Field Trip!

Posted on May 1, 2016 by Keely

The Arctic girls left Anchorage last Saturday night after the NYO athletes’ pizza party. By the time we hit the road, it was after ten, so by the time we got back to Fairbanks it was five in the morning. I noticed, as we drove through Nenana in the early dawn, that the tripod had fallen through the ice since we were last there, only a few days before. The river was open, a passage suddenly made of liquid water.

At the hotel, everyone slept a few restless hours, then we went to Wright’s for an 8:00 check in. When the girls’ plane took off at 9:00, Geoff and I went back to the hotel and crashed for a few precious hours, then he and I returned to Wright’s to pick up the Venetie group at noon.

We ran a few Fairbanks errands and celebrated A’s birthday at a hibachi grill, then turned around and drove the kids down to Anchorage.

Geoff fell asleep about ten seconds after we switched places. He didn’t have much success making lesson plans.

That was hard. It’s hard to be with kids all day every day, and to do it with all the added stress of traveling and feeding them and making sure they are safe is a monumental feat. I have a newfound admiration for parents. It felt like I never had a moment alone, not even to eat or sleep. I don’t mean to give the wrong impression: I had a great time. It was just a long great time.

We had some great roadside stops

Between Fairbanks and Nenana

Just beyond Healy (C didn’t want her picture taken – she hadn’t composed her yuckiest face yet)

On a windy Monday in Whittier

South of Denali

In two weeks we put almost exactly 2,000 miles on the van, and, for the most part, it was pretty easy riding even with eight kids and all their gear in the vehicle. We saw a couple of moose on the road, but they were never problematic road moose, and I learned that Geoff has a working knowledge of approximately 80% of the rest areas and 60% of the gas stations in Alaska.

We cruised through a mountain to get to Whittier, and C calculated down to the second how long it would take us to travel through the tunnel at 25 mph. If there hadn’t been a car in front of us, we probably would have hit it dead on.

The worst part was when G got carsick on the ride up from Seward. She was miserable, and there wasn’t much we could do for her. We’d been whalewatching that day, and she never really got over the rocking of the boat.

Ponchos for everyone!

Sea otters!

Not puking yet, but it won’t be long.

A lot of the kids had never seen the ocean before, and we got to see it up close and personal. We saw a Steller’s sea lion catch and eat a big salmon, and we saw a humpback whale blow only feet away from the rail of our boat.

The kids loved it – when asked what they’d most enjoyed about the trip, most of them agreed that the whales were the coolest. Those kids that weren’t puking did, anyway.

We had some other great adventures too.

We spent a night at the Alaska SeaLife Center in Seward, sleeping between the sea lion and the seabirds. C unintentionally set off the door alarm at about 10:30 and I nearly had a heart attack, but other than that we had a great time. They loved the touch tank and the feeling of having the place to ourselves after dark. The SeaLife Center rehabilitates marine animals, and they had two baby otters in their care while we were there, and they were outrageously cute. I loved the octopus and the puffins with the funny old man hair.

The touch tank at the SeaLife Center was very popular.

On Wednesday, we visited the Anchorage Museum, which I think is wonderful. The Imaginarium is a great science lab playground, with loads of giant bubbles and live animals, and the displays about Alaska’s native communities are well-made and incredibly informative: each case has a computer at the end with information about every object, including a transcription of elders discussing the object’s significance and provenance.

After that, we took the kids to see Broadway’s Peter Pan, which I was a little afraid they wouldn’t like, but which they wound up loving. The flying and dancing and swordfighting looked like great fun, and the sets were beautiful. C spent the whole show whispering questions into my ear, and P swears that if her dad doesn’t get her tickets to go see Beauty and the Beast next spring, she’ll cry.

I’m for bed now. I have some recovering to do before this week hits full force. It’s graduation on Friday and Prom on Saturday, and then suddenly it’s the last week and school’s out for summer. Somehow, I need to find time to pack up my house and my classroom to move up to Arctic and the next big adventure. Madness!

It happened so fast!

Posted on April 20, 2016 by Keely

At the moment, I’m in Anchorage with a group of girls from Arctic Village. This is their annual Native Youth Olympics field trip, and I’m the female chaperone, borrowed from the next village over.

There’s no snow on the ground here, and it rained on the way down from Fairbanks yesterday. There are tiny green leaves on the trees.

On Sunday I put the Sassy White Bravo away for the last time this season. When I get back to Venetie in a week and a half, there won’t be snow on the ground. I returned my skis to gym storage, too. It was a hard day, Sunday. It seemed like winter would last forever, and then suddenly it was over.

