|
 Story by Lee Sherman, photos by Elizabeth Odell
Together, the apple and the float symbolize a career that burst from the shadows into the spotlight in 1995. That was when Griffin was chosen National Teacher of the Year. The honor, bestowed by the Council of Chief State School Officers and Scholastic Inc., plucked the soft-spoken teacher from a tiny school on the outer reaches of Alaska's Kodiak Island and put her on TV screens and stages across America. Dressed in the first business suit she'd ever owned, gold loops shining on ears newly pierced for the camera, Griffin gave interviews to morning news anchors Paula Zahn and Joan Lunden. She chatted with U.S. Secretary of Education Richard Riley at a reception in Washington, D.C. She spoke to audiences of both new and longtime educators from coast to coast. Everywhere she went, in the custom of the Aleut villagers who were her first students, she told stories about salmonberries and tundra-grass baskets and the wisdom that lives in tradition. Many listeners took inspiration from her words, says Jon Quam, director of the National Teacher of the Year Program. "Elaine Griffin showed us that in a caring environment, students are able to see themselves and how they relate to the world," he says. In her travels, Griffin found aspiring educators especially receptive to her stories. "Among people who want to become teachers," she says, "there's an enormous hunger to make strong connections with students."
Twenty-two years ago, when Griffin and her husband Ned first touched down in Akhiok (say AW-KEE-AWK) Cove in a 1943 Grumman Goose float plane, the village children waded into the water and circled the aircraft, calling, "Are you going to be our teachers? Are you going to be our teachers?" Griffin had indeed come as a teacher. But she also came as a learner. In this roadless hamlet whose 70 inhabitants lived mainly on fish gathered from the sea and berries taken from the tundra, Griffin found a community afflicted with alcoholism and the problems it generates: suicide, child abuse, and teen pregnancy. The troubles came as "quite a shock," she says, for a first-year teacher who grew up as "just a plain old ordinary kid" in rural New York. Yet in this cluster of dwellings on a treeless expanse of tundra, Griffin found every family eager to support their children's education. "You could look at it in one light and say, 'There's the worst teaching situation you could possibly have—a village struggling with alcoholism, horrible weather, no trees, leaky modular units with a floor that was falling through, only two teachers to teach every single subject K through 12, and no apparent resources," she says. "And yet it was the perfect teaching situation—small numbers of students in multiage groupings that stayed together long enough for real communication to develop. When we had a program at the school, not only did every single parent in the village come, but every single person came—100 percent. They were down at the school dressed up in their best clothes saying, 'What can I do to help?'" As often happens when she talks of teaching, Griffin's emotions overwhelm her and she grows quiet while she swallows hard, fighting tears. "I can just see all their faces," she says. "They believed that somehow, education was going to open the door so that their children could have a better life than they had had, and they all knew how hard life was." Griffin shared their faith that a good education could heal all wounds and open all doors. One villager became Griffin's mentor. Vera Inga, an accomplished basketmaker who ran the post office, often wove her lessons into stories, just as she wove beads into tundra grass to form the delicate basket that today encases the glass float she gave to Griffin. A native basket is not merely a few handfuls of woven grass, Inga taught. Rather, it is the tangible evidence of centuries of tradition—a "song made visible." Just as one cannot learn to weave without first learning the songs, the language, the ways of one's ancestors, one cannot teach without first understanding the cultural moorings of one's students. When a group of Job Corps workers Griffin supervised failed to show up for work one sunny July morning, heading instead to the salmonberry fields to harvest the ripe fruit, Inga softened Griffin's anger by showing her that, like basket weaving, berry picking embodies culture. The fruit was needed for food. But, more than that, "you need to be out on the tundra with your grandma," Griffin says. "That memory of picking berries with your grandma is what supports you through the hard times in your life, and gives you the courage to go on." Inga made Griffin see that by focusing on what she saw as irresponsible behavior—failing to show up for work at 8 o'clock sharp—she had missed the larger