WHAT'S IT REALLY LIKE?

        

       A question I get all the time is, "What was it like to be a teacher in Alaska?".  I can't answer that question because it would be like trying to illustrate a whole shopping center by describing one store.  Alaska is bigger than half of the 48 contiguous United States and the people and schools  differ from one end of the state to the other just as much as the terrain does.  All I can do is relate what it was like teaching in one small village in one small corner of the largest state in the union.

                When someone asks me that question  the short I answer I give is this; "In my experience, teaching in the village of Kotlik, Alaska was like being a street-corner evangelist."  I go on to paint the picture of a zealous preacher thumping his Bible and shouting The Word as if he has the rapt attention of the entire population of a city while the mass of humanity is surging around him paying little attention at all.  My attempt to teach was kind of like that.  By the half-way point of the year I resigned myself to performing the motions of my job regardless of what the students around me were doing. 

               Consider the first day of class on the first day of school.  The electronic tone chimes at exactly 9 o'clock.  I'm standing outside the door of my classroom with a smile, ready to greet my new students.  Inside,  the room is neatly arranged.  Clean desks are lined up in rows facing the white-board at the front.  Taped on each student's  assigned desk is an artfully done up name tag bordered in gold and maroon construction paper to match school colors of the mighty Kotlik Falcons.  The kid's schedule is posted at the front of the room and each bulletin board has a colorful, informative list of procedures for each activity students do regularly such as walking in the hall, sharpening pencils, entering the classroom and preparing for class.  All of the standard preparations for the first day as prescribed by the famous behavior specialist Harry Wong. 

               While cheerfully greeting children at the door I glanced into the room to find the first-comers rearranging furniture to suit them and peeling name tags off desks.  And so the war was on! 

               One of the things we new teachers were told at the orientation week in Anchorage is that the Superintendent believed that an office referral was a sign that the teacher did not have a grasp of classroom management.  The impression we got was that if we wrote referrals we shouldn't expect to keep our job.  Suspensions and referrals were trending up in the last few years and this new Super' was going to reverse that.  In his opening message he did just that.  By March the referral rate was down in every school by at least 50% from the year before.  Not that behavior had changed it's just that no teacher documented it.  Suspensions were also down a staggering amount this year.  If Kotlik was any indication of why this was true it's because students were "sent home" unofficially for several days after grievous infractions.  They were not suspended per se just told not to come back for a while. 

               It became obvious during our orientation that school behavior was a district-wide problem.  Not to worry though because our district had recently adopted CHAMPS and PBIS, patented discipline improvement programs that "worked wonders" all over the USA.  In a nutshell PBIS is a tangible prize based system that rewards kids for displaying expected behavior: "You have a pencil!  Here's a reward., You didn't smack John in  the hall, here's a reward!, You have your book open to the correct page, here's a reward!".  CHAMPS on the other hand is mnemonic device intended to remind kids about every facet of normal school behavior.  Examples include: how to ask a question, how to approach a pencil sharpener, how to move in the hallway, how to enter a classroom, how to exit a classroom...  Very simple procedures that we think of as 'common sense' but that now must be taught and re-enforced daily. 

               During our orientation we had CHAMPS and PBIS drilled into us over and over.  If we weren't doing CHAMPS and PBIS then there were going to be problems.  If we were doing them then all of our teaching days would be happy. 

               So it's day 1 and period 1 and I am facing the first challenge of my authority and we go to battle over seating assignments.  During a lengthy CHAMPS lesson on how to enter a classroom on the first day of school one of the darling girls stands up and begins roaming around the room.  An obvious grab for my attention I choose to deny her the satisfaction and so I ignore her wandering until she decides a nap is in order and  lays across the threshold. 

               The words of my new Principal echoed in my mind "If one of my kids wants to sleep in class let him sleep.  That's one less problem you have to deal with.  You don't know how drunk his parents were last night and if you wake him up he's just going to be angry"  As luck would have it this was the time when David, the Principal, (we were all on first name basis at the Kotlik school, teachers, administrators, and students) walked into the room or rather stepped over a prostrate student to enter.  At any other school I taught at this would be a death warrant to my career but here it was SOP.  I was doing fine. 

WINDS OF CHANGE

 

              I've decided to get out of teaching and enter a different field.  People have asked me how the whole wind turbine technician thing got started, and I'm talking about very important people.  So here's what happened.  Last July, Hobart, my mom and dad, and I were road tripping from North Carolina to Anchorage in order for me to eventually get to Kotlik, Alaska and start my new teaching career.  Once we got into the mid-west we started seeing these huge, gigantic wind turbines.  Three hundred foot tall towers with blades the size of 747 wings.  I said "Whoa".  We also saw other interesting things that are outside the scope of this blog entry. 

           image: Wikimedia.org

    So anyway, when I got settled in Kotlik I started doing some research on these electricity generating behemoths with the thought of possibly getting a smaller one for the school and using it for science and math projects.  At the end of the second week in my new school my enthusiasm for teaching village children sharply waned and at the same time my interest in wind turbines markedly waxed. 

