Posts published by Doug Noon

3 Results

40

Telling the Raven

By Doug Noon

For each of the past three years, my students have published their writing on our Tell the Raven Web site. It’s a writing space where we share our ideas with one another, and with other interested people around the world. Traditionally, school teachers have been the primary audience for student writing. But now, Web publishing software offers us a platform from which we can tell our stories to anyone who cares to pay attention.

I began the online writing project with my students hoping that it might broaden their horizons, and encourage them to take an interest in the world beyond our local area. It would be great, I thought, if kids in town could connect with schools elsewhere, including schools in the Alaska bush. I imagined that the Web might serve as a medium for cultural exchanges that would require students to hone their writing and reading skills as they learned to communicate with people in other places, telling about their daily business.
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26

Totems of Respect

By Doug Noon

Education policy in recent years has emphasized individualistic aspects of learning. A focus on accountability and achievement testing, giving priority to “results,” has promoted a view of learning as a competitive enterprise, responsive to incentives and sanctions. But this businesslike vision of schools ignores something of great value that schools also have to offer — membership in a community. Schools are people, too.

A totem pole at Denali Elementary School in Fairbanks, Alaska. Photo by Doug Noon.Totem pole; Denali Elementary.

Each year at Denali Elementary, we retell the story of the totem pole that stands in the middle of our schoolyard. It is remarkable that we even have a totem pole here in the interior of Alaska because totem poles are a cultural tradition of the Northwest coastal Indians, 1000 miles south of us. A local Tsimpshian carver from Metlakatla, Bert Ryan, worked with some of our sixth graders in the spring and early fall of 1997 to carve the totem pole. The pole itself tells a story, a story that was given to us by Bert, and is retold each year by three sixth graders at an assembly during the first week of school.
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38

A Natural Enthusiasm

By Doug Noon

I’ve been teaching in Fairbanks, Alaska’s second largest city, for 25 years. I moved here in my late 20’s after dropping out of college and working a long series of seasonal jobs, one of which was as a farm laborer in a Wenatchee, Wash., apple orchard. I met a Mexican family there, kids and all, living in their car as the October weather grew colder, with fewer hours to work each day. I realized that my educational background, truncated though it was, gave me a foundation I could build on to secure my future in ways that people with less schooling might never pull off. I decided then that I should be a teacher, and maybe spread the wealth a little farther and wider.

Eventually, I headed north to get my teaching credential and live out a frontier adventure I’d been planning for several years. Things worked out. I’ve taught in a few different schools in the area, and I’ve also climbed some mountains, built a home in the woods, raised a family, driven a dogsled, and learned to ski. Although Fairbanks is considered an urban Alaskan town, “urban” is a relative term here, since the city of Fairbanks would be considered just an average-sized small town anywhere else. The city itself has a population of 30,000. The town plus its surrounding area, almost the size of Rhode Island, is home to about 85,000 of us.
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