Summiting Mt. Baldy

A friend and I summited Mt. Baldy, the highest peak in the White Mts., partly for the joy of the hike and partly as a scouting operation since we want to take our students on the same trek. Technically, we were breaking Apache law, since the peak is sacred tribal land open only to members of the tribe. The only way a non-native is supposed to be up there is if she's accompanied by someone from the tribe. But we hiked on state land for almost 7 miles, and when we crossed onto reservation land for the last part of the climb, we saw no signs barring us.

From the base to the summit, we hiked 7.23 miles and climbed from around 9,000 ft. to 11,429 ft. It was chilly and rainy at the bottom, with scattered sun and showers, and at the top, we stood in a giant, cold, blustery cloud. I could feel the intensity of the mountain and the weather as we stood up there, feeling like we might be blown off.

We want to take the students up there for several reasons, the primary one being that Mt. Baldy is part of the cultural history of the White Mountain Apache Tribe. It's considered sacred land, the source of food and water and creation. Few, if any, of our students have summited Baldy. Plus, we're planning a unit enveloping the themes of cultural identity and environmentalism in the upcoming months, so we're trying to pull in the study of nature conservation, local ecosystems, native plants, elevation and plant life, and even possibly navigation. It's a lot, but we're really excited about pulling this together. We're even thinking about taking a few kids out to backpack and camp on Baldy.

Playing favorites

Well, we have a librarian, thank god. She's only part time, but it's something. Not much, but something. I believe that she used to be either a librarian or a language arts teacher. I'm currently in the library, and as I look around, I see that the library is a mess, but now it's a mess from books being taken off of the shelves, stacked, and organized. It looks like she's giving the place an overhaul.

I still think it's ridiculous that we don't have a full-time librarian. We can't afford one, and yet we can afford to send four teachers from the high school to a conference at $300 per person plus food and lodging expenses. At this conference, a teacher from our school was honored as Navajo County teacher of the year, but none of the teachers from our school even knew about the conference. Our teacher who was honored got to go to the conference for free but had to pay for her own hotel room. Our superintendent honored her and our school by wearing a faded CDJH t-shirt and blue jeans. The following day, he honored the high school by wearing newer jeans and an Alchesay High School t-shirt. On the third and final day, he honored Whiteriver Elementary with a (you guessed it) Whiteriver t-shirt. No mention of 7 Mile or Cradleboard Elementary was made. The high school and Whiteriver El. are great favorites of our superintendent.

Emo Tag

Recently, several eighth grade girls were suspended for playing "emo tag." A student came into a class bleeding, and of course she tried to pass the obvious cuts from a razor off as your average scrapes and scratches. Upon questioning, "emo tag" was revealed: a game in which these girls were slashing each other with razors. One of the girls has patterned scars from cutting herself all over her upper arms. This seems almost like the girl version of "Fight Club."

Another popular thing to do here at CDJH is to chew on thumb tacs and razor blades. I saw a lot of razors last year; this year, the 7th grade boys all have thumb tacs in their mouths.

No Librarian

I'm sitting here at Saturday school, which is held in the school library, and I'm sickened by the mess surrounding me: piles of unshelved books. The return box is full. There are piles of books on the counters. There is a cart full of books to be shelved. A quick glance at the shelves shows that the books are completely disorganized.

There are no displays set up to attract the kids to books: no Great Fall Reads or Horror that Will Make Your Skin Crawl or Apache Culture, etc. There are only blank bulletin boards, empty shelves, disorganization, and unshelved books. It makes me sick. A librarian is a key component in any literacy program, right? Especially at the middle school level. A lot of kids leave elementary school with a fondness for reading that gets squashed by a lack of literacy programs at the junior high level. If our kids leave here without at least one favorite author, we've totally failed them. As they grow older, a love for reading becomes harder and harder to instill. And what I would like to investigate and figure out is: How does a Title I school with supposedly enough money for things like computers and a librarian have neither? What's going on in our district office?

Here's the brilliant plan for the library: They want to hire parents to come in here to color code and shelve the books based not on alphabetical order or any kind of Dewey Decimal system, but rather, based on reading level. That way, we teachers will have an easier time doing the non-existent librarian's job of shelving the books, which we're of course not going to get paid for. Because then all we'll have to do is stick them on the shelf with the other blue or green or aqua books.

So will we have a fiction and non-fiction section?
How will we teach the kids how to do research?
And how will we ever find anything?
And how are the parents going to know what grade level the book is?

I can't wait to see how this plan goes. I'll definitely be reporting back on this one.

Oh, and why don't I volunteer my time and help out? Well, while I definitely want to bring my reading class down here to create a display, I'd like to point out some of my responsibilities this year: 7th grade reading teacher (22 students), 7th grade language arts teacher, 8th grade language arts teacher, yearbook supervisor, newsletter supervisor, school press secretary, weekly duty, leadership team, school improvement team, Saturday school coordinator, correlate committee member, and after-school tutor. I'm not trying to complain: I'm just pointing out the reason why turnover is so high in our district. I'm just offering the consequences of having a superintendent who believes in running our district like a money-making business: the good teachers get stretched and pulled and used up until they're totally burned after two years. Same old story, same old song and dance.