Coming to a Close....

(An entry I wrote for the main IslandWood blog...)

The year is wrapping up. Both cohorts have finished their last weeks of solo teaching. The only things that lie between us and graduation are a week of team teaching and presenting our independent study projects, non-profit management projects, and portfolios.

In these last couple weeks, many of us have been doing some final reflections on what this year has meant to us.  We have turned in official assignments to our instructors and mentors in which we have reflected on our growth as an educator, but we have also been chatting casually around the Commons and over cups of iced chai teas at the Treehouse Café down the hill about how much we have grown in all realms of life this year.  Although everyone is taking their own unique lessons from their IslandWood experience, many of us feel like we have grown monumentally as educators, members of a small community, and personally.

As educators we have been pushed to try approaches we've never tried before, worked with kids who have had life experiences that make it very difficult for them to be in a new environment like IslandWood, and debriefed our experiences, both successful and unsuccessful a million times with our peers, mentors, and instructors to seize all the possible opportunities for growth.

As members of a small community, we have had to figure out how to be with the same 29 people practically 24/7. We live together, we eat together, we work together, we take classes together, and we socialize together. We've been in quite the IslandWood bubble all year, which has brought its fair share of frustrations, but more important are the laughs and the compromises and the ways we have learned to understand one another. Even after long days of teaching and very little sleep, we have learned to love each other despite our quirks and flaws and to be patient with one another as we all try to figure out our lives.

And even with the due dates for our big projects looming and a long year of work and growth on our backs, we still find time to jump out of the bubble and savor the occasional ice cream cone at Mora's in Winslow or dance to groovy beats at the Folklife Festival in Seattle.

Dinner in the Woods and An Adventure in the Woods!

After a year of planning, IslandWood's biggest annual fundraiser, Dinner in the Woods, was celebrated on Saturday. This was an all-hands-on-deck event, with every member of IslandWood's staff and almost all of the grads pitching in to help serve food, set-up, entertain the kids, check coats, photograph, schmooze, and clean-up. About 400 guests were ushered onto IslandWood's campus for the evening.  As they mingled before the banquet, many grads and other helpers presented them with trays of mouthwatering appetizers including such IslandWood originals as sunchoke fritters with onion jam drizzled with balsamic reduction and sour cream, rabbit empanadas, oyster shooters over a bed of smooth stones, and polenta squares with gorgonzola spread, sweet olive paste, and toasted sage leaves.
The dining hall field was transformed the week before the event into a grand platform tent for the banquet (see video of the tent being built here) and decorated with elegant mint green table cloths and potted native plants available for the guests to bring home afterwards.
At around 6:30, the guests were seated and served a feast of roasted lamb, arctic char (a sustainably-raised fish with qualities of both salmon and halibut), asparagus, and a pilaf of ancient grains. As the foods delighted their taste buds, the guests bid on grandiose auction items like trips to Costa Rica and a custom glass sculpture by Preston Singletary, who also happened to be present at the dinner. A 5th grade student who had come to the School Overnight Program just a few weeks prior gave a brief speech about his experience, a teacher who has brought her classes to IslandWood for years told of its effect on her students, and a board member told about his perceptions of the program. After learning about all the remarkable things IslandWood does, the guests participated in Raise-the-Paddle, where they donated high sums out of the goodness of their hearts. This was incredible to see, knowing that each donation made was going to make it possible for more students to experience nature like never before. Dinner in the Woods was quite an extravaganza, and it was amazing to play a role in such an important part of IslandWood's future. Even though many of us worked late into the night clearing tables and cleaning the tent and kitchen, there was a sense of satisfaction and camaraderie that accompanied the feeling of a job well done for a good cause.

Today, Cohort E had a Natural History Super Monday session. While natural history courses at other schools might involve sitting in a classroom watching a powerpoint presentation or even walking around outside while the professor points out the leaf shapes of certain plant families, IslandWood's natural history classes are much more adventurous than that! Today, we tromped through the thick forest in a corner of IslandWood rarely seen by humans, down below the Teams Course.

