When in Wemindji...: Mini Pencil Mayhem

It has been a week with most of the town without Internet. As you can imagine, this is incredibly frustrating and BORING since pretty much the entire community is relying on 3G which makes it essentially impossible to do anything on your phone, if that is what you have left to use. I have been wandering my house like a lost puppy desperate to read the latest gossip from Hollywood, curious to know what is going on in the outside world. What month is it? Where am I? WHO am I? A life without Internet forces one to start thinking deeply and asking too many questions. I need to get online.

Thankfully the school has a different Internet source which is very lucky for me because this weekend I needed to make an emergency purchase that required a fast and reliable connection. You see, my electric sharpener died last week. Any teacher will understand the benefits of having a good electric sharpener. With the amount of sharpening these kids seem to need to do in a day, using the little hand-held ones would leave them all with dozens of blisters. So I invested in 2 very good sharpeners, set some rules about proper and responsible use and things were good. Anyways, my first sharpener of the school year died a natural death on Tuesday. After quite possibly MILLIONS of sharpens, it finally croaked and moseyed its way through the shavings clouds up to sharpener heaven. I replaced the dead sharpener with a newer, faster model. This sharpener however fell short (no pun intended) in one department. It had no fail safe or whatever. Meaning it just ate pencils until you removed them. It didn't stop sharpening when the pencil was sharp. So the kids quickly discovered this and began making mini pencils by the DOZEN. At first it was kind of cute. But then they became obsessed with making one inch pencils that were essentially useless. Upon checking the pencil baskets, I found about 648376 mini pencils and NO normal sized pencils. I lost it. "NO MORE MINI PENCILS!" I bellowed at the kids, explaining in a calmer manner that it wasted our dwindling supply of pencils and you couldn't write with these ones anyways. We agreed no more mini pencils. Over the course of the week, the odd mini pencil did pop up and a student would be told on for making the offensive mini pencil, mini pencil offenses became the tattle-du-jour, but I felt the problem was on lockdown.

Well, I will not name names, but a particular student decided to try and sharpen their eraser on Thursday. Take a guess what happened. YEP. Not 72 hours after replacing my electric sharpener with a superior model, this sharpener was also sent to the pencil shapening pasture. I was livid. After an already incredibly stressful week with lots of "chats" with the class, I was understandably upset. Also, think about it. I am up here fairly close to the middle of no where with NO Staples or office supply store within 9 hours. That means at LEAST 1-2 weeks (with express shipping) until a new sharpener would arrive. That meant at least 1-2 weeks of complaining about no sharpener, losing countless hand-held sharpeners in the garbage cans and TONS of blisters. I foresee a very rough couple of weeks in the future.

Anyways, I am trying to keep my chin up and keep calm during a stressful time in the school year. Lots of testing and all around business have the students and teachers pushed to the max. Tomorrow we begin our first of 3 days of standardized testing school-wide, tonight is the season finale of The Bachelor, Wednesday is report card night but thankfully Friday is a PED day which is a nice little light at the end of a looooooong dark tunnel.
Last week we had visiting artists Veronika and Katie come teach cool art lessons to the entire school. They came to the grade 2 classes and read "The Enchanted Caribou" and had the kids draw and create silhouettes on black and white paper. The effect was very cool and the kids liked drawing with white pencil on black paper.

This weekend I also did my taxes. Last tax year was my first full calendar year teaching and living up North so expected to see some of the benefits, also filing as an Ontarian to claw back some of the INCREDIBLE amount of deductions I am robbed of on a bi-weekly basis as I work in Quebec. It got off to a shaky start (see picture) but was soon resolved. THANK GOD.

As for my broken bum, it is still broken but fast on the mend! Physiotherapy was a lifesaver and I cannot stop singing the praises of the community's expert physiotherapist Lise. LOVE HER.