How schools use the Iditarod as an instructional tool

The world's most famous sled-dog race becomes a way to teach math, science, and history in classrooms around the world.

from the March 13, 2008 edition

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In her classes, she puts particular emphasis on math (if two-thirds of the starting mushers finish the race, how many mushers will finish in 2008?) and science (using the way dogs continue to run after mushers fall off sleds to illustrate Newtonian laws of physics).

As Blaile's lessons suggest, the use of the Iditarod as an instructional aid extends far beyond schools in Alaska. True, the race has become as much a part of the curriculum here as multiplication tables and Magna Carta. But in the Internet Age, hundreds of schools around the world use it, too. The day before this year's race, Ms. Johnson was getting calls at 4 a.m. from teachers on the East Coast fretting that they didn't know the musher start positions.

"It's nothing for me to get an e-mail from somebody in Australia, Spain, some kind of request in Alaska and South America all in the same day," says Johnson, who works most of the year out of her home in Aberdeen, S.D.

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An Iditarod map and recent news clippings embroider the wall of Kass Friend's first- and second-grade classroom at the Chugach Optional School, an elementary school in Anchorage. Students take time out during their daily schedule to check on mushers' progress.

"There were 96 racers and four dropped out. How many are still in the race?" Ms. Friend asks her students as they crowd around her computer to peer at the race standings. They are fascinated when Friend tells them that the race checkpoint of Ophir, site of an abandoned mining settlement, is a ghost town.

Some want to hit the trail themselves. "You just want to try it out and see what it would be like," says Garrett Nevells, a second-grader.

Friend tries to put less emphasis on the race winner and more on history and cultural lessons associated with the old mail-delivery trail. It was used in 1925 to ferry, by sled-dog relay, life-saving medicine to combat a diphtheria outbreak in Nome. "They're fascinated that a village doesn't have a store," she says.

Back at Larson Elementary School, the entire "Ikidarod" adventure takes less than an hour to complete – a fraction of the nine or 10 days that most winners need to reach Nome. The winning team poses for the celebratory photograph wearing necklaces of silk flowers. So do all the other fifth-grade mushers and kindergarten "dogs," including the team led by Alexis Abbott.

Her team grabbed the "Red Lantern," the prize for the last to finish, an award that symbolizes determination, just like the prize given to the real Iditarod's tail-end competitor.

One unintended similarity to the real Iditarod arose, too. As mushers in the race coped with a 40-degree heat wave that turned the trail to slush, Larson Elementary had its own weather woes. The school planned to hold the race on the soccer field, but wet weather forced it indoors – hence the carnival scene in the hallways.

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