We investigated new plants that are sprouting up with the warm spring sunshine like star flower, cascara, trillium, fringe cup, and spiny wood fern. We stared snails in the eye, or rather the tentacula, and swung from invasive ivy vines.

We crawled into the mouth of a glacial erratic shaped like a giant snapping turtle, and slid down slick muddy slopes. We discovered steep gullies, seas of stinging nettle, two coyote dens, deer bones, two western red-backed salamanders, a stalactite-like fungus, huge old-growth stumps, moss-draped big leaf maples, a dead shrew, all 7 kinds of ferns that grow at IslandWood, and a murky vernal pool.

Speaking of murky vernal pools...
Charlie decided to earn a quick twenty bucks from the rest of us by bellyflopping into one of them!

See what I mean by adventurous natural history classes?
I love IslandWood!

A Weekend at Wilderness Awareness School

A few weeks ago, instructors from IslandWood and North Cascades Institute (NCI) converged at Wilderness Awareness School (WAS) for the second portion of the exchange between the three programs. The first portion of the exchange was at NCI and can be read about here.  It was good to see familiar faces from our weekend at NCI but this time, the scenery was a little different. Instead of tall snowy peaks gazing down at us, we were amidst mossy vine maples and tall cedars in a little pocket of forest right outside the town of Duvall. We had gathered some preliminary knowledge of WAS's programs from chatting with their instructors at NCI, so we knew that they took more of a "listen to the earth" approach than the other two programs, but we didn't know what we were in for when we arrived to spend the weekend there.

From the very beginning, their instructors helped us explore by engaging all of our senses and asking us questions to guide us to a deeper understanding.  They taught us how to use owl eyes, fox feet, and deer ears in order to be aware of as much as possible around us.  They encouraged us to slip off our shoes to truly feel the ground beneath us and walk even more silently, then, barefoot, we padded to find our own special place within the trees, a Sit Spot, from where we could observe the world around us.  They took turns telling us the story of how Wilderness Awareness School came to be as we sat around a fire that had been started with a hand drill in a round hut called Malalo ya Chui, which means Lair of the Leopard.  We learned bird language, experienced the WAS questioning approach, discussed edible plants, and tried our hand at a 2-match fire.

  We had a pasta potluck that evening, complete with stinging nettle tomato sauce, and chatted while passing around one of the WAS instructors baby, Wilder. After dinner, we played games of stealth in front of the blazing wood stove, then a small group of us hiked through the darkness down to the pond to star gaze.

After a night spent shivering in my sleeping bag in below freezing temperatures, a cup of coffee and my enthusiasm to learn more about WAS's programming gave me energy to face the new day. Between sips of freshly brewed hemlock tea, a group of us learned how to make bow drill sets and sat whittling away around a fire until we all had our very own bow drill kits to bring home.  While we made our kits, other groups tracked cougars, followed the beat of a drum blindfolded through the forest on a Drum Stalk, and explored the rest of WAS's land, called Linne Doran, meaning Pond of the Otter. 

When all the groups finished, we came together to try making a coal using a giant bow drill kit.  The drill was about 3 feet tall, so it took a lot of us to pull the rope wrapped around it back and forth to get the base board hot enough to form a coal. But we did it, and it was sure a sense of accomplishment! Before leaving, we had an enlightening conversation about the natural directions and the indicators of awareness within teaching. They're hard to explain, but in brief, they are part of an educational theory that is based on the natural tendencies of humans over the course of a day and the course of a program, including energy levels and times for reflection. I found a lot of truth in the theory and you can learn more about it in Coyote's Guide to Connecting with Nature, the book on everything WAS. 

It was an incredible weekend and all of the IslandWood instructors who attended picked up new approaches to teaching that we have been weaving into our School Overnight Program lessons. I personally have started doing Sit Spots, animal senses, bird language, and a story of the day with my students, all of which I learned more about at WAS. The instructors from NCI, IslandWood, and WAS also formed a warm supportive community, the ties of which will hopefully hold strong into the future.

Bones and Printmaking

Today was Super Monday!

