Mental Gymnastics

I’ve been doing some substitute teaching and tutoring while here in the bush. And it has actually been a lot of fun.

One thing I’ve found both frustrating and fascinating is that these poor kids have to do mental gymnastics sometimes to be able to wrap their brains around a concept the way it is taught everywhere else. It would be like the rest of us being expected to learn out of textbooks shipped in from a Star Wars planet…or Avitar. It just isn’t easy. Sometimes they are totally lost by an idea…but usually they come up with a very creative way to adapt it to their culture so it makes sense.

Some time ago, I was trying to explain the idea of “perimeter” to a boy. I said, “it’s like a fence around the square. How long is the fence?” He looked up at me and with total sincerity asked, “What’s a fence?”

I realized that most these kids out here have grown up without fences…anywhere. In Alakanuk they were unheard of. In King Cove there are a few…around the cemetery in an effort to keep the bears out…and the fish cannery has some for the same reason. But the houses have none.

One of the teachers was telling me about a test she gave her young kids. I think it was one of those standard tests that comes with a book. The question was, “How do you get to a hospital?” And the options were: by plane, by boat, by ambulance. Most of the kids circled “plane”; a few circled “boat”; no one circled “ambulance.”

You see, around here, if you are super sick and need to go to the hospital, they put you on a bush plane and send you off. If it is too windy to fly out of King Cove, they put you on the Island Trader…a boat that does emergency runs to Cold Bay. In Cold Bay, they have the fourth longest runway in the country—seriously. It was built during World War II as an emergency landing place for planes. It has been kept in great shape because it is now an emergency airstrip for international flights. Before they shut down the Space Shuttle Program, it was an alternate landing spot for that. In other words, you can land most anything there…which means that bigger planes take off from Cold Bay…planes that don’t have to worry quite as much about the wind like bush planes do. So if it’s super windy and travel to King Cove has been shut down, just hop on the Island Trader to Cold Bay. You can probably get out from there. So how do you get to the hospital? That's easy! By plane or boat. Ambulances are unheard of.

The other day, I was teaching an eighth grade history class. We’d had quite an active discussion about cave men, with the kids throwing out ideas of what they needed to survive. Towards the end of the lesson, I showed them a cave painting of what looked like hunters  with spears chasing bison. After a moment, one of the boys asked, “But why are they trying to kill the caribou with a harpoon?”

Mental gymnastics at work. I love it!