student or teacher?

Since arriving at the District Volleyball Jamboree in Newhalen, kids have mistaken me for a fellow student. Admittedly, I am still consistently carded for everything, but a student….seriously? This is definitely a first. In all honesty, I have mixed feelings about the misinterpretation of my actual age. On one hand, I sincerely hope that the uncertainty does not lay in my maturity and/or lack of professionalism. On the other hand, I think it is awesome that I look young enough to pass for a high school student. I suspect it may be the latter because all these confused girls are from the south part of the district, so they have never seen or interacted with me before this jamboree. Either way, the other teachers think it is hysterical. It has become a running joke, and provides constant fuel for teasing. Perhaps I should think twice before pulling my hair up into French-braided pigtails.

The February Funnies

I have been uncharacteristically ornery recently. I am told this is typical temperament for this time of year. Alaskans call this behavior “the February funnies.” They say that "the February funnies" may be demonstrated by depression, craziness, irrational thought, cabin fever, general crabbiness, nothing sounds fun, totally unmotivated, a little paranoid, etc., etc. February funnies lead to Jack Nicholson moments (as seen in The Shining), so I need to be on my guard. My Curriculum Coach told me to try not to make major decisions in February, because she has learned that, in hindsight, those decisions turn out to be not-so-good.

I am so stoked for Spring Break, which I am hoping will rejuvenate my spirit.

A Great Lakes Update on "Momentum" - by Noel March

The summer before I moved to Alaska, I opted to stay in Erie, and was paid to sail with my best friend. It pleases me that others were able to enjoy Lake Erie's summertime awesomeness...

A Great Lakes Update on "Momentum" (ex. Dirigo) - by Noel March

It was to be a special treat for my young family and me, a layover stop last summer at the Bayfront Center for Maritime Studies (BCMS) at Lake Erie, Pennsylvania.  It may have been a bit hard for them to understand at first, especially since I had made such a big deal about "making good time on the road" between eastern Maine and northern Illinois, ultimately bound for my in-law's farm in rural Garden Prairie (a whole month with Grandma and Poppa was, after all, the long awaited goal!).  But all along the way I had my "captive audience" who were helplessly subjected to my seemingly endless tales of childhood sailing adventures aboard the famous Friendship Sloop DIRIGO...and regaled they were!

You see, my childhood summers were spent at Friendship Harbor.  With my brother Jon and sister Mimi, we would sail with Ernest Sprowl and Harold Lash aboard DIRIGO during those early Friendship Sloop Races in Muscongus Bay, and a few trips to Castine for the Retired Skippers Race as well.  I learned to sail aboard that sloop, and did a fair amount of "growing up" thanks to her, too.

We arrived in Erie on the evening of July the 2nd, and after checking Laurie and the three little ones into our hotel, I made a bee-line for the wharf to see that 45 year old dear friend of mine, DIRIGO.  There she lay, noble, quiet and still, just as she should be, and just as I had pictured she would be.  Now named MOMENTUM, and proudly in the service of educating youth on the environment, conservation and seamanship, she greeted me with happy memories and one very special figurehead of a hand-carved eagle's head leading her original trailboards.  My late mother, Nona March, had lovingly carved that figurehead over the course of one whole summer in 1975 and how I remember her joy to see that eagle prominently affixed and adding a touch of her own grace and elegance to that beautiful sloop. 

The next morning after breakfast, our family was greeted by Captain Alex Nagle and Mate Amanda Loose for a cruise across Presque Isle Bay (yes, another Presque Isle)!  We enjoyed the excellent company of captain and crew, and I had a special feeling of satisfaction that the very first sail that my own children were now taking was aboard the very sloop upon which I had taken my own very first sail in 1965.

I am happy to report that MOMENTUM #46 is alive and well on Lake Erie, and in the caring and capable hands of the highly regarded Bayfront Center for Maritime Studies. 

For more information on BCMS, check out www.bayfrontcenter.org.

cultural extinction

The history of Alaska from the Russian period to the present has impacted life so significantly that the cultural identity of the Native peoples now faces extinction. Ironically, education has had the most profound impact on cultural preservation and destruction efforts. The Russian Era marked the beginning of literacy and documentation of the Alaska Native languages. In 1867, Russia sold Alaska to the United States. America was primarily interested in economic gain, not Native culture. Overtly, missionary teachers systematically destroyed Native language and culture as part of a plan to assimilate indigenous peoples from their barbaric ways into mainstream, Christian, American society and culture. Currently, all twenty Alaska Native languages are critically endangered and soon may become extinct.

The Russian period was from 1741-1867. The first Russians that came to Alaska were not under government control, but were fur hunters. They simultaneously endangered both the sea otter and the Aleut people. As a result, The Aleut Native population was reduced from 16,000 to about 1,600. Next, from about 1785-1825, the Russian-American Company under Shelikov at Kodiak established permanent settlements and increased government control. Treatment of the Native people improved from outright slaughter and massacre to mere enslavement and exploitation in the pursuit of more sea otter skins. In 1824, a humane missionary, Ioann Veniaminov, arrived in the Aleutians, bringing with him an interlude of enlightenment and benign Russian influence in the colony. This is the last time that outsiders influence would be advantageous to Alaskan Native cultures and languages. 