meaning in the event. "I was trying to superimpose a lesson about responsibility that I thought I could teach better than one that the entire village knew how to teach already," Griffin says. "I won't say it was arrogant, because I was doing it from good intentions. You don't learn these things in education courses. They have to be learned on the job." Responsibility was a "big word" for Griffin as a first-year teacher. She set up appointments to call on parents with her complaints: Suzie isn't doing her homework; Billy isn't getting to school on time. Kevin's house was her first stop. Kevin's father, a single parent, had laid out smoked salmon, fried bread, and tea on a crocheted tablecloth. "My knees were kind of shaking because it was my first visit as a teacher, and I knew I needed to be firm about the homework issue and paying attention in school," she says. "I was just launching into my litany of complaints about Kevin's irresponsibility when Kevin walked by the window. His dad looked up and said, 'There goes Kevin, rolling a drum of oil up to his grandma's house.' He looked me right in the face and said, 'Isn't that wonderful? He's the most responsible son I have.'" Griffin's voice fills with emotion as she recalls the episode. "Somehow, Kevin's dad communicated to me what my responsibility was as a teacher—that I didn't just have the responsibility of making sure Kevin did his homework or paid attention in class. I had the responsibility of understanding that Kevin was an irreplaceable person in this world—that the constellation of people who were related to Kevin were all connected to him in ways that could never be made with any other person." From Inga and the other villagers, Griffin learned about the strength that flows through families and communities, even those that are in trouble. Education theorists now call this innate power to overcome difficulties "resiliency." "Vera made me see that people's basic humanity exists throughout and underneath problems," Griffin says. The teachings of Akhiok were the turf in which Griffin's philosophy began to take hold. "I think the purpose of education is to learn to know yourself and who you are so that you can find your place in the world," she says, more than two decades after calling on Kevin's father. Subject matter and skills form only the framework of education, she says. Teaching a student to do well on the SAT or the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills is easy compared with nurturing the child's full human potential. That happens, she believes, when teachers start the engine and then get out of the way. "You think, as a teacher, that you've educated people, but you're fooling yourself because they can only educate themselves," she says. "What you're really providing them with is sheltered space—space to reflect, to immerse themselves in ideas, to look at things through new eyes." Experience and personal tragedy have chipped a few holes in Griffin's faith that education has the power to mend every wound that children bring to school. But she continues to believe that education can and must feed children's souls as well as their minds. "What good does it do you to be well educated if that education is not nourishing to you—if it's like taking a vitamin pill instead of eating wholesome food?" she wonders aloud.
In a three-room schoolhouse just a few steps from the rusty trailer house she shares with Ned and two of their three adopted daughters, Griffin's students are engaged in a discussion on pessimism. An excerpt from 19th-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer's The Pessimist's Handbook provides the intellectual fodder. The talk begins with a quick thumb through Webster's for a definition of pessimism. Then ninth-grader Andrew offers his own definition: "If a glass is half empty, that's pessimism. If it's half full, it's optimism." His brother John, a sixth-grader, counters wryly: "It depends on what's in the glass." The sixth- through 10th-graders wrestle with the writer's words. What does he mean when he says friendships rest on illusion? How do feelings of self-worth heal mental suffering? Why does he say nothing can help a person who knows his own worthlessness? The jangle of a phone cuts into the talk. Looking worried, Griffin takes an emergency call from the district superintendent in the school's closet-sized office. Her eyes are red when she returns. A student in Bethel on Alaska's west coast shot and killed a principal and another student that morning. Here in Griffin's classroom, sheltered among evergreens on Kodiak Island's rugged eastern shore, students are quiet as they consider the bloody event that has shattered another Alaska school. After a moment of uncomfortable silence, the eight students turn their discussion to school violence.
