Mushing around
Annual sled dog visit is a hit with Lincoln Central Elementary kids
“It’s my escape. I get to get away from the crazy, busy world. I don’t want to sit there and play a game; I want to take my dogs and run 250 miles.” —Musher Becki Tucker, who paid Lincoln students a visit with her dogs
Chained to either side of Becki Tucker's RAM 2500, some of the Outlaw Ridge Sled Dogs occasionally start to bark – but with a point and the utterance of a single word, Tucker can shut that down in a second.
She is, after all, the mother of these 14 dogs. But as a musher, she has to be a lot more than that.
“I'm also their nutritionist, their behaviorist, and I'm also their coach,” Tucker said, “and sometimes it's really hard to be mom and coach.”
And like any good mother, she can tell you all about the personalities of the different dogs. While she adamantly asserts she doesn't have a favorite dog, she will tell you that Thrasher is “the perfect child,” Turmoil is tough and Frenzi is emotional, a perfectionist who will withdraw if yelled at.
(Other dogs have names like Super Star, Krome, Danger, Fuel, Venom and Theory.)
While she lives in Dorchester, N.H., Tucker made the trip to Lincoln on Friday to speak with third-grade students at Lincoln Central Elementary. It's just one element of teacher Jeff Drolet's sled dog racing unit, which has had the students
following the Iditarod.
The unit will culminate with the upcoming “Ikidarod” challenge, during which students will apply what they've learned about mushing commands and teamwork while on modified tricycles. The date for the Ikidarod has yet to be determined, due to the snow covering the course.
This is Drolet's fifth year doing the sled dog racing unit, but only the second getting a $1,000 Spark Grant for classroom innovation from the Rhode Island Foundation. Tucker has visited Lincoln Central in the past.
She explained to the students that she began racing 19 years ago and initially had a proclivity toward sprint races, ones under 10 miles. She would get bored doing races over 20 miles, but that changed, as did her commitment to the sport.
Nine years ago, she took an ATV out – not wearing a helmet – and ended up crashing her head on the pavement. Tucker nearly died and was expected to remain in a vegetative state.
But instead of retreating from her passion, the experience made her think more about pushing herself beyond her past experiences. She decided to do 60-mile races, necessary to qualify for the 250-mile Can-Am Crown race, which starts and ends in Fort Kent, Maine.
She competed in her first Can-Am Crown four years ago and managed to finish, something nine out of 10 rookies can't say. She came in fifth place out of 21 teams the next year, scratched last year and placed sixth this year.
“It's my escape. I get to get away from the crazy, busy world,” she said. “I don't want to sit there and play a game; I want to take my dogs and run 250 miles.”
At Lincoln Central on Friday, Tucker talked to the students about checkpoints, and how she must keep her dogs well-fed and well-rested. She talked about jackets for dogs and about harnesses. She demonstrated how to stop a sled.
“I've been dragged down three miles of plowed road. I've been dragged uphill,” she said. “They're not stopping for me. They love to run.”
When Tucker transports her dogs, she places them into boxes on the back of her truck, each one labeled with the corresponding dog's name.
“They love their box, because that's their space. It's their den,” Tucker said. “It's not a crate; it's their bedroom.”
After Tucker's talk, the kids got a chance to pet the dogs and pose for a picture on her sled.
As she watched excited students get hugs from dogs, parent volunteer Marie Lemery gushed about the sled dog racing unit.
“My son loves geography and he loves dogs, so this is right up his alley,” she said. She has another son in first grade, and she said he can't wait to be in third grade because of this.
Drolet got into following the Iditarod when he was student teaching under a teacher who followed the race.
Drolet has been working on the unit with fellow thirdgrade teacher Beth Hollowell, who focuses on English Language Arts while he teaches math and science. They kicked off the unit with a red lantern lighting ceremony on March 3, the Friday before the start of the Iditarod.
They even had “Who Let the Dogs Out?” cued up for the ceremony.
The kids partner up and research mushers. Each team chooses a musher to follow, though not everyone gets their top pick, considering everyone wants the top three mushers.
On the Iditarod website, the kids can track GPS, watch live video commentary and learn the terminology mushers use.
In the classroom, a chart shows the progress of the different mushers, including the number of dogs they still have in the race. Drolet explained that all teams start with 16 dogs, but if the veterinarians or mushers determine a dog isn't safe to continue, that dog gets dropped.
Next to the chart are maps some students made of the course.
While the pairs follow their mushers' real-life progress, they can also earn time deductions for doing tasks related to the curriculum. The tasks promote teamwork, such as asking another student for help with a closing sentence on an assignment.
The third-graders must complete all their normal class assignments before they can be eligible to do projects for time deductions.
While some challenges yield the deduction of just a few hours, giving up television and electronics for a week – with the exception of educational websites and Iditarod research – yields 100 hours.
This is a challenge that Mackenzie Kishfy, a student in Hollowell's class, took on. Other challenges included extra reading and math problems, she said. One of the most interesting things Kishfy learned was how mushers bring their dogs over lakes.
“I really liked learning about all the mushers and how they raced and how good they are,” Mason Primo said. He has been following the progress of musher Ray Redington and said he has particularly enjoyed GPS tracking.
The majority of the 70plus teams competing in the Iditarod have finished, and eight teams scratched. But the students are still closely following the race to see who will get the red lantern, which is awarded to the last musher to finish.
“It is celebrated in Alaska as the perseverance it takes to finish the race,” Drolet said.
When the Lincoln Central students do the Ikidarod, they will be completing math, science, social studies, reading and writing tasks as their checkpoints.
Examples are listing the seven continents and filling in a compass rose at the social studies checkpoint, and explaining the commutative property at the math one.
“It's fun because you watch the kids struggle with wanting to go fast but knowing that the slower you go, the more they're able to navigate the checkpoint,” Drolet said.
Parent volunteers will monitor whether the kids do the course they designed and score with a rubric that includes positive peer interaction, cooperation and use of musher commands.
Drolet said that over the years he's been doing this, the feedback from parents “is they're amazed what their child has been able to accomplish when they're challenged.”