The Russian Orthodox Church and its educational system brought literature and literacy to Alaska Native cultural history. Veniaminov worked with Aleut chief Ivan Pan’kov to adapt a Slavonic alphabet to Aleut and had translated a catechism. (Previous to this, all Native languages were oral in nature and had no alphabet.) Subsequently, wide-spread literacy developed in other Alaska Native languages and cultures; at first, in relation to the church and church school activity.

In 1887, the Americans came to Alaska seeking riches in the canning and mining industries, and American church missions and schools were established. The first Commissioner of Education for Alaska (1885-1908) was Presbyterian missionary Sheldon Jackson who, unlike Veniaminov, did not believe there was a place for Native languages in education or religion. For the next eighty years in Alaska history, the old assimilation tradition reprimanded and/or discouraged Native children from speaking their ancestral language. Not until the civil rights movements of the 1960’s was there a resurrection of interest in Alaskan Native linguistics and culture.

Those eighty years of negative indoctrination of Native linguistics and culture has resulted in a detrimental sacrifice, with several generations brainwashed into the notion that Native languages are inferior, unfavorable to childrens’ livelihoods and professions. Cultural indoctrination, combined with the ridiculous notion that because teachers typically only have modeled fluency in one language, English, it is harmful to burden one’s brain with more than one language, or perhaps that it is hopeless to speak two languages well, contributes to the decline of Native languages. Because of the unrelieved repression of Native languages, cultural extinctions are now a serious possibility for the coming century. Linguistic anthologists project that by about 2055 all Alaskan Native languages will have vanished unless immediate preservation efforts are made. 

Language is considered to be the most crucial part of a culture. Language provides the means by which beliefs, behavior, ideas, customs, etc. are transmitted through society. “The only way a language can survive as a living spoken language is if children learn that language as their first language and transmit it to their own children the way it was transmitted to them” (Krauss, 66). Alaska Native languages have survived to the present day by oral traditions, distributed for innumerable generations by those who have formed, refined, and perfected those customs according to their own culture into a rational heritage of multifaceted beauty, unique to each individual. Native cultural suicide is currently happening; the generation that is now able to speak Native and English, but is speaking English only the children, is directly responsible for recklessly abandoning their heritage. 

Since Jackson’s days of Native linguistic and cultural eradication, an additional enemy has surfaced. The battleground has now spread like an infectious disease from the classroom directly into homes. Internet, radio, and televisions are aiding in Alaska Native cultural annihilation.  Every day, satellites bring mainstream America into homes via a direct feed.  Programmings, unfortunately, are not conceived by or about the Native people themselves. Rural Alaskan television is not locally controlled. Imaginative and determined media personnel must work together to take active control and transform television and radio to the service of preserving Native heritage. There must be a desire for conservation efforts by the Native cultures if any efforts are to be impacting and lasting.

Efforts within schools could also assist in the battle against Native heritage extinction. Aside from being unrealistic, it is unfair to hold the educational institution solely responsible for the preservation of Native languages and cultures. All too frequently, the teachers within the schools are not Native, and thus lack the appropriate perspective. Successful Native language preservation in the schools is only realistic by considering the current linguistic work (and how that manifests into literature) and then on the materials and training available to teachers.  To bring about any true and permanent linguistic and cultural revival, parents and the community must continuously work together with the schools. 

As the village Secondary Generalist in bush Alaska, I have experienced, first-hand, the affects of the last 143 years of assimilation efforts. I live in Pedro Bay, Alaska, where the only semi-fluent Native speakers of the Dena’ina language are in their sixties or older.  Admittedly, the current situation is extremely disheartening. The culture is dying, and with it so will the village. The absence of subsistence activities combined with the inability to obtain any sort of income outside the Village Council paid-positions has forced too many of the local Natives to relocate to a place where they could earn a living. There are only two families left. There are only nine students attending the school, and three of those children belong to the non-native elementary school teacher. After this year, the Dena’ina School will be forced to close indefinitely because there will not be the state-required ten students present to have the funding to keep the doors open.

third grade, too

The suggested district curriculum materials for my middle levels (grades four through eight) of Language Arts do not address all of the District’s Reading Standards within those levels. [How/Why a district could strongly urge the use of a curriculum that does not meet most of the required Reading Standards,  I will never fully understand.] To address this discrepancy, I have elected to supplement the curriculum by doing a novel study on The Bridge to Terabithia. My novel study is being implemented on Tuesdays and Thursdays, so I do not get reprimanded for straying from the curriculum.

I chose the book because #1. We had the novel set on site #2. The Bridge to Terabithia is positioned somewhere in the median of all my students' ability levels.  #3. Although there is the occasional use of the word “damn,” it does not contain questionably inappropriate content. #4. My curriculum coach has taught this book in the past, and had oodles of reference materials, lessons, and graphic organizers she was willing to share. I picked and chose what I wanted to use and put together these cutesy booklets, for each student, of everything we are going to be doing for the entire novel study (minus the tests). Working with the younger kids is fun because they appreciate when their materials are awesomely cheesy (campy).

