The Raven's Gift - Don Rearden [43]
For all he knew, he and Anna might not be there the next year either, so he decided to quietly stuff the district curriculum guidelines in his desk and find a way to show his students how to teach themselves.
On the day he started the new approach, he sat for a while at his desk, with a smile, just looking them over. They would peer up at him and then glance away, shyly. They were a patient group. Five boys and seven girls. They sat at their desks, some of them with light jackets on, all of them wearing T-shirts, jeans, and Nike or Adidas basketball shoes or knee-high black rubber boots.
Alex, the kid with the Bulls cap, John pegged as his biggest challenge in maintaining any sort of respect with his students, tried to hide the pinch of snuff in his lip as he asked, “Why you always smiling at us, John?”
He wouldn’t tell Alex to spit out the snuff and go to the principal’s office. He knew there were more important battles to win.
“Why am I smiling?” He stood up and walked to the whiteboard. “You guys have told me that you don’t think any of what you have learned in school is important, that it doesn’t have anything to do with you. Right?”
“Well it don’t,” Alex chuckled. “You see any Eskimos using geometry shooting ducks?”
The class laughed.
“Well, what about history? Why might history be important to you?” John asked.
Sharon, a skinny girl with glasses and hair always tightly braided, raised her hand. He called on her, knowing she would have a well thought out answer. From day one she had established herself as the brain of the class.
“If we can learn from our history, we can make better decisions and we can understand the world better,” she said, covering her mouth shyly when she finished.
“Right, Sharon. Great start,” he said. “But why might history be important to you, as Yup’ik students—Yup’ik people?”
“It’s not,” Alex said. “They want us to learn names and dates of old white and black people who are dead. I’ve got better things to do, man.”
“Exactly. Exactly, Alex. Yes! What if I tell you that none of what you’ve learned so far really matters?”
He looked at each of them. A few of them, including Sharon, seemed a bit befuddled. Alex sat back, pleased with himself. For the first time, John thought he might have a shot at reaching him, maybe all of them.
“Let’s start with the first dude you learned about in history. Who was it? One hint. He sailed the ocean blue …”
Jack, a quiet, sullen death metal fan, flipped his long hair and finished the rhyme. “In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.”
The rest of the class looked at Jack, surprised.
“It’s like a song lyric, dog. I don’t forget lyrics. Ever.”
“Yes. Columbus. Nice work, Jack.”
Alex sighed. “Oh man, Columbus sucks. He found the Lower Forty-eight, big deal.”
“Right again, Alex. But you’re not right about what he found. You’re right that Columbus sucked. He—well, let’s just say he wasn’t the kindest, most friendly explorer. Maybe we could say that what he was a part of is more horrible than you could ever even imagine. What if I told you that this first hero you learned about in history wasn’t who you have been taught he was at all? What if I told you that most of what you have learned and will be expected to learn”—he paused and held up their history book—“was a bunch of BS?”
“That would be pretty cool,” Alex said. “It would be like The Matrix. A conspiracy, man, the whole world school teaches us about is one big fat lie.”
IT TOOK THE GIRL AND JOHN four days of steady travel to reach the first village. He figured they made about three miles a day, maybe less. He half expected to find someone alive,