LIFE OF LEARNING

WASILLA — As students prepare for their first day of school, teachers readying for Thursday’s influx spent Monday in the adult equivalent of an opening day assembly at Teeland Middle School.

But district staff is so large the assembly had to be split into two days. Elementary school staff will meet today to hear much the same presentation the secondary school staff got Monday.

Linda Jo Klapperich, honored at the assembly for winning the Mat-Su Borough School District’s Teacher of the Year award in May, said the district used to have this kind of meeting every year, but it just kind of stopped one year. She said the idea is a good one that keeps teachers from getting too compartmentalized in their individual schools.

Superintendent Ken Burnley told teachers they should expect to see him frequently in their buildings and he plans to visit them for inspiration.

“When things get me down, and they do get me down, I go out into the schools and see the kids and see you,” he said.

Burnley used the opportunity to fire up his troops, taking as a theme for the meeting a Kia car commercial that features dancing rodents. The refrain of the commercial’s song tells viewers “you can get with this or you can get with that.”

Burnley said in the Mat-Su Borough School District context, “this” refers to a great district and “that” refers to the status quo, a merely good district.

The district is doing well, but “we can amp it up even more,” he said, before inviting administrators and principals to the stage to dance to the song wearing mouse ears.

Also at the assembly, Don Davis, who was principal of Waterford High School in Waterford, Calif., during a very trying time in that school’s history. Davis gave a presentation he called “worst to first.”

The school had been ranked bottom of the barrel, a fact Davis said he found out when he read it on the front page of the local paper. Davis said he turned the school around and offered advice based on what worked for him.

The advice ranged from the specific — two-part algebra courses don’t really help much; in Waterford the same percentage of students failed algebra Ia as failed plain algebra I — to the very broad advice to be progressive. The example of something progressive Waterford tried sounded at first like something regressive — gender-divided classrooms. But, he said, having an all-girls math class and an all-boys class seems to be helping achievement.

He told a story about bringing a group of visiting teachers through the school who noted that the classes were silent. Davis said that, at the time, he was proud of that.

“We can’t have them talk to each other, that would be chaos,” he explained was his reasoning. But the visiting teachers said a little bit of discussion was a good thing. “That’s how you know they really get it.”

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.