Hi, coming to you from the Minuteman trail, Paul Reviewer's horse tracks are still available, like we can still see them, right? Yeah. Yeah, it was, it was, it was her. No, I'm not even sure that he rode this way. No, part of it. It's hard to tell because I thought that like this, this was the actual, this bike path was built on the trail, but there was also a train and it was also 250 years ago, so. Yeah, I think they just call it the Minuteman bike trail because it goes,
you know, from Cambridge out to Lexington, Bedford. I don't know where it ends out there. So I want to talk about differences in high school experiences. You grew up here in Lexington. I grew up in Alaska. I think the first two things we have to establish. One is that the number one important thing or the top two important things is in our lives we had families who supported us. And you have families that get you into Ivy League schools.
Well, yeah, okay. So Duke's not an Ivy League school. No, I'm joking. So your family supported you. They cared about education. They valued education. They were there. They were present, supportive. Same thing with my parents. And that's a huge contributor to kids who are successful. And then the second thing, maybe even 1A or 1B, but there was a Harvard study. I don't know.
I don't have it here because we're walking. but this study showed that the number one indicator about whether or not someone was going to be successful or a kid was going to grow up to be successful was friends that they chose which makes a lot of sense so yeah you had friends that were going to college you have friends that were supportive you had friends that went to class they weren't perfect friends neither were mine but the two
biggest things that we had that impacted our lives are family and friends. Yeah. So now we'll get to the differences in the high schools and the high schools, I guess, pros and cons of your high school experience? Well, I guess maybe I'll just describe it a little bit first. So Lexington is a suburb of Boston and... You just walked by Henry. Did you notice that? I know, but I was like, are we going to say hi? Or like we're in the middle of a podcast? Yeah. He didn't say hi to us. No, yeah.
But so I guess I'll start out by kind of describing my high school experience. And so Lexington is a suburb of Boston, and you get a lot of people who live here that are like professors at Harvard that commute in and out, or it's a really wealthy town and people, everyone wants their kid to go to Ivy League school. And so the schools are really good, but there's also a lot of pressure to just perform for your parents, basically. And so I think that can turn out well or not.
And I think one thing that I really appreciated about my parents growing up here is that they.
You know they wanted me to work hard and and succeed and be successful but also they wanted me to like do that on my terms and to be happy with the choices I made so but I mean the the pros of growing up here are totally that I mean you get like I would almost say like a world-class experience with school like you know the bands are top-notch the debate team like has won national championships or regular public school yeah it sounds yeah
individual debaters i guess i should say the team can't win a national championship but you know they're just and and every year at least when i was in high school which was a while ago now so i i don't know what percent of my class went to like ivy league schools or sort of that tier mit stanford but i think there were like eight kids in my graduating class went to harvard so it's how much is your graduating class about 500 all right so high school like 2000 yeah okay and then
yeah the cons were just the um go to the offerings again you had uh we went by your school we saw that there was a world languages building so how many languages were offered yeah chinese italian spanish latin french german i think that's all sign language if you count that that counts as a second language. So I'll go pros of Kulawak High School, and then I'll kind of compare it to Ketchikan's, where I'm at now.
We had Spanish, but it was via satellite, so we didn't have an actual instructor who knew how to speak Spanish in class. We had to fax in our homework. It was a clunky and mess. Had typical offerings. I had one English teacher for all four years, one science teacher for all four years.
So it was just all the same people that I'd known they were friends my parents growing up so I think a pro of growing up there was I just saw my teachers not just as teachers but as people and they all had interesting lives they fished commercially or they fished charters during the summers or they hunted or they did super interesting things so I never had this idea that, Teachers appeared for school and then went home and, you know,
just did whatever teachers do at home that they don't have interests. They're not three-dimensional people. So growing up in a small community like that, there was about 750 people in the town, 65 or so in the high school, graduated with 14 others. Three of us went to college. One went to Dartmouth, one Portland state, and then I went to Arizona.
One went into the merchant marines one went to i think started a college thing in, canada but ended up being kind of a stay-at-home mom but a lot of trade type stuff and that was a benefit for a lot of the kids who like you had a viable option of staying at home and working in trades working in the fishing industry construction things like that so yeah and i think i mean growing up here you don't everybody i mean some people were wealthy so They had safe home moms,
but everybody worked like white collar jobs. Like there was no... You like, the only reason you'd ever know somebody who was an electrician or a plumber was if you need to work on your house. Cause they probably don't even live, they probably don't even live in Lexington. They call them other towns. Like none of my teachers really lived in Lexington because they couldn't afford to. Yeah. Did I share that article?
