It’s the time of year when teachers are preparing for the start of a new year. They don’t make Wall Street salaries, sometimes don’t even make enough to continue in teaching, but a story from long ago reminds us of the nobility of the teaching profession.
Hannah Breece was born in Pennsylvania in 1859. She became a teacher and in 1904, at age 45, agreed with the federal Department of the Interior to teach school in Alaska at a salary of $600 a year. Her first school was in Afognak, a village near Kodiak.
There was prejudice. "The Aleut children were a ragged, unkempt lot and the Russian...children treated them shamefully” (p. 17).
There was superstition. One child wouldn't eat popcorn because he thought only the devil could turn something inside out.
Hannah must have wondered if her efforts were futile. Afognak had a church, school, and tavern. About the tavern, she wrote in her memoirs, "Here you are, ready to tear down what each institution can do for the good of the people” (p. 13). She drilled her students in civics, but "One day, I asked, "Who says which man shall be president of the United States? With one accord they chorused, 'The Czar!'" (A Schoolteacher in Old Alaska, p. 22)
Hannah stayed in Alaska until 1918, an unheralded hero in a noble and needed profession. God bless our teachers!
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