A NEW TEACHER LEARNS LIFE LESSONS FROM A HURRICANE.

Byline: PEOPLE By Randi Bjornstad The Register-Guard

A year ago and right out of college, Sarah Bliss was hankering for some real-world adventure far from hometown Eugene.

So she signed up for a two-year stint with Teach for America, a program that places recent graduates with strong leadership skills in "under-resourced" schools throughout the country.

Little did she know just how much excitement was headed her way.

"My first choice was to go to New Orleans - I wanted to get away from the West Coast after spending my whole life in Eugene - and that's where I was placed," Bliss says. "I was excited to see Mardi Gras, eat all the amazing food I'd heard about and experience the culture."

After five weeks of intensive teacher training in Houston, Bliss walked into her special education classroom at Higgins High School in Jefferson Parish on Aug. 23. Less than a week later, Hurricane Katrina blew her plans to smithereens and Bliss all the way back to Houston.

"A friend of mine called and said there was a Category 5 hurricane heading right for New Orleans," Bliss recalls. "We left just a few hours before everything became gridlocked. We headed for Houston, because there were family friends there."

Thinking she would be gone for just a few days, Bliss took only a duffel bag with a few clothes. But the days stretched into five weeks before she knew what would happen next.

"For the first two weeks, I just watched TV in sadness and awe," she said. "It was one of the most intense feelings I've ever had."

Some of her Teach for America colleagues quit and went back home to various parts of the country. But Bliss "wanted to stick with it."

"Starting in mid-September, they started talking about what to do with us. They decided to keep us in Houston," because a lot of kids from New Orleans had ended up there.

After a short retraining course, Bliss started her new assignment, this time teaching fifth-grade language arts, primarily grammar and writing. Since then, she's made yet another switch, to science.

"Basically, the state standardized tests have science, but they don't have writing, so they wanted me to change and teach science," she said. "I felt really unprepared - I was really daunted. But I jumped right in, and now I love it."

She had six weeks to give her students a crash course to help them on the test, "so I tried to teach them skills, like doing experiments using the scientific method."

To be honest, she "wasn't that strong at teaching grammar," Bliss admits. "I tried to find ways to make it exciting, but I had a hard time with that. I mean, how do you make adjectives sound exciting?"

Largely because of Hurricane Katrina, her first year of teaching has tested her interpersonal skills as much as her academic ones, Bliss says. Her daily class load includes about 50 children displaced from New Orleans, and she's had to help them recover from that trauma while keeping their minds on their studies.

"I've learned that kids are surprisingly resilient," she said. "I expected a lot more behavior problems, more melancholy. But they've bounced back pretty well, although sometimes when we have deep conversations, they get upset. I know they think about it, but it doesn't seem to haunt them."

Through the months, she's lost contact with students as they trickle back to New Orleans to try to pick up their previous lives. About two-thirds of the hurricane refugees in her class say their families will return to Louisiana, Bliss said.

One who left a hole in her heart as well as her class was Kenneth Simon.

"I found out that the kids in his family were often not in school because they have to help bring in income for the family," she said.

"They attach bottle caps to their shoes and tap dance for money in Jackson Square in New Orleans. So Kenneth went back, but his sister and cousins are still here."

Bliss, too, plans to be back in New Orleans next fall for another teaching assignment, after spending the summer back home in Eugene, where she graduated from South Eugene High School in 2001. She earned her bachelor's degree in comparative sociology from the University of Puget Sound last June; she turns 23 next month.

"In a way, I'll be starting over when I go back, just like many of the students," she said.

"I had found two roommates back there, and we had gotten a wonderful New Orleans-style house together, six blocks out of the flood zone, near Magazine Street; it was awesome. I was really sad to have to leave it, and I've heard that rent has gone up about $600 a month, so I don't know what we'll be able to afford now."

All in all, Bliss said she probably learned as much as she taught in her first tumultuous year in the real world.

"I learned a lot about flexibility," she said. "I learned about having to start all over again. I saw a lot of 10-year-olds facing more in life than I ever would want them to.

"And I learned that I'm really happy to be doing what I'm doing, even though it turned out much differently than I expected."

CAPTION(S):

Sarah Bliss of Eugene talks with student Kenneth Simon, who was displaced by Hurricane Katrina and ended up in Houston, as did Bliss.