6.21.2006

Turning Out the Lights

Anchorage Daily News

Link to Anchorage Daily News Story


Turning out the lights on five tough years


By R. Brett Stirling
Around Alaska

(Published: June 21, 2006)

KONGIGANAK - I rock back in the chair and take it all in again.

All of the students' desks are stacked and pushed to the four walls of my classroom. The whiteboard is wiped clean, the acrid smell of the cleaner still lingering in the air. For the first time since August, my desktop is clean. The walls are bare save for one tuft of butcher paper stapled too high for me to reach without a ladder. I prop my feet on the corner of my desk, lean back and lace my fingers behind my head.

Little has changed in this room in the five years I've taught here. There's only so much you can do. The ugly orange carpet, laid when the school was built in 1979, is still here, though it is frayed and holed and you have to avoid the long threads when you vacuum.

Today, all the notes and pictures are off the antique white walls, and you can clearly see where the rollers didn't reach on last year's paint job. The rear wall still perplexes me with its eight-foot-high blue short-loop carpeting.

The end of each school year brings certain rituals.

All across the country, schools gear up for proms and graduations. These traditions are timeless and anticipated. And in our community, these events are looked upon with a similar anticipation, and they generally coincide with the first truly warm days of spring and the breakup of the river ice.

This year has seen none of the normal activities either in the world or in our school.

As I sit here contemplating my empty room and the pile of boxes to be taken home and shipped out, it is snowing. Not a dusting or lazy flakes drifting from the sky, but a wet whiteout of wide flakes that stick to everything. The river, though flooded, is still choked with ice.

The prom was held last week in a neighboring village. And for the first time since our "Molly Hootch" school was opened in 1979, no one graduated from our high school.

That first year, five years ago, I walked into a room of a dozen freshmen. Of those students, there were nine boys. None of those boys received a diploma last year, and none will walk up the three wooden steps to the 30-year-old stage this year. Most dropped out at some point over the last year and a half. Despite that fact, over half of them have passed all three portions of the High School Graduation Qualifying Exam.

There is no one answer or explanation. Contrary to what some would like or seem to think, there is no magic pill that will suddenly educate every kid in America by 2014. And people who focus solely on the classroom as the reason, cause and cure of America's education problems aren't seeing the whole picture.

Earlier this year, I sat with one of my first students. He is 19 now, full grown into his taller-than-me frame, his voice secured in the lower register and his maturity visible in his square-shouldered posture.

We sat in this classroom. Papers littered the floor. Photocopies crumpled and shoved under desks. Broken pencils like casualties lay on the ugly carpet.

"I wish I hadn't messed up," Clayton said, no doubt referring to his first two years in my classes, years rife with hostility, unconsciousness and absences. "I'm just too far behind now, right?"

"No," I said, trying to sound upbeat, "You can certainly do the work." He waited. He knew me and the new school requirements well enough to know it wasn't that simple. "But I don't think you can get it done this year."

Clayton nodded. The prospect of coming back to this building for a sixth year did not sit well. He let out a huge sigh.

"I wish I hadn't messed up," he repeated. Wearily, he stood and left. I found myself furious as he disappeared from the classroom.

Kids are supposed to mess up. When they figure it out, as Clayton obviously had, they should be able to correct it, get back on track and get on with their life. Unfortunately, in our rush to meet federal mandates set by the No Child Left Behind Act, we failed to consider the individual human beings we are working with daily.

Additionally, we have failed to construct a curriculum that is truly Alaskan. My students were required to read "The Scarlet Ibis" among other "classic literature" this year for their literature class. I tried to explain the symbolism, how the dead bird symbolized the dead brother. My students stared at me as if I was from another planet. A dead bird isn't a dead boy; it's soup.

I drop my feet off the end of the desk and am propelled to a standing position by the action of the chair. Through the windows I can see the fat flakes whipping horizontally across the land. Five years I spent in this room laughing, yelling, helping, consoling, listening and dancing goofily (the only way I can dance) when the moment called for it.

The teacher before me occupied this room for a single year. The classrooms on either side of me have each seen three teachers in that time, only one with more than five years of experience when they entered the room. Most were like me, first-year teachers in their first classroom. And now I too am moving on.

I heave the last of the boxes to my shoulder. Next year I will be teaching in a different village. I walk to the door and turn to face the sterile square room one last time.

For a moment it appears full again, the students all slouched or hanging in their desks or chairs, eyes on me as I recount the story of the previous weekend's hunting trip with Clayton -- the story of how, on our way home after hitting nothing all day, I managed to pull out a long-range shot on a duck that helicoptered its way to the ground.

Clayton retold the story in Yup'ik, using his index finger as the bird's neck and flapping his thumb and fingers like a pair of wings to mimic the doomed flight of the duck. Then he broke into a perfect impression of my stunned face as the bird fell. The class roared in laughter, myself included.

I reach out and turn off the lights and the sputtering fluorescents fade and the room is bathed in an eerie glow from the white world outside. I walk out into the hall and then the squall and leave my classroom behind.

R. Brett Stirling has been living and writing in Kongiganak, 70 miles southwest of Bethel.


Copyright © 2006 The Anchorage Daily News (www.adn.com)

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http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=476&row=0

http://www.ncsl.org/programs/educ/NCLBArticle.htm

http://www.citypages.com/databank/25/1214/article11955.asp

http://glenninstitute.osu.edu/washington/GregorySchultz.htm

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