The teachers in Aspen, because the teachers get paid pretty high, but it's still not even close to being able to afford anything in Aspen. So students in like the shop class built tiny homes for the teachers so they're in these.
Tiny homes it was like part of a shop class but it was also so that you could have teachers that were in Aspen and it was super bizarre it was a nice thing but seemed yeah I can't imagine the entitlement that some of these kids might have over their teachers like are you going to give me a, a B plus I built your house. Like what kind of weird dynamic would, would that have?
But so I think another thing that was cool about growing up there and is a, the strong thing about living in Ketchikan is the, the distance from work to wealth is very small, narrow, like the kids whose parents own lodges, the kids work at the lodges. So they spend summers cutting fish from 1 p.m. Till midnight. They have to wake up at three because you have to have the fish frozen first before you can box it to send it out on the morning flight.
So just a horrible, miserable, but really hardworking environment. And so the kids see exactly what it takes to become successful. Some of the kids who are pretty wealthy, their parents or their grandparents started off as pioneers in the aviation industry or lodge industry or whatnot. So they see firsthand what it takes to acquire the wealth that their parents do. That's not to say that every wealthy kid is this really hard-working exceptional student.
But i think it makes a big difference when you can you see what it takes it's not some thing that you're just benefiting from that's generations right and i do think that a lot of kids that grow up in lexington i mean their parents try to instill hard work in them but it's really academic focused and I think a lot of them just feel pressure to like okay like I'm just gonna become a doctor because that's like a path that I can I know all the steps to
get there and if I can just do all enough in school I can get there there's no like there's almost no risk, which sounds kind of crazy but those sort of career paths just seem like you know I mean there's hard work there for sure but it's just a different sort of like I don't know there's not a lot of creativity, I think.
Yeah, I think there's definitely something to be said for if your summer job or if your job is to get a 4.0 and get into those schools, because like you said, you get on that track, it takes a lot of work. So for a kid to have a job flipping burgers just to be able to say they flip burgers, I guess that's not the, I guess being a barista would be the serving coffee or waiting tables or something like that would be the new equivalent.
But yeah, so it's not to disparage people whose job it is growing up to get that 4.0 or that weighted 4.5 and get into the big colleges and have the summer volunteering or starting a non-profit or whatever. Yeah, I think the kind of the con that you're talking about to growing up here is that like you don't necessarily get to explore your options and you don't you don't really know like. Hey, I could not go to college and I could start a business in anything really.
If you're that smart, that's kind of like the catch-22 is people are like, oh, I don't need to go to college. Lots of people who are successful don't go to college. And it's like, yeah, but those people could have gone to college because they were smart and hardworking, but they just had different opportunities versus you kind of being like, well, I don't need to do that work because I don't need to go to college and I don't need to get A's.
Yeah having a work ethic is huge it has to go into something so if you don't go to college but you have the work ethic to make something or you're curious about something you still understand and appreciate there has to be some level of education whether if you're gonna even be a mechanic like you have to learn how to be a mechanic you have to learn those trades if you want to go into the trades it's not a matter of i'm just going to go into the trades and all of a sudden you're going
to have a nice career you have to have the work ethic to show up to learn new things the more certifications you have the more things you can work on whether it be, diesel engines or yeah like if you got your if you were a technician for high-end electric automobiles like that's going to be a an industry that's going to be growing if you're not certified to work on electric vehicles and even though Ketchikan doesn't have many if you wanted to leave if you wanted to move to
Arizona or Colorado or somewhere in the lower 48 and you limited. Yourself to just one certification or just one sort of entry-level position and you had a entry-level work ethic like it's just not going to work yeah well and i think too i mean if you just want to kind of turn wrenches and you can be a mechanic and you can have a a nice standard of living doing that that's fine but also like if you want to you know work your way up and someday like own a business like that exactly then i mean
you have to be literate you have to be able to like account like do accounting and you know there's quite a bit of you know sort of, not intellectual but you know there's those are things you learn in school that you you're like i don't need this but well some kids anyways yeah it's like.
Catch a can has the tourism industry and so you think you're just going to run charters which you absolutely can but you still have to have the math business and marketing sense to be able to make it work so if you do get a two-year aa or take a couple business courses so that you know what you're doing you might know how to fish that's great but it's easy to overextend yeah 20 years from now when the fishing isn't so great and maybe you have to kind of pivot into more,
you know like eco-tourism sightseeing type stuff and then you know you have to be able to learn those things to you know share with your clients right about like the nature and the history I agree.
