where EC II students are sitting for now, but we teachers are all very excited that we will actually be getting some rooms in the dorm next door to use for classes. This sounds like a real improvement for everyone, and though I say I’m excited to have my own room, Heather Murphy, the social studies teacher, says rightly that I have no idea, since she has shared sixty students with all the other teachers in that little building for two years. She is very excited.
When we get back after lunch, we have three rotations left, and I am usually very exhausted by the time we get done, though I think that will get better the more I know what I am doing. I really am doing a lot of things just day to day, which is a horrible habit to get into, but I feel like I won’t be able to plan some things until I’ve known the kids a bit longer. That is why I could barely get myself to plan anything for the first two days, because I knew so little about what to expect, and I don’t know if any of my fellow teachers could have prepared me better than they had.
After that I go home to read, eat supper, and work, though it is so easy to spend much of my work time doing unnecessary things. That is why I often end up staying up much later than a self-respecting teacher should, as I am at the moment. I believe I will call this blog post complete, and will update you on my fun weekend activities like fair festivities, Jordan and Sarah’s wedding in Sioux Falls, and the daily quirks of a teacher’s life later on. I will eventually try to make a schedule of when I need to blog, because that worked very well in Ecuador, but first I need to know the rest of my school schedule.
I pray God would be with all of you and bless you richly! Please pray that my students would have a passion in their hearts to learn, and that I would be a blessing and a godly example to them.
Christina Joy
