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Teaching in the Dark: A Memoir

A woman stands in a heavy coat, facing the sky with the Northern Lights. The cover says "teaching in the dark: a memoir"

By Genét Simone (PhDEdu'04) 
(Balboa Press, 503 pages; 2023) 

A young teacher buys a one-way ticket to Shishmaref, Alaska. Within minutes of landing, she finds herself dealing with unexpected, rustic accommodations, and the culture shock of living in a remote Iñuit community. She relies on her courage, resilience, and wit while enduring freezing temperatures, power outages, loneliness, and first-year teacher anxieties and missteps, but eventually realizes that those challenges pale in comparison to the life lessons she learns about the heart of teaching-lessons from her students, their culture, and their community, on the vast, windy landscape at the edge of the Chukchi Sea.