by Mary Odden
For our children, Lottie Sparks School offered an “asset” in today’s educational parlance. When you talk to them you can see they still have it, a light in their eyes left over from the way people in this community cared about them when they were small students here, right down the road.
COUNTRY MOUSE, CITY MOUSE
At three in the morning a few weeks ago, on one of those red-eye cattle-car flights to Seattle, I had a lot of uncomfortable sleepless time to think about how urban America doesn’t “get” rural. How they can’t understand fish and game issues, how they don’t even know that tofu comes from soy beans. Coiled concrete freeways and dressing to impress—ack!
But I know that I also don’t “get” urban—and the reasons I don’t, as usual, are my own prejudices. Like all prejudices, they differ in usefulness.
Example of a useful prejudice: Rural people are more resourceful and independent than urban people.
Mistrustful of plumbing, we dig outhouses. We have generators and flashlights and candles, ropes and buckets and our own potatoes and we aren’t afraid to use them. After Hurricane Katrina you could hear all kinds of rural people say if it had been us, we’d have had boats tied up on our roofs, certainly friends in high places—maybe friends with float planes.
Instead of stacking ourselves on top of each other like helpless cordwood, or like equally helpless and crowded passengers in steerage on a Boeing 767, we say we prefer room around us.
What’s really useful about how independent we think we are, though, is that we are lucky and willful enough to disagree when we need to. You might note that we often do this when we don’t need to. If we don’t like what our neighbor proposes, we have a lot of room to go home and do it our way.
Example of an un-useful prejudice: Rural people are more resourceful and independent than urban people.
The attitude of believing in our own sturdy individualism is likely to give us one helluva shock if we ever notice what official and unofficial cooperation can accomplish in a city.
Lights stay on, toilets flush, garbage gets picked up, and people trust each system to work. I don’t know if it amazes you, but I’ve lived with burn barrels and five gallon buckets so long that I can enjoy being surprised, for a few days, by the cooperation that makes the garbage go away, the poop disappear, and the clean water flow out of the faucet.
During my short stint as a teen counselor out west, I once sat up all night talking with an outstanding high school teacher in the Yukon village of Grayling. She said the most educational field trip she was ever able to give her students was a trip to Chicago, where they asked, “How can the buses know where to go?” She said experiencing trust in large systems such as subways and skyscrapers gave her students confidence in themselves and in democracy—which if you think about it is an extreme form of trust.
You don’t have to live there, and if you are like us, you don’t want to live there. You just have to know that it exists.
Footnote example of an un-useful prejudice: Rural people are friendlier than urban people.
This may even be true, but forget about it. You don’t need help from everyone who lives in the city. Take the wrong exit, lose your wallet, spill your vanilla latte on the counter, and the kindness of strangers will astound you.
Besides, even the idea of what’s urban and what’s not can be up for grabs. Riding to Anchorage with my neighbor Rosemary Bartley a few years ago, I could feel my fist tightening around my Sam’s Club list as we approached the region of exits and converging lanes. Rosemary, a native of Chicago, gave a contented little sigh as she nimbly maneuvered her green van through the traffic. “Anchorage is such a nice little town,” she said.
WHERE’S THE JUG
My favorite teacher, Louie Attebery, once told me that there are just two basic ingredients in good teaching—love of subject and respect for students. Louie teaches English Literature at a small Idaho college and wears a suit on days he teaches a class. He explained to me that he does this to show respect for his students even though he grew up on a sheep ranch and is more comfortable in jeans.
Love and respect work in other teaching venues too, bluegrass music for example. Our family always tries to make it to the Anchorage Folk Music Festival, held annually over two weekends at the end of January. At this free event at the Wendy Williamson Auditorium at UAA there are kids and musicians everywhere, including on stage. Most of the stage acts are bluegrass, Irish, old-timey, or folk music, but you can practice up to get your 15 minutes of fame doing just about anything including belly-dancing.
One of the great features of the festival, besides the informal music jamming which takes place in every closet and stairwell, is the workshop schedule. We usually participate in the workshops because we are perpetual music students, wanting to learn a new tune or a new way to sing harmony or play an instrument.
The only paid performers at the festival are the featured individuals or bands that headline each weekend’s evening stage performances. The festival’s organizers ask them to spend time during the day on Saturday and Sunday teaching people their specialties. If it’s an Irish band, for example, you might get a tin whistle or fiddle tune workshop. Featured performers are nearly always great on stage, but their enthusiasm for dealing with rooms full of would-be musicians can vary.
Last weekend, the featured performers were the “South Austin Jug Band.” We heard them play on Friday night, and it only took a few songs from SAJB to make them my new favorite band of any genre. Imagine the demanding clean-note precision of classical performance laid onto Texas swing and blazing-speed bluegrass with traditional instruments—fiddle, mandolin, bass, and guitar. Then transform the bluegrass themes of love and loss with fresh song-writing and surprising harmonies that make you lean forward to hear every note.
