OK. Just a few more thoughts in a deliberately random order:

4 out of the 5 teachers at Northway School are leaving at the end of this school year. 4 out of 5. A new principal will be coming in, too. I suspect many of us heard similar stories out at our rural placements. Everything we know about education tells us that this high turnover rate is terrible for Alaska's students and yet we're not hearing a lot about what we can do to change it or better adapt to it. At Northway, I can only imagine there will be a few years of difficult transition and re-stabilization. The school's location a few miles outside of the actual village will put it at a distinct disadvantage through the course of that transition; it's just not seen as an essential pillar of the community like schools are in many Alaska communities.
 
In Northway, many of the younger kids got awards for drawings they submitted to a drawing contest Tetlin National Wildlife Refuge held earlier in the year. The rep from the Refuge said the Northway kids submitted far more drawings than any other school in the region. Go Northway Warriors!

Kids getting awards and etc

  The view of the Yukon River from "downtown" Eagle is breathtaking. Simply breathtaking. 

A view of the Yukon River from Eagle

There's a giant metal chicken in Chicken. I'm told it's the biggest chicken in the world. Ernie, the boy who told me this, tricked me several times during our trip up to Eagle and I remain dubious.

Jonny and the giant chicken in Chicken

Eagle's school building is really nice. There's a large communal meeting/library area located in the middle and the classrooms and offices are all situated around its perimeter. The building's design makes those long hallway school buildings look poorly planned and kind of ridiculous in comparison. Eagle's is a very small school; just 18 students are enrolled there in 2015-16.

Eagle School

There are many words for snow.

Many words for snow

Northway School

Here are just a few observations in no particular order: 

So. One teacher I observed's background is in English. And she has strong familial ties to Northway Village, making her a valuable link to the community for the school. She teaches Journalism, Alaska Studies, Math, English, and Life Science, in that order, for grades 8 through 12. It's the same schedule every day. It's a tough job. Most of her students are consistently getting failing grades. 

The number of students in her class fluctuates from day to day from between 5 to 10. The kids have Chromebooks to use for research and to write and to do math assignments through Khan Academy. They also have science textbooks to use for their Life Science coursework. When I was observing, most of the kids' time was intended to be seatwork time. They were almost entirely silent for several hours. But few seemed to be doing any actual work on their assignments, and that was apparently the norm. 

What I also did not see were any of the scaffolding strategies we've been talking about this last year and I've seen in every other class I've observed.  There were no Think Alouds, no Pre-Teaching Vocabulary, no Tapping Into Prior Knowledge, no Giving Time to Talk, no Think-Pair-Share, and expectations for assignments were almost always incredibly, irritatingly, excruciatingly unclear.  

Those same students stay in those same seats in that same classroom all day, with a handful of 5 minute breaks and a 30 minute lunch break somewhere round the middle. Unless their grades are all good, then the kids will get a break for gym during fifth hour, the period before Life Science. That's a great chance for them to go burn off steam and shoot hoops in the gym, a chance for exercise and a change of scenery. But if their grades are all bad, as they typically are and have been for as long as anybody remembers, the kids are required to stay in those same seats, in that very same classroom, All. Day. Long. Imagine that.  

On the other hand, the elementary through 7th grade kids get several opportunities to exercise and run around, chasing each other screaming at the tops of their lungs. They are invited to stay active during their numerous breaks in the day, and they are kept intellectually and physically stimulated through station work in the classroom. They're even given a physical outlet when they're expected to remain semi-sedentary for lengthier amounts of time. Here's a cool thing I call a bike-desk that kids use during their math and science classes...  

bike-desk

Our trip to Northway has reaffirmed my belief that the proper use of blended learning strategies with distance learning as a focus is key to education's survival in our far flung rural communities. Alaska's university system and especially hub communities' schools need to step up to provide more learning opportunities to students in our rural villages. At the bare minimum we need to be finding ways (and the funding) to offer more outreach, and we absolutely must get the necessary technology out to rural schools, ensure that it works, and make damn sure that everybody in the school knows how to work it (i.e. lots and lots of training and retraining and teaching our teachers).

I'll mention here that I spent some time doing vocabulary review and testing with the middle schoolers' Language Arts class. It was explained to me that one of the major struggles at Northway School is developing kids' reading skills. There'd be pictures of me doing some work with the students there but Jonny was probably off somewhere playing with poop* when he should've been taking pictures. 

If you're still reading along, it's just after lights out here in Eagle. My sleeping pad is in a gymnasium full of crazy boys. I'm writing this from the kitchen. We got in to Eagle this afternoon after an almost 7 hour ride through an absurdly spectacular and remote section of the eastern Interior. We are 8 miles from the Canadian border. Jonny and I came in a van with Northway's principal and 6 of Northway's really, truly wonderful students to check out a motivational basketball player named Jesse LeBeau. Jesse came to Eagle to motivate kids and play basketball, and he did both very well. This trip has been amazing.  










*Please read Jonny's blog for context.

Preparing for Northway

On Sunday, after gathering up food and et cetera supplies and maybe buying a cot to use when I sleep on a classroom floor all week, I'll drive my janky old station wagon to Northway, Alaska, way over by America's hat Canada. It's a trip I've been looking forward to taking for quite some time. 

  

I know next to nothing about Northway other than it is home to a runway that's often used by pilots who fly into Alaska from America's hat Canada and need to clear customs. Here's one heckuva nice view of their final approach into Northway's airport...

Photo courtesy of: jandd.org

Northway is about 5 hours from Fairbanks on the road system, and it's pretty close to Tok, the area's hub community. Northway has a small population. As of 2010, 290 people live there. More than two-thirds of its population is Athabaskan. According to this website, Northway is actually three dispersed settlements: Northway Junction at Milepost 1264 of the Alaska Highway; Northway, located nine miles down a spur road on the Nabesna Slough; and Northway Village, an Alaska Native community two miles south of Northway.

More from that website: "The nearby Tetlin National Wildlife Refuge area was long used for hunting by the semi-nomadic Athabaskan people, while the permanent community was established during World War II with the construction of an airport for the Northwest Staging Route, a chain of air bases through Canada. The village also served as a supply point for the construction of the Alaska Highway and in 1942 was named after Chief Walter Northway, an Athabaskan who adopted his name from a Tanana and Nabesna riverboat captain. Today, Northway is the aviation entry point into Alaska for most private planes. Some 700 planes clear customs each year in Northway, most arriving between May and September. Both the Federal Aviation Administration and U.S. Customs maintain offices at the Northway Airport." 

47 students are enrolled at Northway's K-12 school. I'll be helping out with social studies and English lessons while I'm there for the week. More to come...