Welcome to, or back to school! For this issue, I collaborated with my good friend Remus. After some discussions, we decided to interview Mrs. Walker for our teacher interview. She’s a lovely science teacher down in A112, who hosts Battle of the Books during lunch on Mondays, Green Effects on Mondays after school, GSA during lunch on Tuesdays, and Ocean Club during lunch on Fridays.
From this point on I would like to mention this article in no way shape or form is to expose anything about the teachers and things they are not comfortable with. As journalists, we strive to make sure our content is acceptable to all and above all appropriate. Miracle was unable to attend the interview due to a small inconvenience. However, the recording used for the information provided was successfully obtained by Remus.
When Remus got there, He quickly set up and went over what would be happening with Mrs. Walker. The first question Remus asked was about Mrs. Walker debriefing her trips to Costa Rica. She explained that she met with a nonprofit called Earth Watch. Scientists would apply to have Earthwatch trips; going into further detail, adults that want to go on these trips go to conserve something. Applicants list how many people are needed, where they would sleep, how they would eat, and activities done each day. Earth Watch picks 5 trips over the course of about a year, and Earth Watch makes no money off of people paying to attend Earth Watch trips. These trips are tax deductible. Mrs. Walker’s trip was put together by a professor at the University of Kentucky, who specializes in pollinators.
We asked about the research she took part in and she mentioned that the mission was to find out which pollinators live in the Monteverde region of Costa Rica, and what kinds of plants are needed for the pollinators to stay alive and healthy. The professor helped farmers plant the plants to help conserve the bees. Mrs.Walker was helping to capture and identify the bees and plant the correlating friendly plants. “Also, I learned about the region/history of the region as well as how best to conserve the bees. Some bees found can produce honey that can cure Cataracts disease.”
We then asked Mrs.Walker about another trip she took and if that was just for her family. “Yes, they wanted to go somewhere with a lot of biodiversity and Costa Rica, on the Osa Peninsula, which holds 2.5% of the world’s biodiversity and only .01% of its landmass”. The purpose of the trip was to explore and find new things. It sounded like she had a good time so we then asked what she did. They went ziplining, and her kids loved it. Her kids also did the Tarzan Swing, which frightened Mrs. Walker over the safety of this ride. They went hiking, also doing night hikes just to look for the animals of the region. They ended up traveling to 8 different national parks, one being at an elevation of about 10,000 feet which reminded her a lot about Alaska. They also traveled via a boat that went along a river and into the ocean. The ship went broadside to the waves and thus Mrs. Walker learned about how her kids were very adventurous. We were curious if she and her family had any favorite animals they saw, and it was a baby sloth: “A young sloth we named Geraldine that was just left behind by his mother and he had yet to learn that humans were scary. He would lounge in a tree just outside where they were staying in the Hacienda Baru Wildlife Preserve” she said. The research trip she took with her class lasted about a week, and her family trip was about two weeks. “What did you enjoy most about Costa Rica across both trips?” After some thought, Mrs. Walker expressed that discovering the different things in the wild, working with the scientists, and being able to be a part of the fieldwork, because it’s so different from what she does as a teacher, made her love even meeting the farmers who switched from the large scale farming to more of an eco-tourism. She made sugar cane juice from one of those farm trips.
Mrs. Walker’s trips included one where she went on a trip to educate young women about jobs in industries such as gold mining. We asked her what job was her favorite to learn about: “The course is called POWR, it is an Alaska Resource Education class for young women.” The haul truck driver was her favorite mostly due to the fact the girls on the trip were excited to climb up into the large truck which was about 3 stories tall. Her other favorite job to hear about was the geologist from Fort Knox Gold Mine, as she had grown up in the Philippines and trained there as there were several girls of Philippine descent on the trip. Her favorite part of the women’s empowerment trip was going to the training mine graduation through MAPTS, it “felt like an amusement park,” but it was real and people go there to train for work. Her least favorite part of that trip, of all the trips, was just missing her children. “What would you say was your favorite part of teaching the course in Valdez?” Giving her a moment to answer, Mrs. Walker pointed out that working with other teachers was really fun, and she enjoyed learning new things from the other teachers as well as sharing her knowledge with them. The teachers were fun and excited to bring the lessons they learned back to the classroom such as their drone yoga, buzzing as they “flew” and the outdoors of it all because even though it was raining, they traveled on boats. It made Mrs. Walker excited to know that the other teachers’ students would have new experiences and new things to learn from their teachers. For our next question, we trailed off a bit from the questions about Costa Rica and asked her how often the women’s empowerment group that she leads over the summer lasts. According to her, It’s a 4th quarter after-school King Tech class. The field trip is one week over the summer.