Experiences

=Share with us your experiences from 1989-2009=

Please add your entry just after this comment, so that the most recent entry is read first. Head it up with a dotted line all the way across and put your name and state on the next line. Then make your entry! ................................................................................................................................................................................................... Myrna Peterson, Deer River, MN

My experiences at Stanford catapulted an exciting three year adventure for our Deer River Team. We cooperatively worked to develop & implement Ojibwe Culture into the K-12 curriculum in our school system. We encountered many highs & lows, working with Native elders, other colleagues & community members to gain valuable insights into the past. We authored applications & received many grants to facilitate our goals. Apple Computer, Westinghouse TV & NFIE cooperated to fund & produce a docudrama, titled "Everyday Heroes", which captured the flavor of our community, our school & many of the challenges that we faced. Since that time, this movie is still being used in some college classrooms that deal in diversity issues. Personally and as a team, we had many opportunities to present at state & national conferences on technology, incorporating diversity & curriculum. Our project met with resistance and misunderstanding from both cultures. We disbanded the idea, but gained much knowledge and established lasting friendships. My hope is that this valuable experience can be revisited at some time in the future.

I moved from my technology coordinator position, which I held from 1984-92, into teaching 6th grade at King Elementary in Deer River. I thoroughly enjoyed engaging those creative minds in the world of technology. I continued to stay involved in helping my students capture the essence of the Ojibwe culture, and to explore their own heritage. My four children, all nearly teenagers by now, kept this single mom involved in their extra-curricular activities beyond the school day for the next 3 years.

My life changed drastically when I was in an auto accident about 1 mile from my house at 12:15am on June 21st, 1995. I headed home after a long day & a late night swim with a friend. I avoided an oncoming vehicle & the Ford Ranger I was driving entered a muddy ditch with no shoulder, struck a culvert, flipped over & landed in the opposite ditch, making a complete 360. No other vehicle stopped. My efforts to get to a safe spot outside the vehicle, caused me to suck in lots of mucky water while crossing the ditch to reach a small embankment. A trucker spotted the abandoned vehicle at 5:30 that next morning & radioed 911. Rescue workers from the local ambulance & fire department got me to Deer River Hospital where doctors stabilized me & had me air-lifted to St. Mary's Hospital in Duluth, MN. I had an incomplete fracture at C3-C4 in my spine. (Christopher Reeve had a complete fracture at C2-C3 one month earlier.) After 10 days in ICU, I spent 8 months on 2nd Floor Rehab at Miller Dwan Hospital in Duluth. I went home to Deer RIver to live with my four children in February, 1996. We had nursing help for 13 hours during the days & my kids cared for me during the nights.

My physical & mental health diminished gradually over the next 6 years. In 2001, my doctors discovered a major reason for my deteriorating condition. My original fusion never stabilized--a screw loosened, probably in December, 1995, at the onset of the intense shooting pain & eventually fell out, but went undetected. I went back to St. Mary's Hospital in Duluth to have a bone chip from my hip placed at C3, C4 to re-fuse the break & have a 7" tuning fork wired to the top of my spinal column to secure it. I spent the next year at Benedictine Health Center in Duluth learning basic skills over again. From there I spent 3 months on the rehab floor again at Miller Dwan during the summer of 2002. The next 2 years I lived at Westview Services, an assisted living facility in West Duluth & did outpatient therapy there.

I moved back to Grand Rapids, 17 miles east of Deer River, in February, 2005. The last 4 years have been spent in & out of therapies, surgeries & some pneumonia. I live at McKinney Lake House, another Assisted Living--which means there is someone here 24 hours every day for my needs. There is one other lady that lives here, as well. I need total help with dressing, bathing, make-up & hair. I can stand well on my feet again now after I had corrective surgery on both feet to straighten them--one in Oct. '07 & the other in Jan. '08. I need help getting to a standing position & to get into & out of my wheelchair/commode/bed. I do have bladder & bowel control, a blessing, but also something not typical of an injury at my level. I spent time in a standing frame & riding the Nu-Step while at PT & received lots of stretching & strengthening thru OT 3 times per week. My legs are getting progressively stronger, so now I have my own equipment & stand nearly every day at my house. I have limited use of my arms. My left arm/wrist/hand had corrective surgery in April, '08 & my right wrist/hand/fingers were corrected in Nov. '08. My left arm hadn't been functional for 13+ years, so it's great to be able to move it on my own again. I either type with 1 finger on my right hand or use my voice-activated software.

