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.