Mud Lake – “The thing is to keep on moving instead of slowing down if you start to tip.” Derrick McLean is helping my wife, Vanessa, and me dig our Bravo Longtrack out of the waist-deep snow. “Move faster so you don’t sink and lose your balance,” adds the grade eight student. Good advice. But the reflex to bail out when the snowmobile begins to tilt is hard to suppress. Like so much about our new life as the only teachers in this isolated Labrador community of fifty, something as simple as getting to and from work has to be relearned.
We line up the rescued Bravo with the side of the school so that trappers don’t accidentally clip it as they speed by. The mailman has just caught a porcupine near Big Point, so all the local men will be going out to check their own traplines. I, on the other hand, retreat into the school, where I hope my science background will put me on a firmer footing with the students. Vanessa and I flip through our lesson plans as the kids—all nine of them—file in, cheerfully stomp off wet snow, and begin chattering. Eleven-year-old Ashley rings the little iron bell to signal the start of class, and the junior-high students take out their science books as I introduce the next topic in the biology curriculum.
The constant tug-of-war between tradition and modernity at Mud Lake School is making visceral for me theories about the philosophy of education, which I’m studying alongside my work as a teacher. A key debate rages over the nature of knowledge. Some in the field argue that knowledge is simply acquired truths, and that a good education should give children access to those truths. A student’s particular cultural context and her opinion of what is worth knowing, while they may affect her motivation, shouldn’t significantly influence what she is taught. This point of view should console me as I do my best to describe the dance of chromatids and mitotic spindles involved in cell division to the five bright faces that make up Mud Lake’s senior class.
Lunchtime. I am now clumsily straddling the icy peak of the school roof. My left hand holds onto the eave; my right grasps a small shovel. I’m using the handle to carefully scrape away the buildup of snow and frost on the satellite dish, our conduit to the Internet and the world. Language Arts is the first class of the afternoon, and the older kids need a stable connection to work on their research projects. Junior Rumbolt, a grade nine student, is researching how people hunt in different parts of the world. “When I graduate,” he says, “I’m probably going to do the same work as Dad—hunting and trapping and maybe heading into the Labrador interior to work as a fish-camp guide with him.”
Talking to Junior reminds me of a competing view about knowledge—that interests and needs are what make anything worth knowing. A piece of wisdom can only be called “true” from the point of view of a specific person’s lived experience within his culture or society. To say that traditional beliefs about how animals grow and develop are less valid than the version that science provides is to neglect the history and culture in which the former have been developing and serving perfectly well for generations.
As the students assemble in the small clearing behind the school under a fading mid-winter sun, these theoretical conundrums seem to melt away. It’s the final class for Wednesday, Life Skills, and Kelly Groves, a fish-camp guide and a Mud Lake School parent, is this week’s community instructor. Kelly is showing the students how to skin a caribou. As he demonstrates the proper way to separate the skin from the meat—quick strokes that slice away the rubbery, white connective tissue—Junior points to the Caribou’s leg. The aspiring hunter, who usually regards anything to do with science as slow torture, waves the primary students over. “This is where the ball-and-socket joint is,” he says, eager to share a recent anatomy lesson. “The two bits fit together. That’s why it can move its leg.” For a moment, at least, the tradition of the community and the tradition of science mingle comfortably.
Everyone gets a turn at skinning the animal. Most of the older students catch on quickly—they’ve seen their parents do this many times before. When my turn comes, I take off my clumsy winter gloves. Kelly reminds me to hold the knife flat with the body so that my cuts don’t accidentally tear the meat. Like everyone else in Mud Lake, he’s very patient. He understands that we’re new here. After a few swipes with the blade, the cold bites at my hands, making the handle difficult to grip. I relax my hold on the knife. With a little practice, I begin to see the slight contours of the animal’s musculature, and my cuts get more accurate. Eventually, the skin begins to part from the body, revealing the frigid substance underneath.
—Chris Martin
Martin spent two years as principal of Mud Lake School. He recently started his PhD in education at the University of London.