The following appeared in one of NEA's recent on-line publications, our own Dan Edwards from Wilson!
School on the Rez
On the vast, 17 million-acre stretch of the Navajo Nation, at a dusty outpost called Red Mesa, Daniel Edwards spent his first years teaching high school.  He lived in a trailer on the teacherage, the small housing community for educators on "the rez." He stocked up on groceries and clean socks—the nearest store was more than an hour away, as was the nearest laundromat. In clear weather he could pick up baseball games on the radio to break up the stillness of the evenings. Not that Edwards had many idle evenings—most nights he was preparing for his whopping five-class course load: World History and Geography, Economics, Biology, Journalism, and Native American Studies.
"With a small school and limited staff, a lot of us had to teach 'out of subject,' but we did what we could to provide our students with the same opportunities as larger schools," Edwards says.
He admits it was tough. This was the 1980s, long before the Internet, and there were no textbooks or AV resources for some of his classes. He often traveled to a grocery store up in Cortez, Colorado, where he convinced the guys in the meat department to give him beef hearts, whole squid, and fish for the students to dissect in biology labs.
He also faced cultural challenges. Several students refused to dissect fish because, according to a Navajo legend, they could be ancestors. Edwards had to find an alternative way to include those students. "It was OK to create illustrations of the internal anatomy without actually cutting the fish open," he says. "So those students still learned about the classes of bony fish."
His advice to new teachers: "Be prepared!"
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