So, here I sit on the stoop of my little apartment in Aniak, sipping my coffee and looking cool. Check out the hair. Before I left Craig for my two-month stint as a fifth-grade teacher, I forgot to get a haircut. For most of the past ten or so years, I kept my hair cut […]
Category: Mostly Alaska: Life as an educator and citizen
Stories about teaching and living in Alaska
Catch me if you can
I have heard it said that there are no atheists in foxholes; I think the same could be said for the experience of flying over an Alaskan mountain range on a clear spring day, albeit for a very different reason. As I look out the airplane window, I succumb to the ever-present temptation to take […]
In which I set out to learn a new skill
I think one of the secrets of life must be to keep learning new things, no matter how great or how small. Some will learn how to build a new and better space rocket, while I have a more modest goal: to learn how to confidently pilot a four-wheeler. A lot of communities in rural […]
You can’t get there from here
Take a look at a map, and ask yourself, “How does a trip from Togiak to Craig, Alaska come to involve a hotel room in Renton, Washington?” It went down like this: I left Togiak on a Friday morning in time to catch my flight out of Dillingham. From there I stayed overnight in Anchorage […]
Togiak blues (and reds)
The picture you see here serves a dual purpose. First, it gives you some insight into why I stopped coloring my hair. Second, it shows you what it’s like to pick berries in Southwest Alaska. This picture was taken just outside of Togiak, which is a Yup’ik community of about 800 people. As you can […]
Close encounters of the curious kind
I’m remembering that one time, in my little cabin in Kake, when I heard something on the porch. I looked out the window and found myself nose to nose with a fellow mammal. This also makes me think of a time while I was at school. One of the kids, Timmy*, came galloping down the […]
Bears on the porch, bears in the kitchen
When I was about eight, we found a perfect, complete bear track in the mud down by the river. In those days, signs of bears in Powhatan were extremely rare, although I understand that they are much more common now. We stared at the track and spoke in hushed tones of how it must have […]
The great pickle-lamp experiment
I’m not a science teacher. However, as the “secondary teacher” and “lead teacher” of a three-teacher school (two classroom and one special education), I had no choice regarding middle school science. For this group (six kids ranging from fifth to eighth grade), I had to wing it. I knew that nobody would judge me too […]
I live in Alaska but it isn’t cold.
I spent my first ten Alaska years in Anchorage where we got some A-for-effort winters, but even there the Gulf Stream is a tempering influence. My only visit to Fairbanks was at high noon, so to speak, when the flowers were just everywhere and the sun hardly went below the horizon. So the odds were […]