Trying to understand, maybe this can help:
http://ellislab.com/codeigniter/user-guide/helpers/form_helper.html
Look for the subtitle named form_dropdown() and do exactly what it says and let us know what happen.
The thing about the model, let me know if I understood, you want to read the values in a voew from a model?
Guess you need to read about MVC dude,
http://ellislab.com/codeigniter/user-guide/overview/mvc.html
You use a controller to comunicate a view with a model, it is something like monkey-in-the-middle
but man, read the guide it is very useful
Cheers!