Up until 2 years ago, I was using combinations of narcotic medications for chronic pain, which left me pretty uninterested in life in general & still in pain. I went through a process in 2006-7 that took about 9 months of trial & error plus determination to clear my system of narcotic medications. I've become much more active, able & interested in moving about again. I have significant chronic pain from my neck down. I call myself a "frozen french fry". I'm always cold inside, but my skin feels burnt. I need to keep covered from my injury level down to avoid further "burning sensation". Added to that, I feel like I'm hanging on to a 500 volt wire 24/7--what it feels like when your foot goes to sleep. It's pretty strange & bazaar--it is irreparable nerve damage & no amount of medication can do anything but mask the symptoms. I keep busy & praise God for every opportunity I have to connect the dots between all the lost years from my accident to these recent years of my recovery.

I feel blessed to have had such excellent specialized care through all of this. My kids & I have dealt with so much, but had survived because of our faith in God, prayer, family/friends support & the use of comic relief. They & their friends were & still are an important part of my recovery by just "hangin' out together--doin' stuff 'n goin' places"; watching movies, playing games, traveling as we were able, worshiping, laughing a bunch & talking late into many nights. Technology continues to be a passion & now has been an integral tool in communicating with relatives, friends & colleagues around the world. I enjoy teaching Sunday School, Release Time, tutoring & volunteering throughout my community. I have aspirations of traveling & writing about my experiences.

............................................................................................................................................................................................................. Walt Tremer, Coopersburg, Pa.

