Late January, Early February

An attendance awards assembly was held in the gym on January 20.  Students who attended school every day for the month of December were recognized with a certificate and having their names placed into a draw for year-end prizes.  For K-9 classes, the year-end prizes would be new bicycles, but for high school, the prize would be an iPad.

            

Grade 2.

My job was to be the backup cameraman.  I stood at the back of the gym and took pictures of the winning students.  Ryan, the school's media teacher, was the primary cameraman and took all the close up photos.  The pictures were later printed by the principal and posted around the school for all to see.      

            

By the end of January, the sun inched closer and closer to showing itself above the mountains.  There was more sunlight every day.  At midday, the sky would be filled with colours of blue, purple, pink, and white.  I captured one of these moments on camera on January 24th.

            

When the month of January came to a close, I passed three significant milestones in my teaching career: accumulating 365 days of classroom teaching experience, teaching in Arctic Bay for two years, and living in Canada's north for three years.      

            

The sun is back.

The sun made it's triumphant return on the morning of February 5th.  I snapped several photos of the special occasion from my classroom.  The school held a brief afternoon sun celebration on Friday, February 6th.  Students & teachers made posters of the sun and walked around the school with them for several minutes.  Everyone then assembled in the school's gym to watch a qulliq being lit by a local elder.  The elder also told a story in Inuktitut about how the Inuit would celebrate the return of the sun when they lived out on the land.

            

My guitarists & I were the last act of the ceremony.  We played two songs: Ode to Joy, and You Are My Sunshine.  We ended up playing the second song several times because the audience wanted to sing along in English & Inuktitut.  It was the first time I had my guitarists play in front of a large audience.  We were nervous but persevered.  I shook the hands of my guitarists at the end of the ceremony, congratulating them on a job well done.

            

Arctic sunrise - February 9, 2015

The last week of January and the first two weeks of February were busy times for me.  There was much teaching & inspiring to be done before the upcoming Professional Development Week (more on this in a future post).  My Grade 10 English students read several more short stories and finished the literary elements module.  We then moved on to the grammar unit.  We quickly reviewed nouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives, and pronouns before moving on to other topics, such as, sentence writing, avoiding double negatives, tenses, and how to properly use commas.  Near the end of each class we either played Mad Libs or other word games on the Internet.

            

In Grade 11 Social Studies, we finished the industrialization section and moved on to imperialism.  Similar to last semester, my students studied how European countries expanded their colonies and spheres of influence into Africa and Asia in the 1800s.  This was often done through the use of force.  With it came Christian missionaries, diseases, slavery, forced assimilation, but also access to European goods, railroads, & modern farming techniques.  We also did a film study, watching & analyzing the film Zulu.  I selected the film because it is set in Africa during the 1800s and is based on a true story.  A small British outpost comes under heavy attack by a large Zulu army, but miraculously, the outpost survives after a 2-day battle.     

            

My guitarists prepared for their first concert of the semester by practicing Ode to Joy and You Are My Sunshine.  The sun was to return in early February, and I wanted my guitarists to have an opportunity to showcase what they learned to the school.  (You can read about the concert in the paragraphs above).  My guitarists also did music theory and, in the days following the concert, learned several basic guitar chords (G, G7, C, D).

            

Over the first weekend of February, Kataisee, the high school Inuktitut teacher, held a 24-hour famine event at the school to raise money & awareness for hunger in Nunavut.  Food insecurity in Nunavut has been in the news recently, ever since APTN did a story called Wasting Away.  (Click here to read about the Nutrition North Controversy).  Kataisee's students also helped with organizing the event.  For twenty-four hours, the participants only drank tea & water, and passed the time watching movies, playing sports, and making posters about hunger, mental illness, and overcrowding.  The students told me it was tough not to eat solid foods for an entire day but they were glad that it was finally over.  But they did understand that for many in the world, hunger is never over.      

            

And finally, during the second week of February, Kataisee was showing old film strips to her students about Inuit living out on the land.  What made this so intriguing was the projector she was using.  It was a really old school film projector, maybe from the 1960s or 70s.  I was surprised that it still worked.  It was a blast-from-the-past moment that I just had to capture on camera!