Just time to to that's the thing that kind of concerns me with i guess kids in general the only thing i know of obviously is teaching in ketchikan there's a lot of really exceptional students i think will be fine and have great successful happy careers has in the trades, no college and some also go to college and be great but the amount of kids who just aren't they don't spend time with themselves just thinking just being curious being bored yeah that's when your brain just kind of.
Goes i know the amount of things that i would think of like at night before trying to go to sleep because the brain is still working like article ideas things angles how does this work how does that work the kids that just watch video games or watch youtube until they fall asleep those can be some prime hours of both hours but minutes of just thinking and just pondering and being creative and in the time now of just being pacified by the.
Phones we lose that ability to be creative and i think that's that affects people in alaska just as much as people probably in lexington yeah and i was i was gonna say i think that's true too of you know even a lot of people that i went to high school or college with who are you know you might look at them be like oh they're really successful like they're a doctor or whatever but like it's like i don't know if they just expend all their mental energy like being a doctor
but like when you try to talk to them about something outside of that they're just like not very smart about it like they haven't like thought through ideas outside of that or they just maybe outside of work they just want to shut the brain off so they're just watching tv and you know scrolling instagram or whatever and not really thinking about anything yeah that's the that can happen anywhere the people when you're who you are is a combination of what you
do at work or for work and then also who you are outside of it the life that you have outside of it like that's what makes up the entire person if you just all work then it doesn't matter if you're yeah in alaska or here or anywhere well and i think kind of tough you know if you are all work and you're you know like i don't know you're obsessed with cancer research or something and you're at work 16 hours a day and that is your whole life like that's cool
that's awesome we need people like that yeah but if you're at work eight hours a day and then you're at home eight hours a day doing nothing and your brain is kind of empty like.
Not like going out and having really any experiences or yeah you know that's kind of I mean and if that makes you happy like it's power to you a lot of people on the trails less people, out fishing whatever but I think we talked about this a little bit it if that's what you feel like you want to do but it comes at the expense of family yeah it's about that in the outdoor realm the amount of people who are it's pretty obvious the people who are really supported by their spouses because there's
just a different feeling to it versus the ones who and who want to involve their families yeah and the ones who oh i'll just make sure that i make a mention about how supportive my wife is in the show but really it just seems like an unquenchable thirst on the part of your ego. Yeah. I wonder about some of those guys where I'm like, if you were going off all the time without me and spending thousands of dollars on those hunts, like I would be pissed. Thank you for supporting me and me all in.
Well, is she really? Or are you going to be in trouble when you get home? Like if you draw a cool tag or something and you want to go do it and our baby's too young to go, like, yeah, absolutely. You should go do that. But as soon as she's old enough to walk, she's coming. Yeah. I told you about that student I had who the dad bragged about how many animals she's killed and this and that, but the kid definitely felt that she wasn't prioritized, let's.
So that's great you know you're a great hunter and you have all these heads on the wall but if your kid doesn't respect you like your kid wants a dad your kid doesn't want a youtube star or a or a sponsored hunter your kid wants a dad yeah what are we gonna do if hayley hates the outdoors i don't know i don't i think that's we have to have success early on and i think we have to measure it too benjamin had a lot of fun up on the camping trip as a flat it was totally different
totally almost overwhelming but the weather was good there was a lot of hiking but he was definitely in shape enough to to where he had fun so I think he'd definitely do it again and it wasn't all focused on the deer which I think was great yeah so I think having early success if it's really miserable yeah and there's no success then I think it'll be in trouble but I don't know I think kids like to as long as it's not too stressful they can like to do what they're I think as long as
you don't make it miserable for them, like make them hike way too far or. In a lot of rain, which will be tough. Like, I think it's hard to not like the outdoors. Balancing that. I remember we were in Denali National Park and we were hiking around with brother and his kids. Yeah. And it was all about the food. It was that get to lunch point and it was like, okay, snack time is up here.
And then went a little bit further and then we stopped for snacks and then made it back down, like right as things were starting to deteriorate. But it was And that was some pretty, it was pretty steep. There was definitely a trail. And then we got in that shale. But yeah, the kids did great. It was a fun adventure. Yeah, like nothing they'd ever done before. Yeah. That was pretty cool. And then seeing other people into it too. And yeah, I think there's potentially a time when.