Super Monday is what we call the supplemental training session we have for two hours on every Monday of our non-teaching weeks. The focus of these sessions varies. Back in the fall we explored the bog during a natural history Super Monday and we've also had sessions that have taught us about ways to use creative writing and rhythm in our teaching, bird call identification, and fun group management techniques. Super Mondays are always a blast and teach us very helpful skills to implement into our teaching.

Today was no exception. We were led by two of our naturalist instructors down to Mac's pond where we were told to trail-blaze around to the far side. Picking our way through prickly salmonberry branches with our boots sinking into decomposing logs, we hiked through a part of IslandWood we had never seen before. As we rounded up through the trees behind the grove of cattails, something white caught our eyes. There, nestled into the hemlock needles and moss on the forest floor, was an assortment of bones! Among them, a hip bone, a femur, and a skull. Upon closer inspection, our naturalist detective minds figured out they were the bones of a female deer. As we called out for our classmates to come look, a few of them hollered to us that they had found bones too! Lots of them! We scrambled through the brush and our eyes widened when we came upon what they had found— it looked like a deer crime scene! There were many large femurs, jaw bones, pelvises, a couple strings of vertebrae, and three more skulls, one with sturdy antlers protruding from the top.

Our instructor Greg informed us that he had been scouting some sites to take our Natural History class last week and happened upon these bones. He told us that the other cohort had done some exploring during their Super Monday session last week, but that it was such an astonishing scene that he encouraged us to put on our detective caps and develop some theories to help solve the mystery. Practically before the last word left his lips, we scattered around the thickly wooded hillside, our eyes pinned to the ground in hopes of finding more evidence.

Within seconds, shouts started rising up from all over, "There are more bones over here!" "There's a fully connected leg under this tree!" "This skeleton still has muscle attached!" Sure enough, there were deer bones at various stages of decay strewn all over the forest. Some were hidden under draping sword ferns while others were lying open on top of stumps.

For some people, this scenario might have been a nightmare, but for environmental educators like us, it was fascinating! After about an hour of detective work, we regrouped to discuss our theories. Many of us concluded that the most likely cause of this scene was that people had been dumping roadkill over the hillside from the highway a couple hundred feet above us for quite some time, which wild animals like coyotes had then gnawed clean, but we're not sure. There are so many possibilities! One of the IslandWood grads is planning to do her independent study project at the site in the spring to continue excavating, map out all the bones and further investigate causes.

After retracing our steps back around the pond to the main trail, we hiked back to campus where most of us attended a professional development session with Mette Hanson, a well-known printmaker in the Pacific Northwest. IslandWood hosts Artists-in-Residence a few times every quarter who run workshops for kids and sometimes lead evening programs or performances. In December, we had African drummer extraordinaire Jah Breeze as an Artist-in-Residence, and in January we had poetry guru Vicky Edmonds. Although the primary focus of Artists-in-Residence is to work with the kids, they sometimes also offer professional development sessions for IslandWood staff and grads.

In today's session, we learned about the art of printmaking then got the opportunity to carve our own print blocks and roll on a variety of brightly colored inks to make a series of prints from our blocks. Needless to say, it was a wonderful way to spend the afternoon and all of the participants were very proud of their final prints. I love taking a break from the rest of my life to sit down and just let the creative juices flow.

<— Two runs of my print, a djembe drum with mushrooms at its base, both strong IslandWood symbols for me.

An Adventurous Weekend in the North Cascades

Last weekend, most of the IslandWood grads drove up to the North Cascades Institute (NCI) to spend three days with the grads from their program along with the apprentices of the Wilderness Awareness School (WAS). It was the first trip in a three part exchange series between the environmental education schools that aims to foster the sharing of ideas and facilitate making connections with others in our field. From the trip preparations, I knew I'd be meeting new people and seeing a different program, but I could not begin to foresee the great adventures I'd go on or the incredible experiences I'd have with new friends.

