Teachers Wanted: Must Like Snow
Anchorage School District gets creative to recruit staff who can teach to diverse learners in Alaska's urban enclave.
In Anchorage classrooms, a teacher like Mary Ellen Kisley Darling is prized for the ability to help diverse students learn.
Story and photo by DENISE JARRETT
ANCHORAGE, Alaska —
A man and woman climb the steel-grated stairs of the pedestrian overpass, each with a crisp bag holding a new bottle of liquor. They speak low to each other as they cross over the noisy intersection, not returning the nod of a passerby. Below, at a bus stop, weathered men sit on a bench and sip from their own brown bags. Behind them is Clark Middle School; across the street is the liquor store. This is an eastside neighborhood in Alaska’s urban enclave, Anchorage, where some 260,000 people live — nearly half of the population of the state — but it could be any scene of urban disadvantage in the Northwest.
Clark Middle School scores the highest of local middle schools on measures of hardship, according to Anchorage School District records. It is by far the poorest middle school in the city, with 60 percent of its students receiving free or reduced-price lunches. Its student mobility rate is also high; nearly half of its enrollment turns over during the school year. For the past several years, students at Clark have scored on or below the 50th percentile on standardized tests in all subjects tested. It’s exactly the sort of place that is in most need of expert teachers who can help disadvantaged youths get a toehold on a better life. Yet, during a time of teacher shortages, an urban school like this is often the least likely place to attract them. But Clark has found a way.
While this community’s struggle with poverty and transience are evident on the streets this morning, inside a classroom at Clark, growth and hope are in much display. It’s 10 o’clock. Eighth-grade math class is starting. This is Ms. Darling’s realm. In here, the October sun filters through the yellowing leaves of birch trees, falling bright on desktops and young faces. Highway traffic may roar outside, and Air Force jets may roar above, but, in here, one can get down to the business of learning.
It’s not a magical place. It’s orderly, cheerful, rigorous. In here, students can speak their ideas out loud. They don’t have to be right, but they do have to try, says Mary Ellen Kisley Darling, 52, whose high expectations are tempered with warm humor. Even those students who are just learning to speak English have to participate.
Half of Darling’s students are English-language learners. Darling and bilingual tutor Ina Carpenter, who grew up in the Yup’ik village of Kipnuk in Western Alaska, do double-duty, assisting students with vocabulary, extra time, discussion, review; whatever it takes to help them succeed. Don’t tell them you can’t do it. Bottom line, you can’t quit, says Darling.
To a visitor, she explains: “They have to survive and get along just like everyone else in the nation. I believe all kids can learn, because they can and because I know they have to. They have to learn the curriculum that’s set out in the state guidelines. It’s my job to figure out how to make it work for them.”
Indeed, Darling has been making it work for them for a long time. Before relocating to Anchorage four years ago, she and her husband, William, 51, a retired teacher, lived for 25 years in the Bristol Bay community of Dillingham on Alaska’s western shore. They raised their two children there, Evan, 20, and Brook, 15. Darling taught eight years in the Dillingham school where 80 percent of her students were Alaska Native youngsters with varying degrees of English proficiency.
Maybe it was there, in that small fishing community, where she figured out how to help language-minority students make sense of English language and Western ideas and culture. Or maybe she learned something about that many years ago. Her own parents moved from Czechoslovakia to the American Midwest as children, their families fleeing persecution and seeking prosperity by farming the rich soil of Wisconsin. Mary Ellen grew up speaking Czech at home until elementary school, when teachers pressured her parents to learn English.
Today, there’s a certain quality to Darling’s voice that sets her slightly apart. Maybe that’s what she thinks about, the apartness, when she’s teaching her language-minority students. Because that’s the one thing she won’t allow: separation. You can have your own ideas, but you have to take your place alongside everyone else in her room and speak out. By now, pretty much everyone does.
“They’re yappy,” Darling says about her students, “but you have to honor that. They’re always checking with and helping their neighbors, and as they teach each other, they’re reinforcing what they’ve been learning in class.”
This prompts a new thought, and she shakes her dark hair away from her face. “Sometimes, what they’re learning clashes with their religion, especially in science. We talk about where science and religion meet or do not meet. You have to recognize those differences. They know things. You’ve got to acknowledge them.”
Yagga was a girl who didn’t want to be acknowledged. Not at first. She came to the states two years ago from West Africa.
She told Darling, “I don’t speak good English so don’t ever call on me.”
Darling replied good-naturedly, “Guess what? I pick on people!”
“You think I can do this, but I can’t,” Yagga said.
“You won’t get any better if you don’t try,” Darling told her.
Darling says she presses her students to be brave and to learn to take care of themselves. It seems to be working. These days, Yagga doesn’t wait to be picked on, but raises her hand in class and speaks out.