Then imagine these guys are about three days older than your teenager daughter and, except for a few stocking caps pulled down to protect their tender Texas necks, they look like they just got out of bed.
I never thought there was a bluegrass “uniform” until I noticed they were not wearing it.
But oh well, after they played our hearts out for 45 minutes the audience brought them back on stage with a standing ovation. After their performance, they went downtown to pick and fiddle that whole night away at one of the customary post-concert jams. We weren’t there because we couldn’t stay awake that long.
We made sure we were at the next mornings’ workshops though, and the young performers of the South Austin Jug Band had not only been able to get out of bed, but spent the next four and a half hours sharing techniques and tunes with us. We found out that Dennis Ludiker’s dad was five-time National Fiddle Champion at Weiser, Idaho, and Dennis has been steeped in the music since he was three.
Dennis remembers being three because it wasn’t that long ago. And he said he felt extremely awkward standing at a blackboard with a piece of chalk at the workshop. He was more comfortable with a guitar in his hand later on, as he walked around the room teaching the marvelous old fiddle tune “Salt Creek” to thirty people, some who had four or five decades on him.
Everyone in the class held a guitar. Dennis didn’t make us raise our hands when we weren’t “getting it,” but put melody-playing people together with chord-playing people and showed reluctant fingers which strings to press—one musical phrase at a time. He worked patiently with each person all around the big circle.
When Dennis was done, every guitar-holder knew both the melody and the chords. Half of the circle could play the melody while the other half chorded the background. Then we switched. Dennis said, “There’s the tune. Go home and play it and change it and make it yours.”
Love of subject and respect for students—it was all there. Never mind wearing the suit—there’s no jug in the band, either.
DRIVING THE BOAT
A hundred years ago when I was in my early twenties I worked at Galena on the Yukon River and I wanted to learn how to drive a boat. The Air Force statio
n was a main feature of Galena at that time. The big chain link fences weren’t up yet between the military buildings and the village buildings. The movie theater, library, clubs, and a number of the military boats were all allowed to be used by the townspeople. But to use the boats, you had to take a safety course from the Air Force guys.
A lot of people drowned in the Yukon River then, just like they still do in rivers all over Alaska. I figured the Air Force would teach me about sweepers and currents and carburetors and air locks and oil and getting tangled tree-stuff off the prop. I thought I’d learn those things along with being told to always, always wear my lifejacket. I was right about the lifejacket.
We didn’t even look at a boat. We never talked about a boat motor or a prop. We probably talked about sweepers but I don’t know, because what I remember are the color slides of drowned people—bloated, ugly, very dead drowned people. We looked at photos of so many drowned people that I can’t picture the big Air Force hangar in Galena without thinking of sitting in metal folding chairs staring at drowned people on the big screen.
After that, I never touched an Air Force boat. It was not because of the safety course but because the fire season got so busy that everyone at our fire control station worked 16 hours a day, seven days a week for the rest of the summer. Going boating in that pink, smoky Alaska summer receded to a wish.
What I really got out of the Air Force boat course was a vivid educational model, reinforced by early government fuel-handling courses predominated by slides of burned people (those courses are oh so much better now). And of course by all the sex-education and drug-education courses I’d had as a teenager—yes we had those back in the dark ages, too—full of pictures of venereal disease on private parts. Those courses were narrated by our county health nurse, who enthusiastically described ruined, wanton lives.
Later, when I wanted to be an English teacher, I recognized the “you’ll drown if you try to drive the boat” model in my profession. It’s when you tell your students by your manner and your words that “correct” will always be beyond them and that their ideas will never be as good as yours.
“Don’t bother, you are not a writer,” is the intellectual gatekeeper equivalent to the drowned body.
Drowning, burning, suffering, dying, and failing English courses are important concepts, good to hold somewhere in the mind while we venture out into the river, the helicopter job, our lives as adults. We owe some thanks to people who tried to scare us into right behavior.
But it’s actually pretty easy to teach people what’s going to happen to them if they fail, or to let them know that they can’t ever be as good as you are. It’s harder to explain a carburetor, explore an ethical dilemma in a teenager’s real life, talk about what respect means on a date, help a student find a deep interest of his/her own. Not the instructor’s interests but their own, and not because something scary is chasing them.
That’s the goal, if we trust the new realities in which our students live. We want them to go beyond us. We want them to thrive.
I bless the people in my life who took the time to know me and show me how to do things that they knew I was going to be able to do.
As if there was going to be a future. As if someone would need to know how to drive a boat.
ASSETS
If you don’t want to read about Copper Valley public school students, put this issue on the floor and let the puppy pee on it—because about six days ago I succumbed to an avalanche of news about awards and activities from the schools.
Even the big state legislative news (education bill) and a national event (the meat recall) are touching our school district directly. When a theme arrives and tackles you, you go with it.