Seeing everyone in Deer River at the reunion sparked so many memories, and the realization that a considerable flood of water has flowed over the dam of life..... And to look back and try to reconstruct the strands that have made up the fabric of life since then is a challenge, though a happy one. The NFIE time in my life was paralleling another major strand, that of my high school teaching and a deep involvement in the high school exchange program with Minsk, Belarus. Each year, beginning in 1987, I took a group of students to a school in Minsk, and they would send a group here to our high school. What started in the depths of the Cold War, in which our group was subject to a lot of militia with guns around us and a tight lid on any outside contact while we were there, turned into an exchange program that continued through the downfall of the Soviet Union, giving our students an up close and personal experience of the fall of communism. In 1990 we visited the national game preserve in Belarus, and had lunch in the lodge there. The next year, the heads of all the soviet Republics met there to dissolved the Soviet Union, and while watching the proceedings back at school, one of my students shouted - "Look! Gorbachev's ass is sitting exactly where my ass was!" A profound historical event. My wife Jan, jealous of my exchanges, started an ice skating exchange with ice rinks in Siberia, and so my travels expanded eastward. A wonderful result of that was when the Soviet Union was about to fall, one of the national pair team of skaters, when all the rinks there closed, came to live with us for three years, trained with Jan as their coach, and she ended up coaching them through the international qualifying events, and took them to the 2002 Olympics. If you might recall, in the Uzbekistan pair team, the pair team girl broke her ankle three weeks before the Olympics, and still skated the program. ABC made a big human interest story of it on the coverage. That was Jan's pair team. It was a real hoot to see your wife on Wide Wolrd Of Sport! In 1992, while in Minsk on an exchange, I met a Belarussian archaeologist, and since that is my primary profession, we talked stones and bones. It seemed there was no archaeology going on in the Republic, due to the economy. I offered a trade, my college, Muhlenberg, would sponsor the excavations if I could offer a field course in Belarus. It was a marriage made in heaven, and is still continuing to this day, with me spending every summer digging sites in Belarus. The primary archaeoligcal problem centers aorund finding the origins of the Slavic cultures. There is a prehistoric blank between the first and sixth centuries in central Europe, which by the seventh century evolved into the Slavic cultural roots. In southern Belarus, the Pripyats River is a major prehistoric trade route, so concentrating in that area, ten years ago I found two fifth century villages. Subsequently, we have located and excavated village from earlier periods of time, and last year uncovered important first century remains, and 63 burial mounds. There remains much work to be done, and I will be there at least another decade. Also in 1992, another one of life's little fascinating gifts dropped out of the sky. A Florida real estate philanthropist wanted to build a school for Asiatic gifted orphans. Originally looking to place it in Boca Raton, Florida, but being rebuffed by the inhabitants that refused to have "yellow skins" in their neighborhood, he looked to build in Hong Kong. In part, due to my recognition by NFIE, plus the fact that I was directing gifted programs at the high school and spoke Chinese, the Pearl Buck Society, caretakers of the project, asked me to head up the effort. At the funding banquet, I almost peed my pants when they held up one of those oversized checks with the amount of grant given to us - six million dollars! Ho! For the next three years, I spent many trips shuttling back and forth between here and Hong Kong. Making a long story short, the British Treaty that had held Hong Kong as a British colony ran out in 1997, and the Chinese communists began making noises of confiscating all land when the treaty ran out. So the school was never built. A sad ending. As a parallel program, I initiated a smaller program sponsoring talented students in Taiwan, and that had great success. A high point would be visiting Taipei, and having a gifted ten year old scratch out Brahms on his new violin for me. The mid-1990's found me rolling along directing the high school gifted program, teaching at the college, and digging in Belarus. Occasionally I would be called on by NASA, as a result of the involvement in the Challenger Shuttle Program as a teacher-astronaut, to do lectures and space science programs here and there around the country. This continued into the new century. Since my daughter had been a national ice skating champion, and wife an Olympic skating coach, I had been up to my eyes in the frigid sport. This however, has never brought me the talent to skate backwards, resembling a crippled moose on the ice. It did give me a deep appreciation of the sport, having spent thousands of hours standing at the rink barrier. Janet, being a mucky muck in the US Figure Skating Association, would have me go along to conferences and workshops, and it occurred to me, as an educator, that coaches really do not understand the teaching-learning process going on during coaching a skater. So I put together an educational workshop for coaches, the USFSA loved it, and they have been sending me around the country several times a year giving coaches' workshops ever since. I tended to froth at the mouth when I was telling Michelle Kwan's coach how he was coaching! In 2006, a few good things happened. Since the Challenger tragedy in 1986, the group of teacher-astronauts had been petitioning NASA to fly Barb Morgan, Christa McAullife's direct backup. Barb became an official NASA astronaut in 1997, and in 2006, she was scheduled to fly on the shuttle. NASA brought all of us to Kennedy for the launch, and it was an incredible event. The launch went flawlessly, healing a 20 year old emotional scar in all of us. Later I got together with Barb in Detroit to hear all the exciting details of the mission. The year also found me deciding to retire from the high school, after 42 years of a happy and rewarding time in the classroom. People all ask if I miss teaching there, and I do miss the wonderful students. I do not miss the shift in education that chains the creative and exciting minds of students to the center confines of the learning process. The same year produced a real focal point of my exploits. Because I have a big Alaskan malamute sled dog whose grandparents rode in the Iditarod Sled Dog Race in Alaska, I scheduled a trip in March to see the race start in Anchorage. It was an amazing event, 1400 howling huskies at the start in Anchorage. We were hooked. The next year we bid on a musher, to be an "Iditarider", wherein the winning bid gets to ride the first 11 miles in the musher's sled at the ceremonial start. We won Lance Mackey. We planned to fly to a mid-race checkpoint, and Lance was winning, so we changed our plans and flew to Nome to see him win. The next year we did the same, seeing the start, flying bush planes to checkpoints, and ending up in Nome to see Lance win again. By this time, we were official sponsors of Lance's Comeback Kennel. That year also started our mushing career, taking some teams out into the wilderness. This year Lance won again, and again found us mushing our own teams down the Yukon at 50 below zero. As I write this (Sept 2009) we just got back from Fairbanks and a fundraiser spaghetti dinner for Lance. After the dinner, I drove up the "Haul Road" to outside Prudhoe Bay, above the Arctic Circle. Next February I will be Lance's dog handler for the Yukon Quest, which means I will drive the dog truck with Lance's wife along the checkpoints that parallel the thousand mile Yukon Quest race from Fairbanks to Whitehorse, Yukon territory. After bring the dogs back to Fairbanks after the race, we'll get Lance's team ready for the thousand mile Iditarod in March. I'll end up in Inuit village checkpoints along the route, and again end up in Nome. Then some more mushing into the wilderness. Needless to say, I'm addicted to cold and dogs. Next summer will find me again excavating a first century village and burial mounds in Belarus. And that catches things up in my life to date! Walt Tremer .wtremer@aol.com ............................................................................................................................................................................................................................. Bonnie Price, California

