39 pages • 1 hour read
Kirkpatrick HillThe Year of Miss Agnes
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2000A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 9-11Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 9 Summary
In November, Little Pete leaves to go trapping. Because his mother died of measles, his aunt, Big Bernie, goes with them. She is known for being strong. Most years, Pete is excited to go, but he doesn't want to go this year because he'll miss school and Robin Hood's ending. Miss Agnes reads for longer, so they can finish it. After Pete, Roger leaves as well. Roger's family has nine kids and three dog teams to take them and their supplies on sleds.
Other families start to leave too, but Marie Solomon stays in the village to look after the children while her mother helps with the trapping. Marie has a lot of washing to do at home, melting snow in winter for washing water. She cooks and cleans as well. She likes to style her hair, sing, and dance, and the boys all like her. This makes Mamma think she's frivolous.
Miss Agnes worries about Marie staying home and not getting an education, but Marie is not worried. She thinks that she already knows everything she needs. Miss Agnes still teaches her. She also helps Plasker's father, who visits her cabin to learn to read and write, as well as Old Man Toby, whom she shows how to write his name. Fred appreciates Miss Agnes's philosophy of life-long learning.
Chapter 10 Summary
The students have a lot of fun with Miss Agnes, particularly when it comes to music. Miss Agnes uses a concertina to teach them songs. When she does, she lets Bokko put her hand on the box to feel it.
Fred explains that the village has dances in the community hall on weekends to celebrate various occasions, from birthdays to funerals. Normally, Martin Olin plays the violin on these occasions and everybody dances, including Bokko and Mamma. There are particular rituals they follow, learned from the miners who used to live there: men and women stand on opposite walls, and a man who wants to dance with a woman approaches her and kicks her gently on the leg. Then, they dance for two songs together. Once Miss Agnes came to the village, she began attending the dances, bringing her concertina so the regular musicians could dance, too. However, she never dances herself.
Chapter 11 Summary
Back at school, Miss Agnes makes an historical timeline to show the children. This helps them contextualize different events, such as World War II and the Russian settling of Alaska. The children play "time machine," where they pretend to travel back to a particular period, and the other children ask them questions about that period.
Miss Agnes uses other non-traditional teaching techniques, such as stopping during unrelated tasks to ask students questions about other things they've learned. Fred likes this method: "It made everything stick in our minds better" (71).
Excited at her newfound knowledge, Fred makes a timeline for Grandpa. Grandma doesn't like how it looks, so Grandpa studies it when she is not home, showing his friends, and adding to it. He and his friends are shocked by the information about World War I on it—that so many people died without them knowing it.
Fred's grandfather tells stories about the past with his friends, and the children listen. He remembers when miners came for gold and explains that the native people helped them with things like navigation, while the miners gave native people medicines. Many current residents are descendants of these miners.
Though he misses some of the old ways, Grandpa continues working, trapping fish and snaring smaller animals. He is nostalgic for hunting sheep, caribou, and moose with his own father in the north. He also remembers stories his mother told him, as well as the sod house they lived in during the winter to stay warm. He was there when the government started the Allakaket school, and his mother encouraged him to go. Still, he had to stop after a couple of years, and this is what makes him so curious about what Fred is learning.
Miss Agnes orders a microscope to help the students learn science. Fred is awed by the different scales of the world, from tiny to enormous. Jimmy Sam is particularly interested in the microscope and brings in things to look at. When Miss Agnes tells him there are colleges, like the one in Fairbanks, with more powerful microscopes that he could one day use, the students are doubtful. However, when Miss Agnes describes examples of famous thinkers who grew up in similar villages, they start to believe it. Jimmy has always been curious and thoughtful; Fred remembers him noticing patterns in fern leaves and realizes that Miss Agnes understands him better than anyone ever has before.
Chapters 9-11 Analysis
Miss Agnes’s expansion of learning outside the classroom continues in this section, as she ensures that Marie continues lessons while at home and Fred creates a timeline (based on what she learned at school) for her grandfather. The setting expands, bringing in references to historical events, the community hall, northern hunting sites, and universities, as Miss Agnes fosters her students’ ambition. She never discusses the benefits of education outright. Instead, she focuses on letting her students realize the possibilities that await them, opening their lives up beyond the village. Jimmy Sam emphasizes this theme as he learns about the powerful microscopes available at the university in Fairbanks—as well as the fact that people from small villages have ended up being great thinkers. Yet, Miss Agnes’s method does not present education only as a means to an end. As Grandpa studies and shares his timeline, knowledge enriches his life, though he has no intention of changing professions or leaving the area. The timeline further allows the villagers to situate themselves within a broader context—seeing themselves not as separate from world events, but as part of them, as when Grandpa adds to the timeline.
The benefits of learning from other cultures also appears in this section, as Fred’s grandfather recounts how, in his youth, the Indians helped miner, and the miners helped the Indians. This example of sharing cultures parallels the sharing of cultures occurring between Miss Agnes and her students, as she learns about their culture and history and teaches them about other cultures. Nevertheless, Miss Agnes remains both part of, and separate from, the village as a whole. Chapter 10, in which Miss Agnes plays music for the village dances, illustrate this; she plays her concertina, yet never dances herself.