Most of the school news in this issue is local. This issue is about great kids, and if you read between the lines there’s a clue or two about how they got that way.
At the basketball game on Saturday, we listened to players’ lists of people who had supported each of them—parents or grandparents, siblings, friends. I had not expected the last Glennallen home game to pack such a punch of emotion, but as the “best supporters” of those students came forward, so did my memories of backside-numbing sessions on bleacher seats with other parents and neighbors, way back when our kids were Little Dribblers. Remember, Glenda? And then why did we have Little Dribblers at all, except for all those volunteer coaches and organizers who thought our little kids were worth it?
A few years ago I was insane enough to take a year-long stint as a mental health educator, working in Kuskokwim and middle-Yukon schools out west. Truly, I didn’t have much to offer except an enthusiasm for getting children to play fiddles and guitars and a willing ear if any kid wanted to talk.
I learned so much more from the students than they learned from me. Once in a while I get a message from a student of that year who caught the music bug and is still playing an instrument—and that is a very sweet thing for me to know.
Mostly, I found out that hopelessness and hope come in the same packages and are entwined. I learned that I could seldom tell which amazingly resilient kid going through hell was going to come out the other side and be all right. But I learned that those who came through okay were those who had adults that cared about them.
One way you can tell a kid is going to be all right and in fact has a fighting chance of being a capable adult who is smarter and nicer than you are—is by asking the kid to make a list of the people who really want the best for him or her.
Scumbags don’t make it onto that list. Parents usually do, but not always. The sibling who protected the kid against somebody’s fist is on the list, and so is the teacher who took the extra time to encourage or shelter a student. So is the State Trooper who, after his own long work day, would open the school gym and play late-night basketball with teens. The aunt or uncle who listened and loved without judgment would make the list, and so would the friend who had a safe space for a kid to sleep, with house rules that made sense. I saw names of coaches who taught fairness along with how to play the game.
And when kids can make lists like that, they are going to show up in the good news. This little paper is full of them.
KID HEROES
We have a warm personal connection to one of the stories in the Anchorage Daily News published on October 10, “No Funeral Blues for Aniak Fire Chief Pete Brown.”
We didn’t know Fire Chief Pete Brown of Aniak in person, but in years past we’ve had phone conversations with him, and we are very sorry to find out he has cancer and probably not much longer to live.
Brown weighed the odds he was recently given and decided to decline treatment, opting instead to come home and have a farewell party last weekend while he was still around to enjoy it.
ADN estimated that as many as 500 people from around the state were planning to celebrate with Brown, who is famously the founder of the Dragon Slayers, a village fire and rescue organization run mostly by teenage girls.
You already know the story, or you can read it in one of the many articles written about the Dragon Slayers since Oprah discovered them in 2003.
A synopsis: Brown is a Vietnam veteran who has lived in Aniak since 1973. After his son was injured in the early 1990s and Brown became aware that emergency medical services were scarce, he organized an EMS and recruited teens to help. He knew the young people were ready to be heroes. The service started out with mostly teenage boys, but over the years most of the boys dropped out and the girls took over.
Good intentions don’t always translate into lasting action, but Brown stayed at the task of turning these youths into rescue workers. His “kids” got intensive fire and medical rescue training and he organized many hours of practice for them after school. On their part, the participants got good grades and they didn’t miss the squad training sessions. If a kid missed a training, she got fired from the squad.
The squad earned respect from the community, now benefiting from effective medical help and rescue. It got respect from schoo
lmates and even statewide and national attention.
The Dragon Slayers are proud of their work. They help a lot of people, travel miles on mid-winter Alaska trails responding to calls. And many of those who have graduated to adulthood through their ranks have joined organized rescue units or other medical professions.
In 2003, the members of the Aniak Dragon Slayers were on Alaska State Trooper-sponsored demonstration visits around western Alaska. The confident girls with their skills and turnout gear impressed our McGrath kids at a school assembly. Our own kids started to join our town’s rescue squad.
Teens are famously ready to battle injustice, but it usually takes the form of arguing over whose turn it is to do the dishes or who gets the Nintendo. But the accidental drowning of one of our local teens put a dread seriousness into our young emergency responders.
In the face of the terrible injustice of Patrick’s life cut short, more of our kids rose to the call and took on medical first responder training. We had a 16-year-old driving the Ambulance until the folks in charge of buying insurance for the vehicle reluctantly put a stop to that. We had teens responding to strokes and broken bones and burns and runaway skill saws. Teens stabilized seriously injured people and put them on Life Flights to Anchorage.
It is an interesting side-effect of our short tenure with the Kuskokwim Volunteer Rescue Squad, with 20 members at its height in 2004, that the adults on the squad began to treat even youngsters who had not graduated from high school as peers.
In turn, we adults were rewarded with a high degree of responsibility taken by the younger members. We still enjoy friendships that were forged with those kids during trainings and rescues.
