Rankin Inlet (Aug 27/03) - Mike Raymer is not from a region of the world you'd expect to take serious interest in Northern Canada.

The Buffalo, N.Y. native is a teacher in Atlanta, Georgia in the United States' Deep South.

A high school geography teacher, he is about to begin a unit on Canada and he wants to feature Nunavut in his instruction.

He said he is fascinated by the region, because of its close ties to culture and heritage, something he believes is unique to the times.

He also teaches a demographic that is considered upper-middle class.

"Most of my students are pretty well off and I think they believe everyone lives the way they do," he said.

Exposure to Nunavut will do more than show his students that there are North Americans that live very different than they do.

"My geography class a lot of it is about different cultures," said Raymer.

Nunavut would indeed be a cultural experience as nearly 80 per cent of the population is Inuit.

His goal is to start out small.

He wants to work with one or two high schools in the region to set up a cultural and information exchange.

The students would be able to possibly write back and forth and share different knowledge and experiences.

There are a lot of differences the youth from both areas could learn from each other.

In Atlanta temperatures rarely drop below freezing and if it does snow, which rarely happens, school closes.

It is also a community of over 300,000 in a metro area of more than 4 million.

That's a huge contrast to Nunavut where temperatures drop to -45 C and communities making up a total population of 27,000 are isolated from each other.

Eventually Raymer hopes to maybe set up a student trip to Nunavut.

So far he has had little luck getting a response from local schools.