Guest lecturer

March 10th, 2005 · No Comments

Once a year, I step back in time to the days when I taught 8 year-olds, and I pay a visit to Aimee’s class to tell them about the Iditarod. Even before I started co-teaching at the school in Connecticut where I worked for three years out of college, the second grade classes there studied the race; it makes an ideal tool to teach reading, geography, math, and social studies, and it’s fun for the kids to follow. This is the third time I’ve talked to Aimee’s fourth grade class, and the first time as her fianc?. I don’t have any real expertise in the Iditarod – her students seemed disappointed that not only had I not raced the Iditarod (or even the Idiotarod), but I hadn’t run any other sled dog races either, nor did I harbor much desire to. But I can talk about Alaska, and tell the story of the time Scott and I woke up at 3am on a camping trip and ran all the way home, thinking it was 3pm, which probably marks the one and only time a story used in a wedding toast has also been used in a fourth grade classroom.

My tenuous connection to the race, besides paying attention to it for the first 20 years of my life, is Zack Steer, with whom I went to high school, and whose sister I was friends with, as well as Dad’s friend Jim Lanier (whom I apparently used to call Jim “The Ears”). I don’t think the students were too impressed by my story of meeting Susan Butcher at a first-day-of-issue ceremony for the dogsled stamp at the Anchorage Museum of History and Artsled_dog_first_day.jpg – I could see Aimee shaking her head in the back of the classroom, probably muttering to herself “What a stamp nerd… Are our kids going to collect stamps? Sheesh…” The students in Aimee’s class who’ve exchanged emails with the mushers after the race is over have more of a connection with the race than I do, but it seems to be enough for me to talk about hours of daylight and hours of darkness and try to give them an idea of what life is like up there. Her students were cute, polite and well-behaved, though it was easy for me to pick out the kids Aimee tells stories about after work.

My time was cut a little short as I arrived 25 minutes late in Needham, due to the freak storm we’d had the night before. My car was covered in a nice sheet of solid ice under a layer of snow, and after I’d cleared that off, I realized that my two front doors were frozen shut. The key turned and unlocked the doors, but I couldn’t do anything about getting them to open. I could get the trunk open, though, and I eventually climbed into the trunk and pushed the rear seat forward to make enough space to reach my arm out and unlock and open the back door. Once that was open, I climbed into the front seat from the back seat, and was able to open the front door from the inside. Luckily, after all that, the car started, and Aimee’s kids got to meet a real Alaskan after all. Currently, my car is now stuck in between a truck and a snowdrift on the street behind work, where I parked it, somewhat forcibly, upon arriving back at work. It was the only available spot, and it was one of those you sort of have to throw yourself into in order to avoid being half in the street. I think I’ll leave the car there until the snow melts again, maybe in April?

Tags: Miscellany