First Day of School

August 3, 2009

Six Knox College Educational Studies students along with two professors awoke this morning for the first day of two weeks in Rock Point, Navajo Nation, located in the northeastern corner of Arizona. We are working for two weeks with teachers and staff at the Navajo Lutheran Mission School, a K-6 school that serves approximately 70 students. Derek and I slammed down a couple of bowls of toasted oats cereal and a banana each, and headed out of our flat (pictured below) to the schoolhouse, which is located approximately 40 feet from our door.

For the first week we are here, we are putting on a summer workshop for the school’s Kindergarten through sixth grade teachers as well as two teacher aides and the bus drivers. Our goal is to provide the teachers with strategies, advice, and activities that will aid them throughout the school year.

We started off the day with some get-to-know-you activities for us and the Navajo schoolteachers. Very quickly I realized that the teachers we were going to be dealing with were part of an extremely tight-knit community who were focused on one goal: giving their children the best education possible in order to create future opportunities for the students and therefore the Navajo community in the future. Even the two bus drivers Yvette and Lenora were present, taking pride in the role that they were playing in helping the students.

The staff of the Navajo Lutheran Mission School that we met today was entirely female. Felicita, a tiny but sharp Navajo woman with two masters degrees, is the principal. Sharon, who has about two years of experience, teaches kindergarten. Lark, who teaches 1st grade, has a plethora of experience teaching at a variety of grade levels. She is the only belagana, or white woman, teaching at the school. Jolene, who teaches 2nd grade, has a year or two of experience teaching. Pauline teaches both 3rd and 4th grade, and as soon as I met her she was proud to tell me that 100% of her 3rd graders met AYP (Adequate Yearly Progress) last year. The 5th and 6th grade teacher was not yet there today. We were told nonchalantly that she “would probably be here soon.” We initially wondered how a school could still be hiring on the first in-service day, but we would soon learn that the atmosphere here would be much more laid back than the suburban and small-town public school environments to which we have mainly been exposed.

M. D.