The IslandWood grads all carpooled across Puget Sound on the ferry then cruised up I-5 to the North Cascades Highway 20 where we drove east a couple hours along the Skagit river, which just so happens to be where bald eagles like to spend their time in January because of the heavy salmon runs. We saw so many eagles during our drive that we lost count! Their majestic figures perched on branches next to the rushing water and their wings spread wide soaring over us as we craned our necks to catch final glimpses of them through the sun roof. Finally we drove over Diablo Dam, onto NCI's road and into their campus. The sites that greeted us were breathtaking. Snowy white peaks peered at us over conifer-covered foothills, contrasting sharply with the uncharacteristic bright blue sky.
That afternoon we explored our new surroundings, met the students from NCI and WAS, learned about NCI's climate change summer leadership program, and played a few raucous rounds of environmental education-themed trivia, with team challenges like making up the best campfire song, matching famous environmentalists with their quotes, and putting all the mountains in the Pacific Northwest in order from north to south. It was a great way to get to know the people from NCI and WAS and break the ice for the rest of the weekend.

The next morning, I awoke to Sarah (my IslandWood cabinmate and NCI roommate) saying, "It snowed last night" as she peeked out the blinds of our room. Excited, I leapt out of my bed and opened the shades only to find out that in her quick glance she had mistaken the white bark of a few fallen birch trees for snow. Although slightly disappointing, it was a humorous way to start the day. We had breakfast, then did more activities to learn about NCI's environmental education program, including a hike around some of their forest trails and a walk to Diablo Dam to learn more about its history and uses (it produces 25% of Seattle's power!). Although we didn't get to see NCI's program in action with kids since they only teach in the Fall and Spring, it sounds very similar to IslandWood's. 5th graders come overnight for a few days and learn about the natural environment through experiential, inquiry-based activities, except the whole program is based in the Cascades so deals a lot with mountain ecosystems, glaciers, and the dam.

Sarah and I on Diablo Dam                     The ravine below the dam

In the afternoon, we got to choose from a few hikes led by NCI grads. I chose one up to Pyramid Lake, which was supposed to have quite the altitude climb but be of medium length. Boy were we wrong!
We ended up climbing 1,500 ft. in 3 miles for a 6-mile roundtrip, which was somewhat higher and farther than predicted, but the big surprise was that it took almost double the amount of time we had thought it would because there was snow covering more than half the trail that had been packed down into ice! This made for a slippery, yet thrilling hike, especially on the way back down.
The whole trip was definitely worth it, though, because the forests were beautiful and at the top was Pyramid Lake, thoroughly frozen over with views of Pyramid Peak right behind it. After resting up from our tricky hike and "skating" all over the ice, a few of us decided that we wanted to explore further, so we climbed a rock slide that led up one side of the lake. It was steep and covered in snow, so we had to do most of it on our hands and knees, but I loved every second of it! It had been far too long since I had gotten to explore new terrain in such an intrepid way. When we reached the top, we were rewarded with a fantastic view of the lake and Pyramid Peak spreading out like a royal flush before our eyes.

After just barely making it back to the trailhead before the last streaks of daylight faded, we returned to NCI for dinner and a campfire with everyone else. Campfires are one of my favorite things in the world (going hand-in-hand with roasted marshmallows and stargazing) and we all had a wonderful time sharing our favorite stories, songs, and skits from IslandWood, NCI, and WAS. We sang and laughed long into the night, and one-by-one, people drifted back to their lodges until only four of us were left: Sarah, Gerolf (a German guy from WAS), Erin (an NCI grad), and myself. We put out the last few pulsing embers of the fire, then wandered campus for awhile, pausing every once in awhile to appreciate the blanket of stars that was being revealed by the parting clouds. We hung out with the WAS apprentices for awhile in their lodge and walked with them down to the lake shore, but then decided to strike out on our own to walk along the road to Diablo Dam. The way was mostly pitch black, but instead of being nervous, I trusted in my nighttime abilities. I've been leading plenty of night hikes with kids at IslandWood this year without any source of light and my night vision has improved drastically. It did feel slightly disconcerting at first to be walking at night along a route that I hadn't memorized by heart like the trails of IslandWood, but although I felt blind, I trusted in my senses and soon I felt right at home in the darkness. When we got to the dam, we gazed down the steep wall and listened to our shouts echo through the ravine far below. Then we hung out for a long time and just talked. About a lot. About life. Then we walked back, picking out constellations in the sky above us, and hilariously skipping for a spell to warm up. We even saw a gloriously orange shooting star streak over our heads! Sarah and I crawled into our beds around 2am, exhausted but sublimely content from the evening spent out in the night with new friends.