When the period ends, Griffin assigns a reading by French physiologist Claude Bernard on tomorrow's topic: Do we have the right to experiment on animals? Yesterday's discussion centered on the writings of another German philosopher, Georg Hegel. The question: Is human history linear or cyclical? Aristotle, Euclid, Darwin, Galileo, and Homer are some of the other eminent thinkers (many of them iconoclasts in their day) the students have met in their talks. Twenty-two years have passed since Elaine and Ned Griffin landed in the chilly waters of Akhiok Cove. After six years in Akhiok, they needed access to orthodontists and other services for their daughters. So they left the roadless village for the community of Chiniak (say CHEE-NEE-AK), a smattering of dwellings, a bar, and a restaurant linked by a post office just 40 miles by rutted dirt road from the town of Kodiak. In this wooded outpost of 150 inhabitants, Griffin gets the adolescent children of fishers and loggers to gnaw on topics most students don't taste until college. It is during the daily Socratic discussions that Chiniak students find the space to reflect, which to Griffin is essential to a nourishing education. "The most important thing about Socratic discussion is that students are not being directed by a teacher," Griffin says. "If the discussion is to advance, the students must advance it themselves." Although the teacher does not lead the students toward a "correct" interpretation, she must be in control of the discussion, providing a "safety net" for students, Griffin explains. Griffin gives a monthly audio course on Socratic discussion for educators in the southwest region of Alaska. She credits Michael Strong of the Center for Socratic Practice with introducing her to the strategy, which she believes is a potent tool for self-knowledge. Writes Strong in The Habit of Thought: "In order to engage all students, and to insure that understanding is internalized and not 'merely academic,' a significant percentage of the conversations is about life itself. By means of weaving conversations about life with conversations which interpret texts, it is possible to engage students of all ability levels and attitudes in intellectual activity." Griffin once held a Socratic discussion with a group of top students in another community. Afterward, they told her they wished she could be their teacher. "You listened to us," they said. "None of our other teachers have time to listen to us."
Griffin's sixth- through 10th-graders include a 12-year-old math whiz who soon will take the SAT for admission to a Johns Hopkins summer program for gifted children. There is a 15-year-old girl (another of the Griffins' children) who suffered severe starvation on the streets of Calcutta as a small child and now struggles with her studies. Another boy is bright but resents being in school. Still another is skilled in drawing and hopes to land an art scholarship. Each of the eight students has a story, a strength, a self that can emerge fully if provided with space to stretch and grow, Griffin believes. Elaine and Ned Griffin share responsibility for two multiage classes: nine third- through fifth-graders and eight sixth- through 10th-graders. A third teacher works with the primary children. Most students return to Chiniak School year after year, giving Griffin the chance to bond with each boy and girl. In this milieu (she calls it a "teacher's dream"), miracles can happen. For example, every student turns in his or her homework on time every day. "I just insist that it be done," she says. "I don't let them down, and they can't let me down." Eighth-grader Daryl Kalua'u admits that he'd rather not be stuck in school. Still, he expresses appreciation for Griffin's efforts. "She helps me whenever I need help," he says. "She'll explain the material to me one-on-one. She'll take time out of her lunch to help." Tenth-grader Joe Henderson says: "She really cares about the people around her. You can tell by the way she talks to us and presents herself to us. She's really dedicated to her job. If something isn't really interesting to us, she realizes it and makes it more interesting. Because the school's so small, she knows what everybody's like. She knows the kind of things we prefer and don't prefer." Classmate Erin Koning echoes Henderson's remarks. "All she wants is the best for us," the 10th-grade girl says. "She'll do whatever it takes. We know her as a friend more than as a teacher. She listens to our side before she draws conclusions. She makes her plans around what we're interested in. Chiniak School lets you really go for what you're interested in. It's a really friendly environment." The students move smoothly through the day: They work independently; they work in pairs; they work in small groups; they work together as a class. Sometimes Griffin pairs younger or struggling students with older or proficient students. At other times, she matches kids who are working at the same level. She adjusts the pacing, the grouping, even the content as the days and weeks progress. "One week, we only get to Step One; the next week, we'll get to Step 20," she notes. "We tweak the schedule every two weeks to make better use of time." No two years are the same, she says, because no two groups of students are the same. She molds curriculum to meet the needs and match the interests of students. As the school day rolls on, students pass between rooms and activities quietly, working with Elaine on language arts, then with Ned on math or computers, then going back to Elaine for a unit on graphing. The purr of the copy machine blends with the murmur of Griffin's hushed voice as she confers individually with students on their projects. With sixth-grader John Van Atta, for instance, she suggests using mail-order earthworms for a science project. He thumbs through a biological supply catalog. "Ah, here we go: 'Worms, live, page 15,' " John says. "Hey, Elaine. I found a couple of entries on worms." At lunchtime, Griffin reads aloud to the younger group from the historical novel, Meet Addy, about a family of slaves planning an escape, as students chew quietly on apples and baloney sandwiches. They talk about the Underground Railroad over chocolate chip cookies and Jell-O Pudding Snacks. The Griffins' styles are complementary. Elaine describes Ned's approach as systematic and linear. Hers is more organic and circular, "growing out of the moment," she says.