As a last hurrah, Ben and I and our visiting student teacher, Addie, took the SWB on its most epic adventure so far. We rode out maybe six miles to the north, the farthest I’ve been along that trail, and started a fire. Terri had given us a foil packet of moose meat, so we set it in among the coals to cook while we went skiing.

It was a gorgeous, warm sunny day. The snow was thick and slick and slushy, and we flew over it fast and sure, hatless and gloveless in our t-shirts.

On the way back, I skied behind the snowmachine – a handy way to move a third body, and a lot of fun. You fly back there, bumping over the ice at a ripping ten or fifteen miles per hour. The trail opened up and I practiced skiing off to the side of the machine in an open area that had been solid ice hours earlier. It happened so fast – all of a sudden I was flying face-first into the deep slush. My skis had sunk into the heavy snow and hooked. I pitchpoled and wound up with ice in my teeth.

I was fine and came up laughing. It’s hard to hurt yourself in the deep, thick, pillowy white spring snow.

But oh, it happened so fast, this spring. It’s suddenly almost summer, and the goodbyes have already begun: Goodbye, snow. Goodbye, skiing. Goodbye, kiddoes.

And goodbye, Venetie.

I’m thrilled to announce that I’ll be teaching in Arctic Village next year.

Still. It happened so fast.

Beautiful northern lights at midnight last week

Spring Carnival

the women’s snowshoe race

skiing on Big Lake

I’m on my way to a new adventure, but I’m savoring every moment I have left with my kids and in the village, and lingering over the small farewells.

Building a Blanket Fort

Posted on December 1, 2014 by Keely

I was offered a job today, one that I really want.
It’s a secondary teaching job in Venetie, Alaska, a village above the arctic circle in the Yukon Flats.
I am frightened of bears and of bush planes and of seventy degrees below zero.
I’ll be going alone and I’m terrified of that.

Over Thanksgiving, I built a blanket fort with some friends. While everyone else was asleep, we reshaped the world. We took the furnishings of sleep and stayed awake to hang them over our heads, pinning this fabric of an improbable, inverted landscape to the ledges with makeshift fasteners and friction and gravity. We whispered our giggles and slept in absurd contortions, grinning.

My greatest fear is of going to bed early, of giving up on things before I’ve even begun. I’m accepting the job offer.
Everything comfortable in my life is going to turn upside down.
Maybe my glee is childish, but I’m exhilarated: I’m remaking my life into an adventure again.
Wish me luck.

A week of summer school

Posted on July 10, 2014 by Keely

I am wildly excited about summer school right now.

Background info: Summer school at Lee has turned out to be only fifteen teaching days, and I will teach only eleven of them. Today was my seventh. I am teaching ninety minute blocks twice a day primarily to groups of students who scored below proficient on their eighth grade benchmark assessment. Like most students whom I have taught, they struggle with basics of mathematics like adding and subtracting integers, multiplication facts, long division, operations with fractions and decimals, and reading for comprehension.

On Monday, I nearly lost my stuffing. My lessons had gone poorly, though I’d been on top of behavior, and I was still remediating the objective (order of operations – not even in the ninth grade curriculum) that I had scheduled for the first day of class and my attempt to give them a hands on activity to introduce variables had totally backfired. I’d been gone for four days, my students hadn’t completed the practice that I had left, and they were acting out, tired of doing the same type of problems over and over again. I was feeling frustrated, ineffective, and angry with myself. I felt exactly like someone who was being paid very, very well to knock down a well-built brick wall by hurling herself against it. I felt like an oppressor befuddled by passive resistance (Lee County’s students are students of Gandhi, not of mathematics).

On Tuesday, I kicked my rear into gear and taught a lesson on solving equations, which I love to teach. I tied it so thoroughly to the foundation we’d laid in order of operations that my kids couldn’t help learning a pinch or two of new material.
I had a student follow a set of written directions to walk a path through the classroom, then had the class direct the student back to her starting position. The class intuitively did this by reversing the directions she had followed, starting with the most recent step. I recorded their instructions and had them make observations on the activity (we undid the last thing first – all the directions are backwards!). Next, I had the volunteer rewalk the original path, then scrambled the directions that her class had used to help her navigate back to start. She wound up in a totally new location. We solved some two-step equations for practice.

Yesterday, we practiced order of operations and solving equations for a while, then I had them writing expressions based on stories, which carried us through the day.
“Looks pretty good, but don’t forget to define your variables, D”
“Okay. R = Rufus”
“What about him? His height? His bank balance? How many hairs he has on his tail?”

