How is it already November??

The first week of November is in the books - I just can't believe we are this far in the year already! We have had snow on the ground for more than a week straight and temperatures have been consistently below freezing. Our daylight is rapidly shrinking, and after we fall back this weekend, the days are bound to be even darker.

This past week was kind of an odd one in the middle school because we had a large chunk of our kids gone to the Jr. High cheerleading and wrestling tournament in Unalakleet. It was a good and bad thing, really - - good in the sense that we (the three of us middle school teachers) had a significantly smaller group of kids to tend so we were able to team teach together out in the middle school portables. It was also good in that we had a huge chunk of time to work one-on-one with students and get a lot of work done. I think we had 12 levels passed in three days, which is huge! It was a bad situation only because there was a large chunk of students gone for school travel, so other students just decided to play hooky, apparently. We averaged about 20 kids a day this week, when usually the middle school has about 50.

I must say, it was pretty thrilling for me to sign off on my students' end of level exams in recommendation of moving them to the next level. We are currently in a big push to get all of our students up to their appropriate BSSD levels and on track to graduate on time, so the more levels our students pass, the closer we are to that goal. We have even extended our school day an extra half an hour in the afternoon strictly for that purpose. After our first week of that schedule, I'd say that so far it has been a success. Granted, we were down a significant number of students this week, but still. The work our students accomplished speaks for itself :)

There are two and a half more weeks to go until Thanksgiving break. It will be strange spending this Thanksgiving so far from my family, but as we only have Thanksgiving day and the Friday after off (plus the weekend, of course), that doesn't leave any room to travel. I guess Roman and I will be keeping a modest Thanksgiving together here on the tundra. Maybe we will roast a ptarmigan, or something festive of that nature!

All the best from your correspondent up here in the arctic --

XOXOjane