"We give students the freedom to learn what they want to learn," says Griffin. When the Griffins teach, they work around the clock. They coordinate after-school activities, such as volleyball and chorus. They oversee intramurals and community basketball on weekends. Sort stacks and stacks of mail. Order books and supplies. Plan curriculum. Seek out sources of money. The couple avoids burnout by sharing their positions with another couple on alternate semesters. They leave their winter post on Kodiak Island to spend their springs in other exotic corners of the world: teaching at an orphanage in Calcutta. Preserving native plants at a rain forest nursery in Australia. Attending Spanish language school in Mexico.
The excitement in the room is electric. Clumped tightly around a Power Mac, students cheer when they link up to a Web site in Moscow, Russia. There, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright is tapping out answers, usually in English but sometimes in Czech, to online questions from students around the planet. With a computer for each student and an Internet connection, Chiniak School can join the world community at the thump of a finger. Fiber-optic connections make these once-isolated students instant world travelers. But in the ether of cyberspace, images are digital. No amount of Web surfing will replace the impact of place on who we are, in Griffin's view. Landscapes bind communities and give shared meaning to experience, she says. The timbered headland of Cape Chiniak meets the Gulf of Alaska in a stunning clash of rock and surf that can coax startling eloquence from the keyboards of children. Sixth-grader John Van Atta, asked to write about his favorite place, pens in part: If the tide is low enough, I can scan the rocks for shavings of arrowheads and the past of people that once lived here before the time of the trees. As I listen to the waves churning softly, I imagine a 12-year-old boy who lived here centuries ago, sitting on a piece of driftwood like me. The islands are teeming with black-legged kittiwakes, trying to chase an eagle away or feed their young. For him, no pink buoys dot the horizon, but nature is much the same. He scans the mountains, tall and proud. The cliffs, like a face with wildflower jewelry. The bushes, alive with animals in their homes. The beach greens that one of his sisters are gathering for the next meal. While landscapes can unite communities, they can also divide them. Loaded log trucks gouge huge ruts in the road from Chiniak to Kodiak, hauling the harvest of the native corporation that owns most of Chiniak's timber. The logging "is just killing our souls," says Woody Koning, a house painter and artist whose two daughters have been Griffin's students. But for every parent who objects to the clear-cutting, another makes his or her living from logging. So when Griffin stood before the local planning commission several months ago to make a statement on behalf of Chiniak's children, she condemned no one. She asked only that planners consider the significance of woodlands in the collective consciousness of local girls and boys. Involvement in place and community, Griffin believes, is fundamental to teaching. "Every student in Chiniak talks about the trees in his or her writing," Griffin points out. "That's the dominant aspect of their life. If those things give your students emotional roots, you owe it to your students to take that root as deep as it can go and explore it. How can you even teach if you don't know what the emotional roots are? You're helping them to see that the visual images around them are shared communitywide." (See sidebar for more student writing.) Last winter, a mechanic for a local logging company offered to bring life and sound to the Civil War stories the students had been reading. One misty February afternoon, gun collector Claude Travis loaded black powder into a miniature cannon on the school grounds. His son Brady lit the fuse. The little cannon, which Travis described as an "itty-bitty play toy," let loose a BOOM! that shook the ground. Students jumped and covered their ears. "Imagine," Travis told the students, "100 cannon going off at the same time. Imagine several thousand black-powder rifles giving off big puffs of blue smoke." Every parent is not only welcome but actively encouraged to bring his or her talent, skill, knowledge, and support to Chiniak school. They teach art lessons. They cook hot lunches. They gather cans and donate the money for supplies and books. "The more remote you are, the more important community becomes as a resource," Griffin notes. Parents apply terms of great respect and admiration to Griffin:
"She and her husband Ned are absolutely the most dedicated, true teachers I've ever met," says Woody Koning, who serves on the advisory board. "She's been a real inspiration to me. She's been more than a teacher to us: She's been like an aunt and a mentor. She's helped me in my personal life. "Teaching is more than a job and money and a career to them," Koning says. "It's their life." One of the biggest surprises of Griffin's travels as Teacher of the Year came in Washington, D.C., where she participated in a gathering of Presidential Scholars chosen for academic and artistic excellence. Each of these top-flight students introduced the teacher who'd made the greatest impact on her or his schooling. "I thought I was going to hear 150 students stand up and say, 'This is my French teacher who made the conjugation of verbs come alive for me so that I was able to learn that dull, dry material in a fascinating way,' or 'This is my biology teacher who really helped me see how you organize experiments, and I won the Westinghouse Science Fair because of her.' Not one student said that. Student after student stood up and said, 'This is Ms. Smith, my French teacher, and I brought her with me, not because she taught me a lot about French, but because she taught me how you should treat other people. She treated every student in her class fairly.' And 'This is Mr. Jones, my chemistry teacher, and I brought him because he taught me that every student in the class has value.'" The students also talked a lot about teachers who helped them learn to question. "One student said, 'This is Mr. Austin, and I brought him along because when I went into his class at the beginning of the year, I was full of questions, and when I left the class at the end of the year, I hadn't found out any answers to any of those questions—and I had a whole lot more questions I wanted to know the answers to.' " Griffin laughs delightedly at the memory. Cradling in her hands the glass fishing float, the gift from her Aleut mentor, she says: "I thought, 'How liberating this is—that students value their teachers for the same things I want to be valued for.' I want to humanize education." Elaine Griffin offers this advice to would-be teachers: "I think you need to have a love of learning that you've experienced inside yourself so you know what you're aiming for. Then, you need to be able to back away from the feeling that you can mold students. You need to open up the whole realm of the love of learning for them so that they can pick their own road to follow." Here's a list of books that recently have influenced Elaine Griffin's teaching: Csikszentmihalyi, M. 1993. The Evolving Self. New York, NY: Harper. Trees have a strong presence in Chiniak students' writing. Here are some examples:
|
|
This document's URL is: Home | Up & Coming | Programs & Projects: Northwest Education | People | Products & Publications | Topics © 2001 Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory
Date of Last Update: 9/28/01 
|
CHINIAK, Alaska—Two orbs of glass glint on Elaine Griffin's coffee table. One is a Japanese fishing float, crudely blown in pocked glass the color of a Seven-Up bottle. The other is an apple of flawless crystal. The objects came from the far ends of America, both in geography and influence. The float, which washed ashore on a wind-swept Alaskan island, was a gift from an Aleut postmistress. The crystal apple was presented to Griffin by Bill Clinton in the White House Rose Garden.
Daryl says he once visited a school in New York where "people get shot all the time." Griffin notes that while it would be easy to shrug off Schopenhauer as "a dead German," events such as the Bethel shooting remind us of the universality of his ideas. "What he said is still true, and it will still be true in a thousand years," she says. She brings up Viktor Frankl's classic work Man's Search for Meaning, which argues that people who feel they have something more to accomplish in life can endure great suffering and hardship. Andrew ties Frankl's point back to Schopenhauer's discussion of self-worth. Marie (one of the Griffins' daughters) brings up Den of Lions, a book by Terry Anderson, the American journalist held hostage in Lebanon in the 1980s. Anderson described a fellow hostage whose deep religious convictions helped him endure captivity with grace. The discussion moves to suicide, which plagues the populations of Alaskan villages.
A former children's librarian, Griffin builds history units around books that students choose from the school's extensive collection. Students design book-based projects that they present to the class (often with parents present) each Friday. Fourth-grader Brady, for example, read a book on Frederick Douglass and another on the Civil War. He then made a diorama of the Elkhorn Tavern, the site of a significant battle. His mom Nellie grew up playing in the cellar of the Elkhorn. She helped Brady with his project using childhood memories as a resource. Third-grader Justine read Ben and Me and Making Books. She then created her own book of sayings from Ben Franklin's almanac, illustrating the sayings with computer-generated graphics. Kelly videotaped a mock news interview with the Pilgrims as they landed at Plymouth Rock. Kate wrote a play about Columbus' voyage, assigning the roles of King Ferdinand, Queen Isabella, Columbus, and various bit parts to fellow students. Marjeena, the Griffins' daughter from India, read three biographies of Abe Lincoln and studied a guide to making pop-up books. Not only did she make her own pop-up book on Lincoln and the Civil War, she also taught other students to make pop-ups during "centers." That's where each student learns a specific skill such as piano playing, drawing, or desktop publishing from another student or a teacher at one of several learning centers set up around the school.
