Outside/Inside.

These are shots taken from outside and inside the plane just before we landed in Bethel. I sat in the last seat before storage. Erika sat to my right. Our flight from Bethel to our final destination was a packed plane with 4 people. The other two people with us ended up being the secretary of the school and the priest of the town. They were very friendly and helpful once we spoke up at the end of our flight with the question, "is this Russian Mission?" We arrived an hour early but were picked up by Jason (the principal) after about ten minutes. Ten minutes was just enough time to scramble through my pack to immediately put on my Carhartts since I was freezing in the wind. The next few minutes was very comedic with Erika helping me try and find my gloves. I eventually settled for some fleece socks.

Jason showed up and gave us quick tour of the school and informed us that we would be the only math teachers this week since their math teacher had taken sick leave. He seemed excited to put us to work. This should be an interesting week. After meeting some of the other staff, we headed off to our barracks. We are bunking with another teacher and the accommodations are quite nice. The apartment is 30 feet from the school and has all the amenities.

For now my brain is mush. Erika and I are about to go adventure the village for a bit before we succumb to the zombification that has been brought down upon us by our travels.

Time to go...

I am all packed up and ready to head to Russian Mission. The things that I brought: insulated Carhartts for outdoor fun, camera, video camera, some clothes, laptop, sandals, water filter, food, sleeping bag, pillow. I went shopping today with the other half of team Burrath (our team name is derived from our names: Ms. Burr and Mr. Horath) and we purchased some nuts, raisins, a few add-water instant soups, crackers, peanut butter, cheese, and a lot of fruit for ourselves and our hosts. I ship out tomorrow at six in the morning and after stopping in Anchorage, Aniak, and then Bethel, I finally end up in Russian Mission at 5:30 PM. I am very excited to get along with my trip but am a bit leery of the 12 hours of travel ahead of me to reach a community that is only a few hundred miles away. I once flew from Seattle to Paris in less than 12 hours and that included a three-hour layover in Philadelphia. This will definitely be different, however, since the majority of my flight time will be by small planes.   

Census data.

I spent about an hour looking over the information at this site. It has very concise and easy to interpret data on just about every aspect of Russian Mission. You're wondering what percent of the people walk to work? Answer: 63%. I can't believe the wealth of statistics the site has.

For my students who have found your way to my blog, I encourage you to click on the site link imbedded above to see some great real-world applications of the topics we've recently covered. All types of graphs are present along with measures of central tendency and measures of variation.

A little info on Russian Mission.

I found this great Alaskan community database site that gives the lowdown on all the communities of Alaska. Click on this link and scroll down to Russian Mission to read the short summary.

For those of you reading this who are headed out to different spots of rural Alaska, I hope you will find this link as a good jump off point for information on your own sites. 

Five days until my excursion to Russian Mission.

I am excited that I will be visiting Russian Mission. I don't think that the realization of this excursion has actually him me yet. This may be my spring break but I am very busy taking care of scholastic business--a lot of which is attached to preparing for my trip. I was able to speak with Mr. Moen today, and it seemed a little surreal to be speaking with the principal of a school that I have never seen. I asked some questions but I just don't know what to expect or prepare for. This does not have me worried, however, and my adventurous spirit is looking forward to the trip.

 Life is good...

This is a test of the emergency blogcast system... This is only a test.