               Through the convenience of the World Wide Web I discovered a school that specializes in online instruction for wind turbine technicians.  The school is named Pinnacle Career Institute (PCI) out of Kansas City, Missouri.  PCI has an eleven month online training course culminating in a 9 day 'boot camp'.  At boot camp we get hands-on experience working with various tools, climbing towers, rescuing injured workers and troubleshooting electrical and hydraulic systems.  We also get a whole bunch of OSHA certifications that are applicable in many fields.  I will be going to boot camp at the end of July, 2015.

               What started as applied curiosity in wind energy has turned into a career change for me.  The deeper I got into the course with PCI the more I began to think that I would rather climb 300' ladders than get cursed at by prepubescents and their parents.  The question now is where will I be working?  If you look at the USGS map (  http://eerscmap.usgs.gov/windfarm/ )  showing the location of wind farms in the USA you will see my choices, none of which are in the southeast.  I will miss teaching and coaching and the great people I have worked with in education. 

     A girl in one of my classes told me that her father had joined the Army years ago.  She said he was sent to Georgia for his training.  One thing she remembered him telling her was that he found it very difficult to sleep at night.  The noise of the frogs and crickets were too much for him. 

It didn’t occur to me until she told me that story that the nights here are deathly silent.  There is the occasional dog bark and the ten O’clock curfew siren but other than those there is no noise at all at once darkness falls. 

Kotlik Power and Light

     Kotlik get’s all of its’ power from this building, owned by Alaska Village Electric Cooperative.  Four Cummings diesel generators are run by automation.  John the technician who gave me a tour of the facility, was taught by his father who worked here for over twenty years.  Surprisingly, he has had no formal schooling in the trade.  The crew who works here keeps the place spotless.  Periodically, maintenance crews from the utility company spend a week at a time on site and live in a milvan next to the generator plant.  

     On the sleepy Sunday morning when I visited, the town was running on just one generator putting out 198 kiloWatts.  John said that he has seen the load get as high as 400 kW at peak usage.  When the school powers up on weekdays they turn on two generators to meet the electricity demand. 

     Electricity is expensive here (58 cents per kWh) due to the small scale and the high price of diesel in remote locations.  In order to reduce the cost the utility company is toying with the idea of stretching high voltage wires hundreds of miles out to these small villages.  That proposal has met criticism from environmentalists and Alaskan Natives.   Another idea, and something they have done in several villages is erecting wind turbines to supplement the generators.  The town of Nome has four large wind turbines that reduced the town’s fuel consumption by almost 20% last year. 

     The challenge of  building wind turbines here is the same as building anything on a delta.  Constructing a foundation on sediment is an engineering nightmare.  It’s been done though in villages such as Emmonak, Chevak, Hooper Bay, and Nunam Iqua. 

 Just Like Capastrano

Song birds have returned to the Yukon Delta.  For the first time since October I heard twittering, chirping and singing while Hobart and I were walking this morning.  People around the village are hunting geese, ptarmigans, and ducks now. 

What Winter Has Wrought Spring Has Put Asunder
      Sixteen hour long days are bringing a quick thaw to the village.  Walking is hazardous at best and the mud everywhere is epic.  The boardwalks on this end of town are all messed up. 

 When in Kotlik...

     Here in Kotlik, custom dictates that if something wants to leave one’s body then one should endeavor to hasten its’ exit.  What I’m talking about is spit, nose nuggets, stomach and intestinal gas.  Yes, those habits I have grown up to consider reprehensible are perfectly acceptable here, and in fact encouraged in order to rid the body of foul substances.  I have witnessed on several occasions grown-ups and elderly folk out about town hock up a voluminous lunger and emphatically spit it out beside the walkway.  The phrase “I used to be disgusted but now I’m just amused” describes the situation in which I’ve seen the Yup’ik language teacher in my classroom delivering a lesson then halt and summon a lugy from the depths of her trachea and casually walk over to the trashcan to expectorate.  

     Then there are the gastrointestinal vapors.  There are probably more deep-belly belches occurring in class than I notice anymore because I’ve become so accustomed to hearing them from petite girls and older boys alike.  One thing I haven’t gotten used to is the flatulence that follows the morning dose of milk with breakfast.  Not only is it loud and from every direction in my classroom but the miasma I’m forced to endure in the aftermath is worthy of a union grievance.  I don’t say a thing and I suffer in silence but there have been occasions where the room’s atmosphere became so polluted that the children have banded together and forced the most offending individual to move to the hallway.