As a parent and a fellow teacher, I was asked if I would also include Dena’ina School’s third grader in on my novel study. There are concerns for her because her Reading/Writing scores have slipped since the beginning of the school year. Since ALL of my students scores have improved drastically, working with me is hoped to improve this student’s scores as well. Of course, I obliged. I am flattered, actually. My ego aside, I also feel it will be beneficial for all my students having this youngling as an addition to our learning environment. My students' ability range is so assorted. On one end, I have an eleventh grader reading on a fourth grade level; and on the other end, I have a fifth grader reading at an eleventh grade level.

I now teach third grade, too. Which means, from 8:30-10:30 am every morning, I teach Language Arts to all of the students in Dena’ina School, except one. Thus far, this new situation has been great, and my third grader is a pleasure to have in class. I believe she also has a sense of pride in being able to do the same work as “the big kids.” Every day, she asks me how long she will be able to stay in my room.

Her enthusiasm is contagious; she is always eager to contribute to our book discussions. Her fluency is not dreadful, and she falls somewhere in the middle for the group read-aloud, only stumbling over tricky vocabulary once in awhile. I put up a Word Wall, and do new vocabulary activities to prepare my students for each new chapter, and any potentially difficult words they may encounter. Ideally, struggling students are also using the booklets I made to prep for their lessons.

Her grammar is excellent. During our last, whole-group, morning, warm-up, grammar activity, she corrected my high school students’ use of alot, instead of a lot. I could not help but beam a wide shit-eating grin. Being corrected by a third grader has a much greater impact than anything your teacher will ever say.

Winning Isn't Everything

I thought I had escaped the whole “tall girls play basketball” cliché unscathed.

Wrong.

I stepped up to claim the unwanted coaching position for the Dena’ina Cheifs of Pedro Bay.

I only have two players, which has made practice interesting. In addition to having extremely limited basketball knowledge, I am forced to make necessary coaching and playing adaptations. Practices consist of strength training, drills, many pathetic attempts to run plays, and lots of one-on-one full court scrimmages. I figure with technique and endurance nailed, we can make the rest up as we go….


To compensate for the isolated nature of the villages (We are off the road system, and inter-village travel is done by plane), all the basketball players and coaches in the district come together for ‘jamborees.’ A typical jamboree lasts about three days. At the jamboree, schools participate in leadership activities (a pathetic attempt to socialize the village kids), and combine to play in basketball tournament.

Wahoo. 

The first basketball jamboree of the season took place at the home of the Meshik Wolves in Port Heiden, which is in the south end of the district. Port Heiden is not included in the gorgeously breath-taking  Alaska most people envision the state to be like. It is flat, has no trees, and the tap water is brown. The water literally looks like weak tea. Despite local’s reassurances, I never dared to actually drink the abomination. I did, however, get to see a herd of wild caribou.

Notwithstanding being locked in a school for three days with a bunch of high school kids 24/7, sleeping on a classroom floor, listening to the perpetual dribble of a basketball, it was fun to see new faces, a new school, a new village, and my teacher friends. I was also eager to learn something about coaching myself. Coaching is not something that you can learn from a book. Believe me, I tried.

At this particular jamboree, schools combined to have three-man co-ed teams. We combined with Egigik. Egigik is infamous for being the worst athletes in the district. Literally, every school prays not to be combined with Egigik. During one practice before we went to Port Heiden, I asked my students why they had such a stigma, they replied, “because they can’t even shoot the ball.” I thought they were just being malicious, so we had a discussion about being nice to everyone.

Wrong, again.

As a teacher, I teach tolerance, and believe myself to be tolerant of everyone. But I must admit, I found myself clueless as what to do as a coach with this situation. Aside from being the worst basketball players ever, one of the two young gentlemen from Egigik honestly could barely run. He tried; god love him, he dumped his heart and soul into the attempt, but the result was absolutely comical, and I found myself thinking of dead babies to stifle the laughter. The Dena’ina Chiefs did not find the situation amusing. My Pedro Bay players were pissed, and it showed on their faces. They were embarrassed. I tried to give these Egigik boys some coaching, but they were completely unreceptive.

I eventually starting picking up things from other coaches, and even recruited a friend (who is a counselor within the district and was at the jamboree doing leadership stuff) who played basketball in college to sit with me and watch my ‘team,’ and give me pointers. I was told that I could be the best coach in the world, but there is nothing much to do with these players other than give them a couple of tips, and hope it helps….

We won two out of our three games. Our only loss, we were annihilated so badly that my Dena’ina Chief players wouldn’t even speak with me for some time afterwards….I shared my concerns with the district athletic director. He told me that someone had to be paired with Egigik, and whoever it was, was not going to be happy about the situation, and he felt team Pedro Bay has the most patience.

After our last game, both the Egigik boys enthusiastically thanked me “for being such an awesome coach.” They shared with me that in addition to not having a coach, never having any sort of formal practice, they have never been on the winning team of a sporting event- EVER.