Students meet Alaskan class, prepare for 2010 trip

FARMINGTON – Nine students peer up to the front of the classroom. Five feet away, in Crooked Creek, Alaska, eight students peer back.

After some initial nervousness, the two classrooms are comparing after-school activities, discussing music and favorite classes at school. The students and their teachers, use Tandberg video-teleconferencing equipment effectively pushing together a pair of classrooms thousands of miles apart. This is the first meeting of the two classes, a nine-month project which will hopefully culminate with an actual face-to-face meeting at the beginning of the next school year.

“What time did the sun come up over there?” a MBMS student asks.

Intense debate in Johnnie John Sr. School, in Crooked Creek. After a few moments, someone calls out the answer.

“11:15,” a student says. “What time does it get light out over there?”

A chorus of “whoaaa” followed by intense debate at Mt. Blue.

“Like seven,” someone says.

“Weird,” Alaskan students say.

The program is the brainchild of Tim Shumway, a social studies teacher at MBMS. In 2006, Shumway traveled to the “bush” region that Crooked Creek is in, which is roughly 300 miles to the west of Anchorage. He taught there for two years calling it “the defining experience in my life.”

Shumway and Wendy Simpson, a language arts teacher, hope to have a similar impact on the 10 students signed up for the trip. The plan would be to travel to the region, utilizing small bush planes, at the end of summer vacation in 2010. Students would spend some time touring cultural and natural sites near Anchorage, such as the Alaska Native Heritage Center, the Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center and the Prince William Sound, but the heart of the trip would be spent at Crooked Creek.

“They would go where tourists do not,” Shumway wrote in a summary of the trip’s goals, “to the bush villages where Alaska Natives still practice subsistence lifestyles.”

Shumway has stressed that the trip is not a sightseeing tour. Students are already meeting twice a month for special, after-school classes on subjects ranging from geography to literature to geology to ecology to social geography. Many parents attend the meetings (sitting off to the side, out of sight of the video-teleconferencing equipment) and Shumway says that he expects experts from specialized fields like photography and geology to join the discussions in the coming months.

Students will be expect to participate in multiple sub-projects, such as a tundra ecosystem analysis and cultural changes study, as well as keep journal entries both in the months running up to the trip and during the experience itself.

For now, the MBMS students are just getting to know their future hosts. They hear about bears in a smokehouse, debate the merits of Johnny Cash and Lil’ Wayne and exchange hunting and fishing stories with the Alaskan students. The children from Crooked Creek are shocked to learn the size of Mt. Blue Middle School.

“You guys have more people in your school,” a student says, “then we have in our village.”

Alaskan students groan when they hear how hot it can get in Maine. The groans of the Maine students are drowned out by the groans of their parents when the Crooked Creek class relates that gas costs $7 a gallon where they live.

The cost for the two-week trip is roughly $1,600 a student. Fund-raising efforts have already started, with the group having raised $3,000. Shumway said the current effort includes selling Matt Frost’s glass Christmas ornaments, with a variety of fund-raising initiatives to come. Anyone with ideas or looking to help the students with the project can contact Shumway at 778-3511 or at tshumway@mbrsd.org.