(I didn't bring my camera so credit for this photo of the dam goes to photographer: 'seawallrunner')

Our alarm rang bright and early the next morning because it was Kelly's birthday, and at NCI, there's a tradition of jumping into the lake on your birthday. Even if it's the middle of January. Even if it's freezing. A bunch of us had agreed to do it with her, but when our alarm went off at 7:30, Sarah and I groggily agreed that after only 5.5 hours of sleep, our warm beds were more appealing than a freezing lake so we reset our alarm for later and attempted to return to dreamland. Our third roommate, Minna, however, rolled out of bed and convinced us to go, so we pulled on our sweatpants and fleeces and ran down through chilly drizzle to the rocky shore with a small troop of IslandWood grads and WAS instructors.
There was no reason to delay, so we stripped down to our underwear and ran in, shrieking bloody murder as we submerged our heads in water that was so cold we couldn't breathe. We ran back out as quickly as we had run in, still yelling obscenities at the cold, but with huge grins on our faces as we toweled off and pulled our clothes back on. Mountain lake jumping is something else that's right near the top of my list of favorite things to do, but I hadn't done it in years, mostly because I've spent the majority of the past four years in Ohio where mountain lakes are as prevalent as Egyptian pyramids (read: non-existent), so being back in the beautiful Cascade mountains and starting my day by bolting into a freezing mountain lake was exhilarating and a refreshing renewal of who I am now that I'm back in the Pacific Northwest. Not to mention, the most startling and invigorating way to wake up ever.

Awhile later, we cleaned out our rooms, packed up our cars, and waved goodbye to our new NCI and WAS friends, but the weekend didn't end there. A few of us made a detour into Rockport State Park, home of some of the biggest old growth in the Skagit Valley. The sun shown down in misty streaks into the mossy eden and many of the trees were wider than I am tall. We took a lovely hike through the ancient forest and marveled at what those trees must have witnessed in their lifetime.

Then we piled back into the cars and drove back towards Seattle, making a pit-stop at an authentic Mexican food trailer where we ate spicy chicken tacos and the cook asked me for my number. Once in Seattle we celebrated Kelly's birthday at a German pub for awhile before heading back on the ferry to Bainbridge where we collapsed from exhaustion.

The weekend was an incredible mountain retreat into which I poured heaps of physical and social energy. It was an extraordinary feeling to be exploring the magnificence of my own Pacific Northwest backyard while seizing every possible moment and a reminder to do it more often.

Home for the Holidays!

This is a quick post about winter break since I jumped right from the beginning of December to the beginning of January in my last two posts.

For the first time in four years, I didn't have to navigate any airports to get home for the holidays. No flight cancellations due to inclement weather. No stale airplane air. No lugging my suitcases from one terminal to another. Instead, I bought a train ticket from Seattle to Portland and rode down in style on the tracks alongside Puget Sound while reading Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible and sipping root beer from the dining car. My whole life I had wanted to travel by train and while not as romantic as I had dreamt it to be, the experience was much more pleasant than air travel.

I arrived home just in time to fry up some latkes and celebrate the final night of Chanukkah with my dad, complete with candles, Chanukkah stories, and dreidel spinning. A significant portion of the next day was spent with my mom traversing our favorite Christmas tree farm seeking out the perfect tree to brighten up our living room for the holiday season. We nicknamed the one we decided on 'Spring Green' because of its cheery bright green hue. The next morning, we drove north to my gramma's house in Sequim, which just so happens to be only a couple hours from IslandWood, so I practically returned to where I had come from only two days prior. We celebrated an early Christmas with my gramma, saw my cousins perform in their church's rendition of A Christmas Carol, and generally enjoyed the feeling of the season with family.

