Ignorance without arrogance

The other day a hubristic 31-year-old “senior White House official” made a widely televised cringe-worthy appearance that reminded me that I wanted to write about one of my brothers who runs a blog titled Ignorance without Arrogance. Don’t worry. His blog is not about politics. Neither is this post. Judging from daily news events and social media content I’m seeing lately, though, a lot of us would be served by giving the concept behind the title at least some thought.

The story  of the blog starts about seven years ago when my brother, who I will call “Clay” (I’ve changed his name to protect his identity – his real name is “Clayton”), accepted a job teaching elementary school at a remote Yup’ik village in Alaska near the place where the Yukon River empties into the Bering Sea. And by “remote Yup’ik village” I mean a village that you can’t get to from here without catching a series of increasingly smaller aircraft departing from increasingly smaller airports until eventually it’s just you, a lawnmower engine mounted to a hang-glider on a gravel strip, with an instruction manual and map. Once you arrive at the village, motorized travel is limited to jet boats in the summer (roughly the third week of July) and snow machines (what we lower-48er’s call snowmobiles) the rest of the year.

The origins of his blog (here's the link) most likely started a few years before his teaching gig in Alaska, back before he quit his job as a long-haul trucker and went back to college in mid-life to become a teacher. His initial attempt at college after high school– at three different colleges, in fact – failed once he finally realized he wasn't going to find one that offered credit for drinking beer and not attending classes. Out of viable alternatives, he enlisted in the Navy and spent six years as a submariner in the Pacific, followed by a series of mostly truck-driving jobs before he realized it wasn’t too late to go back to college.

With his brand-new teaching degree in hand, the opportunity in Alaska was attractive because 1) he was looking for his first teaching job at the precise moment the entire economy cratered and school budgets were evaporating and 2) this remote village in Alaska had a job waiting at a salary that was significantly higher than most starting teaching jobs in the lower 48. Maybe spending months at a time beneath the ocean in a submarine and thousands of hours alone looking through the windshield of an 18-wheeler prepares a person for this kind of a decision as well. Perhaps it also helped that Clay is married to an incredibly tolerant, adventuresome, and adaptable partner (who I am calling “Monica” because, well, that’s her name) who has subsequently finished her education degree and teaches at the same school as Clay.

After starting his job as a rookie teacher, Clay began blogging about his experience in the tiny, isolate village where he was one of the few non-Yup’ik residents. In fact, nearly the entire village was comprised of Yup’ik natives except the handful of school teachers cloistered in school-provided apartments near the school. Nearly all of his students lived in extreme poverty and few had ventured far from their home village. Fewer would finish high school. His new community lacked a medical clinic, law enforcement, or even a grocery store. If you didn’t subsist on seal and salmon, as did many of the villagers, your food came by air from Amazon Prime and Costco. Further, it was a “dry” village, meaning it was illegal to consume or even possess booze, although that’s rather an abstract edict in a place where the nearest law enforcement is several hours by air away.

The village also experienced many social problems that are endemic in communities the world over where poverty is deeply rooted: High unemployment, substance abuse, suicide, domestic violence, and sexual assault were all-too-routine aspects of village life, and the consequences did not stop at the classroom doors.

But these were not the circumstances Clay chose to write about. Instead, he writes about the challenges confronting an outsider navigating the nuances of a new culture. He writes about the joy and energy he discovers in the classroom. He pokes fun at his inexperience and highlights classroom antics that elementary school teachers everywhere might recognize. He works in enough of the difficult challenges of teaching in a remote Alaskan village that his blog can be read as an essential “what to expect” classroom guide for any teacher in the lower 48 entertaining similar ambitions.  But, again, that is not the focus of the blog and he has not attempted to moralize or otherwise pass judgment on the social challenges experienced by his students and their community.

When he first told me about the title of his blog, I didn't get it. Ignorance without Arrogance. Could you not imagine a duller title for a blog? WTF does that even mean? Did you not run this by a focus group? Was your goal to encourage people not to read about your experiences? How does ignorance and arrogance relate to a new teacher arriving in the Alaska bush attempting to teach Yup’ik elementary kids to read, write, and solve math functions? Were you drinking homemade hooch from a 5-gallon bucket in the back room when you came up with this title?

Of course, with a little thought, the title of the blog has everything to do with an outsider moving into an Alaska village to teach native kids. Failing to consider that fact was the result of my own ignorance and arrogance. Rather than writing about the dysfunction and deprivation of his new community - the more salacious and “clickable” aspects of his new situation - he focused on interactions with students and his new community. He didn’t express pity or despair or contempt. He didn’t insert himself into the story as the hero, changing lives one student at a time. He wasn’t condescending or paternalistic. He wrote about his students as they were – curious and intelligent and teaching him about the world as much as he was teaching them.

Teacher turnover in remote native Alaskan villages is high. That Clay and Monica are still there after seven years is testament to their dedication. As is the fact that they are not worn down or cynical or despairing about the challenges of teaching kids who seldom enjoy the luxury of making academic performance a priority. The truth is that they, like many of their peers, are not in “receive mode” waiting to for administrators to tell them how to reach their students. They do it because they believe the kids are worth it.

Clay and Monica, as teachers, are unique in where they teach and in some of the challenges they work with on a daily basis, but in other ways they are more like many teachers that we all know. They are examples of why teaching is a profession, and often a calling as well. Not all of us are suited for the job. The best teachers recognize that their own ignorance is a learning opportunity in disguise and use that knowledge to become better teachers. 

That doesn’t apply just to teachers. All of us could benefit by a lot more ignorance without arrogance in these times.