Wow-- 20 years since our time together at Stanford. What a great reunion we enjoyed at Eagle Nest Lodge! I'm happy to say that much of my life since then has proceeded along the same path it had been on before- got the kids through high school and college and am pleased to see them starting their own lives; stayed in Whittier and continued to teach; stayed in relatively good health; kept friends, and made more new ones, and had many adventures.

With so much the same, it would seem there were no significant differences, but that would of course be only an illusion. So much can happen in a day, and the layering of those days may make some changes seem subtle, when nothing could be farther from the truth. Writing- mostly writing interactively online, like now-(asynchronous mode), has helped me chronicle many of the subtle, lovely changes.

I'm a better teacher, a better mom, a better wife than I was in the heady days of CMI gatherings at Stanford, at DC, and at NEA conferences- New Orleans, San Francisco, Kansas City! I learned from each person, from each experience, how to figure out what I want- and how to move towards those goals.

One goal- becoming a better friend- has interestingly enough been nurtured by an online community of some twenty women that has daily-- sometimes multiple times per day -- interaction. It's hard to hide who you really are over 20 years of conversation, yet interestingly enough, we each reveal new aspects of ourselves. It's been an immensely important community to me.

As my husband has pursued the most interesting professional goals over the last twenty years-- from singing the National Anthem at major league baseball games (20 stadiums so far!) to seeking to become president of a small liberal arts college (not yet, but twice to the level of being on of two candidates), I've wanted to find a way to have stable relationships that were portable. I highly recommend a good, solid online community. Ours is a closed community, with little overall movement, though over the years some people left, and some arrived and settled in.

Since 1989, my teaching has varied. That year, I was asked to teach a course at Whittier College for teaching credential candidates who needed an Instructional Technology class. I asked my CMI partner Pam (Kinnaman) Korporaal to help out. Soon we split up into our own classes, as the demand was high for this service. It sure kept our evenings and summers busy! Though I stopped teaching there in 2000, Pam continues, and provides great service to her alma mater.

After serving two years as Instructional Specialist in a larger neighboring district (specialty: Technology, natch) I found I didn't like the unevenness of soft funding and went back to the classroom. Two years of high school teaching was enough and I headed back to upper elementary, where I've truly enjoyed the kids each day of each year.

Gardening became a surprise interest when we bought a home of almost an acre on a canyon hillside overlooking Whittier College, where my husband serves as professor. Two options- leave it wild and hazardous (fire danger) or cultivate it and spend a LOT of money yielded a decision: invest. Luckily, I had just received (1998 www.mff.org) a Milken Family Foundation Educator Award that provided me with $25,000 of unexpected budget (really, more like $16K with taxes...) so off we went. Hundreds of railroad ties, nursery plants and nearly a hundred tons of river rock later, we have a pretty interesting garden.

As for the important stuff-- the effect of my teaching on kids -- I've been lucky to get feedback that really moves me. Each day brings a fresh anecdote that spurs me to really weigh my options as I reach the spot where I just might close the door on my classroom teaching: retirement. One sweet spot from last Thursday: after school, walking down the hall to my class, I saw a lively group of kids in the after-school program getting water. The boys were about 60 feet away and separated from a chain link fence, but they wanted to express themselves "Hey Mrs. Price, you were the best teacher I ever had!" "Hi, Mrs. Price! Hi, hi!" and my personal favorite, from a sixth grade boy with a very difficult home life and a huge chip on his shoulder when he started in my class in September of the year before, -- at the top of his lungs, the affirmation: "You made me smart."