Christmas Eve and Christmas Day both brought delicious food (think: roasted lamb, baked apples, pumpkin coconut chicken soup, rosemary asparagus, pan de yuca, apple sausage, and pumpkin ice cream sundaes), a leisurely morning of presents, walks through the neighborhood, sunshiny runs through Grant Park, and countless games of chickenfoot dominoes. It was a very relaxing Christmas spent with my family and I'm very grateful to be able to enjoy a Christmas of plenty while others aren't so fortunate.

The rest of break in Portland was a whirlwind of city outings, catching up with good friends, and a trip up to the mountain for some cross-country skiing at Teacup Lake. I went out to tea with Katya at Tea Chai Té on NW 23rd, continued the tradition of spending a few hours at Pied Cow hashing out life with Audrey, strolled the waterfront and esplanade with Erin discussing the concept of home, wished Adrienne a buen viaje on her way to Ecuador for the semester, shopped in sweet little boutiques for a new winter coat with my mom, and had ginger buckwheat pancakes with my dad at Cup & Saucer. The trip up to Mt. Hood was lovely too, and although the snow conditions weren't optimal, it was still fabulous to be back on my skis after such a long time and return to my favorite ski trails around Teacup Lake. It also snowed in Portland for a day, which is a rare and wonderful occurrence! I took many walks through the neighborhood and caught many a snowflake on my tongue that afternoon and evening. It was beautiful to see Portland transformed into a Winter Wonderland and all of its residents turn into children again as they run outside with wonder and joy on their faces.

After another train trip back up north spent chatting with my enjoyable seatmate and gazing at the water and small towns zipping by my window, I lugged my suitcase, backpack, computer bag, and ski bag into a taxi, through the ferry terminal, and across the sound and was more than happy to finally deposit them all in the trunk of Leora's borrowed car when she picked me up from the ferry dock in Winslow. Off and away we went to celebrate New Year's. Our last few hours in 2009 consisted of catching up over Mexican food, casually celebrating East coast New Year's with Greta, Matt, and Kelsey since they were getting up early to go snowboarding the next day, and playing Scrabble in front of the fire with Minna, Ilya, and Minna's friend Lisa. It was all a very relaxing way to spend the evening, but a half hour before midnight Leora and I politely excused ourselves from Minna's house, drove back to IslandWood, and hiked through the forest to the canopy tower. There, we climbed the 179 steps 120' up to the top deck above the treetops as the thick curtain of clouds parted and revealed the Blue Moon (2nd full moon in one month) and millions of bright stars. A few minutes before twelve, fireworks started going off across the water in neighboring towns further south along the sound, and at midnight we howled at the silvery moon to welcome in 2010. We spent the next two hours listening to other people around the island yip and holler when their own clocks struck midnight, star-gazing, picking out constellations, making New Year's resolutions, reflecting on life, calling back to the sea lions barking down at the harbor, watching giant bats flit across the sky, and marveling at the magic of it all. It was the perfect way to ring in the New Year.

The next few days were spent showing Leora IslandWood in the daylight, and celebrating the New Year in the Japanese tradition at the Mochi festival (see previous entry + the video I just uploaded in that entry of me pounding the mochi!).

I also saw a total of four movies in theaters over break: Up in the Air, Invictus, The Blind Side, and Avatar. I was very impressed with all of them. In different ways, granted, but I would highly recommend each one of them, which hasn't happened much in the last few years of movie releases. So do yourself a favor and find time to watch all of them at some point, most importantly Avatar because the message Avatar has for the human race is one that is still not heard loudly enough.

Needless to say, winter break was a time of much merriment and love. Winter quarter has now begun and it couldn't be busier. Lots of teaching, work, and life to figure out. I'll do another update soon about it all, plus the weekend retreat I just spent at North Cascades Institute high up in the mountains!

Hope 2010 is treating everyone well!