Oh The Joys of Prom!

Working hard as a chaperone

The sun is almost completely set. I'm walking home. The path to my house is quite jagged and hard to walk on, so I've got my head on the path and am concentrating on every step. Suddenly, I hear something and see movement out of the corner of my eye. I freeze. Something's there. I turn my head and I see.... a rabbit. He is still mostly white, but I think I see a little bit of brown under his chin. When I stopped moving, so did he. I know that if I had a gun, I could catch him right now, but I don't. So instead, I just stare at him for a while. He is beautiful. This night is beautiful. I want to stare at him for a little longer, but it is just about 2 am, and I've been dancing most of the night, so I turn back to my path and take a step. I look back at the rabbit one more time and see that my step was a signal to him that it was time to go home. I smile to myself and walk the remaining steps to my house thinking how amazing my life is. 

Prom entrance 

Prom set up- lovely

That scenario happened right after we finished cleaning up from prom. Ah, prom! What a fun night! Prom in the village is much different than prom in the lower 48. For one thing, we stayed after the dancing was done to take down everything. The main reason we did that was because we were pretty sure if we waited until the next day, no one would come help. It took us less than an hour to clean up. A lot of people stayed to help. Young, old, everyone. That brings me to another difference- age groups. There aren't a whole lot of things to do on a Saturday night in the village, so prom becomes an activity not only for the high school students, but also for their parents to come and hang out and dance. I say dance, but that is yet another difference. Not a lot of the students wanted to dance. The teachers, now we hit that dance floor hard and had a good time, but the students seemed a little worried to be caught dancing like a baboon with us! Of course, some students did dance and had a grand old time of it. That was a lot of fun. 

The door ladies, making sure no one brings
anything they aren't supposed to

Our prom court-prince, princess, queen, king

Prom was held in our gym. Now, the sun stays up until after midnight here these days, so to help block out the light, the gym is decorated with trash bags lining the floor and material covering the top of the prom area. It was quite a different look for our gym than I had ever seen before. And boy, was it beautiful! The teacher in charge of everything did an amazing job! Even the students were impressed, which isn't very easy to do. 

Good sports

My class's design, isn't it great?

It was a great night, one to remember. Everyone enjoyed themselves and everything went smoothly, kind of like our event earlier in the week. On Tuesday we had a fire safety presentation. Leading up to that, the students for each class were asked to decorate their door in a fire safety theme and they could win a chance to pie an administrator in the face. My kids enjoyed putting our door together. I think it looked really good and that they should have one, but alas, I was not a judge and so our door wasn't the winner. However, we did get to enjoy watching as all of the administrators were pied by different students. The whole school was watching and everyone enjoyed it. 

Everyone gathered waiting for the event to begin

Just two more weeks of school and they are PACKED with fun filled activities! Monday and Tuesday are Culture Days, where students will be led in different culturally relevant activities. This, I feel, will be a lot of fun. I'm working with students on basket making. Other activities include making lap balls (lap game is very similar to baseball), beading, making agutaq (Eskimo ice cream), Eskimo dancing, and making spears or manaqing poles (ice fishing poles). I'm looking forward to all of these things. We also have Senior Dinner and Graduation next week followed by 8th Grade Graduation and Dinner the next week and our Clean Up Day, which I'm not exactly sure when that will be. Then, of course, there is the last day of school on May 17th. So much to do, so little time! I hope my readers are looking forward to the wonderfulness that is the end of the year teaching in Bush Alaska in my next and last couple blogs for this year!