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Representing Our Relatives
By Nellie Two Elk & Amanda Dahlin
Coaching Culture
There were a lot of ups and very few lows this week, which was nice. Sometimes I have to hyper-focus on the ups, I have to focus on the highs just to get through the lows at work.
I help school staff integrate language and culture into the school day. But it’s not about teaching culture. It’s not about adding an eagle or a buffalo somewhere in the classroom. Think about math classrooms or auto-mechanics or carpentry. You can’t just add a symbol; we have to teach culturally. And that is much harder to change.
I dive into people’s teaching philosophy, theories, practices, and behaviors they’ve been engaged in for ten, sometimes twenty years. I usually hear arguments like, “this is not what I signed up for” or “this should have been taught years ago”. There is always a reason to resist; my job is to push past that.
My Accidental Adventure
By Dezi Hendershot & Amanda Dahlin
Falling Forward
I kind of accidentally became a teacher. I was planning on going to law school to get our land back. Like every other student pursuing law, I took the LSAT… and bombed. I wasn't prepared; I was exhausted from being in school. So I went home to my Rez in Coppermine, Arizona, and decided to go with a friend to teach English in Taiwan.
I thought it would be perfect. It would look good on my resume for law school. I was still planning on going, I just wanted to take some time off to recover from how exhausting the education system is. After a year, I would come back and be ready to take on something as big as law school.
As I was getting my paperwork ready to go, my parents freaked out. They felt it was so far away and didn’t want me to go. They even had an alternative gap year plan for me. They told me, Mrs. Ross needed to hire special ed teachers. They thought it would be a great opportunity for me and repeatedly asked me to go sit for an interview with her. My initial thought was, “that really doesn't sound nearly as fun as going to Taiwan. I don't know about that”. But they were persistent.
