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December 30, 2005
Red Alert
by Soren Wuerth

Punishment

     The teenager sat in the front office in a dirty gray sweatshirt, the one he has worn every day since school started. Four white men towered over him.

     "Young man, you are NOT ever going to speak to a teacher that way EVER again! You hear me?!" the principal thundered. The superintendent glared at the young man ruefully. The athletics director crossed his arms.

     I could see the kid fighting tears as he looked down, mumbling about this jacket.

     "What?! You're going to get your jacket and you're not coming back in the for the rest of the night!"

     Outside the office, people moved back and forth between the cafeteria and gym. It was the first basketball tournament of the year. The inflatable "No. 1" fingers were selling fast in the concessions booth.

     I followed the student out of the office and down the hall to look for his jacket. While the senior is not an exceptional student, he has taken over management of the concessions booth, and is considered responsible among his peers.

     "What happened?" I asked.

     "I told a teacher to shut up."

     "Why did you do that?"

     "He wouldn't let me go in and get my jacket. I'm not leaving until I find my jacket."

     Outside the school, the temperature lurked at 14 below. Apparently, the teacher had yelled at him for not working hard enough, then told him to leave and refused to let him back in to get his coat.

     Notwithstanding the cruelty of the punishment, I wonder what lessons the staff at this school thinks they're teaching these children. Will the student "fall into line", or will he learn a warped lesson about power? In this case, manifestly stereotypical, those holding the power are white.

     The student's jacket, his only jacket, is important in ways the highly paid staff does not know. A good teacher knows that encouraging empathy among students should be one of her goals. My guess is that in rural Alaska, thanks in large measure to the ubiquitous methodology of reward and punishment, a school with empathy as an institutional priority is as rare as an Eskimo curlew.

     Since I've been here, I've noticed that strict discipline is the de rigueur for not only the staff, but the community as well. Since the BIA schools, young teachers have come here freighted with doctrinaire religious motivations and a demand for order and compliance. One Native teacher held his hands, palms up, to show how he was punished for speaking his Native language. Teachers drilled holes in their paddles to accelerate the blows.

     That mentality isn't too distant from that of our current faculty. One teacher gloated to me how he made a couple of his elementary children race home, "sprinting as fast as they could after I yelled at 'em."

     Administrators, teachers, parents, and even students expect strict compliance. Teachers are implicitly judged on who yells the loudest.

     The "might makes right" mentality is, of course, symbolic of our nation's current chest-pounding approach to international relations.
















Soren Wuerth is perhaps Alaska's best known community activist. He resides in an undisclosed location in rural Alaska and can be reached at soren@insurgent49.com.
- Columnists -

Editor's Desk
by Aaron Selbig

Red Alert
by Soren Wuerth

Alaskan In Exile
by Neil Zawicki

The
Bramble Bush
by Kevin Morford





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in-sur-gent (in sur'jent), n. 1. a member of a group which revolts against the policies of its leadership.