You kind of lose interest in and i think back to fishing out in our fishing boat we the engine always died it just yeah it seems it was horrible but my brother still liked to fish in the ocean i was young enough to just be bored by it and then frustrated by it so i didn't really want to go fish out in the ocean by the time we were in high school high school sports kind of took over so yeah we didn't really have outdoor stuff and mom and dad didn't really hunt but i didn't feel like
My dad and mom wanted to do stuff outside that we didn't and that's why they stopped it was just The investment in the boat ended up being yeah, and I mean you guys spend a lot of the summer down in Colorado, right? Yeah, yeah, we had fun down there different things that sightseeing and I'm glad that we went down there just So I get an idea of what the real world was like and that's another I guess a pro and a con.
I see a lot of catch can students who do really well in college because they're already adjusted to it they've spent a lot of time in their summer jobs dealing with adults and having responsibility and they spend a lot of time traveling too yeah i mean even if it's just in alaska it's they're on their own they're managing their money from i mean probably even middle school they go on trips right so that's a great opportunity for growth for them but also the world can seem just
some kids don't really know how to, like, how do you go to college? What do you need to do? How do you need to, what do you need to fill out? What's the FAFSA? What do these things do? What's the common app? All those sort of things are, there are counselors who only have two counselors and it's, they're dealing with counselor stuff, not just career or college counseling. So it's, and if you don't get in there and kind of advocate for yourself, it can be.
Or if you don't have, like, I would say down here, a lot of parents are doing all that stuff. If you don't have the family support, it can be tough. Or at least pointing you in the right direction. So you get kids that don't know and you're stuck. But I know it's certainly there's no place that's perfect. And it goes back to those first two things of what type of support system you have as far as at home and then with friends. Yeah. These friends will help you get somewhere. Just that creative.
They don't have to be just like you. And it's kind of nice if they're not.
I was in college. I was friends or roommates with a computer science major and an engineering math and applied math major totally different and had a friend who's in business another one marketing one in education so just a variety of different people but the basic thing was the value of education the willingness to have fun but also work and wanted to be successful and yeah so I think that was that was huge and you get that anywhere I think spent a lot of time comparing this school
is better than this school or this college is better than this college or this state's better than this state but i will say that some of the most unique opportunities in ketchikan aren't really there anymore i think the sweet spot was like right when i arrived usually had that robust maritime class.
Yeah like what school district in the country has its own 46-foot boat where the kids could go out and learn how to commercial fish and tie up yeah and do three-day nav trips like that's that's such catch a can thing it makes so much sense uh the welding was uh huge so then you run into two problems the first is when funding is cut then it consolidates the core classes.
Yeah and then it makes it tough to keep the cte or the vocational ed classes and electives they'll You guys don't have any languages left, right? Like maybe just Tlingit? So then, yeah, and we have Italian, Tlingit, and then Spanish too is online only. But that would probably go when it was to graduate, right? Yeah.
So if you don't, and part of the problem too is it's the A, the funding for maintenance of those things, but also if a teacher happens to leave or retire, it doesn't always get filled. So it's not that they're, it's not that the school district is choosing to cut those courses. is it's if this person leaves or retires, if they can't find anybody to fill the spot. Now I was saying about Rick, he was able to teach maritime, but also biology and PE.
Yeah, which is- And do those well, but they tried to fill maritime with just one period of maritime, which- It's tough. So losing those unique to Alaska sort of things just makes it tough for a lot of the kids that want other options. Yeah. But kids grew up loving to fish. They love being on the water. There's jobs in maritime. I think we had at least a dozen kids since COVID have gone to either Cal Maritime or Massachusetts Maritime.
Yeah, so that's cool. They still have. so they grew up on boats they love that but you know not having that high school class to kind of help prepare them and help well for some kids maybe yeah find that passion so yeah which i mean probably most kids that go to those schools don't have anything like that because yeah but yeah that is you can get that you have this idea in your head if you've never tried it out it can be difficult to say, okay, this is what I want to do.
Cause it's just, it's a concept. It's not anything that you've ever tried. So if you love being on the water and maritime opens your eyes to careers, then you think, oh yeah, I want to go to a maritime academy because I'm, I've sampled this and this is the route I want to go. This is a path I want to follow rather than make a decision based on you. Cause you thought it looked cool or, or something.
And now you're maybe changing your mind so i don't know pros and cons of both similar with anywhere else just yeah i mean there's trade-offs with everything right yeah you can go in yeah all right i'm gonna go to a bakery get some dessert yeah it is one pro of lexington one pro of lexington wash, walking on this bike path and then going to a cafe to get some treats all right talk to you next time.