Today was the bomb, though. I taught a mediocre lesson on function notation, but it had them solving three-step equations with a story. My first period wasn’t so into it, but the second group killed it. They killed it!
“Raise your hand if you can tell me the story of this problem and solution… Okay, A”
“Selena worked ten hours and after splitting the money with her mom, she had $51”
“Awesome, girl. Isn’t it amazing that I can tell you all of that just by writing i(10)=51?”

“What do we need to do first?”
“Figure out what happens to x”
“Okay…”
“It gets divided by three, you subtract two, then multiply by negative six”
“Good work with order of operations. Now what?”
“Reverse the steps: divide by negative six, add two, multiply by three.”
“Go kill it. Remember to keep the see-saw balanced”

Crowning moments of the day:

I had only one student in my second group who didn’t choose to stay after class to finish the challenge problems.
I overheard two kids arguing about who had done better in my class today. One of them was a consistent underachiever who’d really caught on today.

Days like this make me love my job. Days like Monday make me want to flip burgers. Teaching is awesome, but by golly it’s no cakewalk.

Here’s a snap of Mr. P in action.

Community

Posted on April 14, 2014 by Keely

Tonight we had a truly kickass meeting at P-W. This was a TFA-mandated thing, but it was meaningful because we had the opportunity to make it our own. Shoutout to my awesome MTLD for that. Tonight’s was easily the best session I’ve ever attended.

Three of our seniors came, one with a parent. Our principal attended, and several veteran teachers spoke. The students spoke passionately about feeling unprepared for college, betrayed by and suspicious of the revolving door of young teachers, and unaware of the realities of a world outside of our community. We heard teachers speak about feeling uninspired, unsupported and isolated.

I have never felt like a part of a professional community at P-W. We don’t have vertical alignment meetings and we’re not actively encouraged to plan across content areas. Expectations for students aren’t consistent among classrooms, staff meetings are always perfunctory, and most of us do not feel empowered to make changes to the way that our district operates. The students and the one parent present echoed the sentiment that something is missing, that they don’t feel involved.

We discussed a variety of plans to build community and involvement. I loved the idea of a mentoring program. In my vision, this is a program that assigns each student (or targeted students) a teacher with whom they are required to meet once a month to discuss their aspirations, accomplishments, and challenges. I’d do this during lunch, and require students to keep a portfolio or a video log chronicling their growth throughout high school. Each mentor would be limited by time to a few students, but I think we could find ways to build our capacity to do this. In other folks’ visions, mentoring took a very different form with seniors mentoring freshmen. Maybe some combination of the two ideas would work best.

Someone suggested polling teachers and students to determine interest levels in clubs or extracurricular classes or events to provide the enrichment that our small size prevents us from providing. One of our seniors brought up the idea of a student government, which would kick ass and feed wonderfully into my scheme for community meetings (like the one we had tonight! The student council could present…) before parent-teacher conferences. This would happen only twice a year, so it wouldn’t require much additional effort for anyone, and would probably increase attendance and candor at our conferences astronomically.

Regarding improvements within the teacher community, we discussed the need for vertical alignment and new teacher mentoring. This stuff needs to happen: these are simple improvements that could have big impacts.

I felt so clueless when I started teaching at Palestine last year. I didn’t know any of the procedures, expectations or norms, I was in over my head just planning lessons, and I didn’t have anyone I felt comfortable confiding in or asking for help. I heard rumors that any field trip requests or after school club ideas would be nixed, and I felt discouraged and isolated and stressed. I feel all of those things much less now, and after tonight I’m feeling ready to take on some additional responsibilities.

I haven’t felt this inspired in a long time. On my ride home, I actually considered asking Sean to move closer to my school so that I could be more involved next year. I love my homestead on the ridge, but the 45 minute commute is draining and I don’t feel like a part of the social community that the P-W teachers have. I usually decline invitations to go to dinner or to hang out because I carpool with my partner, and I can’t leave him without a ride. I can’t make it home and then back to school before events, so if I have commitments after five, I wind up working 12 hour days with no dinner (this is because I’m picky and don’t eat Subway). Sometimes, I think that if Sean were more a part of my school community or I were more willing to sacrifice my time with him, I’d have a totally different experience and I’d be better at my job.

I’m probably not going to move. This place is my home for now, and I have put a lot of work into making it awesome, but I want it to speak to the excellence of this meeting that the thought crossed my mind. I will find other ways to be more present in my work through the end of this year and into next year, starting with tomorrow.

Big thanks to everyone who came out tonight, you’ve got me feeling excited about school!