Polar bear summer: ABQ teacher uses Norway expedition to explore world with students

Aug. 13—Chris Speck has enough to say about what he did on his summer vacation to keep his seventh-grade students entertained and learning throughout this school year and beyond.

Speck, 44, a Garfield Middle School teacher, spent two weeks in July on the icebreaker vessel National Geographic Endurance exploring the rugged terrain of Norway's coastline and the Svalbard archipelago between Norway and the North Pole.

He studied glaciers and delved into coves and the long, narrow, deep bodies of water, known as fjords, which probe great distances into land masses. He saw polar bears, the big-beaked shorebirds known as puffins, reindeer, blue whales, killer whales and walruses.

"In polar bear country, you always send out scouts with rifles," Speck said as he recounted his adventures over coffee in a Northeast Heights restaurant. "I wanted to see polar bears, but once I saw these walruses ... man, that's my animal. You hear walruses before you see them. They make every kind of sound you can think of."

He said even the ferocious polar bear knows better than to mess with walruses.

"Walruses have four-inch thick skin on top of blubber," he said. "Polar bears can't penetrate that. And walruses have these tusks. Polar bears would rather hunt seals and call it a day."

He said the most stunning thing he saw was a glacier in Norway's Nordfjord region.

"Gorgeous, just gorgeous," he said. "You see this chunk of ice at the top and water is just cascading down. It's beautiful to look at. But then you realize that's the glacier dying."

Broadening horizons

Speck was one of 50 pre-K-12 educators from the United States and Canada selected for the Grosvenor Teacher Fellowship program, established by a partnership between Lindblad Expeditions and the National Geographic Society. Teacher fellows participate in all-expenses-paid excursions to various locations around the world. Teachers in this year's program have gone, are now visiting or will go to places such as Patagonia, Australia, Indonesia, Japan, Alaska, Iceland, the Arctic and Antarctica.

A competitive application process determined which teachers got the nod.

"They wanted to know what lessons you want to teach and how you will use your experience to work with your students," Speck said. ""I stressed the attitude of optimism, of making things better. There have been examples of going in and fixing (mistakes) when we have made them, examples of helping improve the wildlife situation."

Speck's Norway expedition was not the first time he has visited a far-off ecosystem in order to hone his knowledge and teaching skills. In 2018, after receiving a Golden Apple award for exceptional teaching, he used a month of professional development that comes with the Golden Apple recognition to do coral reef conservation at the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology on Coconut Island near Oahu.

"It's less of an explorer bug or a traveler's bug and more, 'I want to bring back these experiences to my students,'" he said. "I want to broaden my students' horizons and open their eyes to a world they might not have considered."

Speck lived his first years in South Sioux City, Nebraska, but moved with his mother and younger brother to Albuquerque in December 1993. He graduated from Albuquerque High and earned a bachelor's degree in elementary education from the University of New Mexico in 2002 and a master's in elementary education from UNM in 2003.

He is beginning his 22nd year as a teacher, all of them with the Albuquerque Public Schools. He taught elementary school for 10 years before moving to middle school and now teaches science and English language arts at Garfield, 3501 Sixth NW.

Speck said his interest in natural science was sparked when he saw algae blooms on a lake near South Sioux City.

"I always wondered what was happening," he said.

It's a fluke

Speck flew to Oslo, Norway's capital, on July 11, then flew from there to Svalbard on July 13, where he boarded the Endurance for a two-week voyage. He said the airport at Svalbard is the farthest north in the world.

"There's a Circle K there with the farthest north gas station," Speck said.

National Geographic photographers and naturalists were among the 100-plus people aboard the Endurance.

"The naturalists could tell us what kind of wildlife we could expect to see, or that this is this bird, or that bird or another bird," Speck said.

Including Speck, there were four Grosvenor Teacher Fellows on the ship. Speck's cabin mate was a pre-K to fifth-grade teacher from Houston, and there were two female high school teachers, one from Brooklyn and one from Indianapolis.

Speck and his companions experienced zero-degree temperatures and constantly moving pack ice that made excursions in inflatable boats an exercise in maneuvering. They did not see a sunrise for two-and-a-half weeks because it was around-the-clock sunlight during their time in those far-north waters.

"We had really good curtains in the (ship's) cabin, so I was able to get some sleep," he said. Unfortunately, he was sleeping during a polar bear sighting, but he did see the majestic and formidable beasts from a distance on another occasion. He had better luck with a blue whale.

"Only 20% of blue whales fluke (raise their tails out of the water when diving), but we saw one and it was fluking all the time," Speck said. "We were told that restoration efforts have helped the species rebound recently."

Speck also met the Sami, the Indigenous people who inhabit northern Norway, Sweden and Finland, and learned something of their history, which includes the kinds of restrictions forced on native people by governments around the world. He came to appreciate the fact that the Sami's interaction with the ecosystem they inhabit is based on traditional indigenous learning that predates scientific knowledge. He said he noticed the same thing among the Indigenous people of Hawaii.

One of the things he can't get out of his mind is the dwindling glacier in Nordfjord.

"The biggest impact on me was seeing the retreat of that glacier, all of the glaciers," he said. "It's a shock. You were actually able to see where the glaciers were 100 years ago, 50 years ago. It's not just anecdotal evidence but photographic evidence. This is what is happening.

"I saw the things I wanted to see and things I didn't expect to see. I absolutely got everything I wanted to get out of it, and now I am eager to share it with my students."

Just care

Speck has photos and videos of polar bears, walruses and icy, blue fjords. And he's got enough arctic stories to last him a long while.

However, he not only wants to bring the wider world back to his students, but also show them that our changing world affects their own neighborhoods as well coral reefs and glaciers. A hazardous waste site might be right around the corner. There are non-native trees sucking the water out of Albuquerque's bosque. The deadly fungal disease called white-nose syndrome has been detected in bats in New Mexico.

"I have to get them to focus on something concrete, to look in their own communities," he said. "What is in your neighborhood? How is it affecting us? There are stories to be told."

Speck intends to use both his science and English language arts classes to encourage students to make discoveries and write about them.

He said his goal is to make his students passionate about something, even if it is not science. He wants them to be able to see beyond the day after tomorrow and make things change for the better.

"I just want them to care, to not be apathetic about the world they live in."