When I read about the ways people who don’t teach fight over what schools should do, I am reminded how thankful I am to be able to teach my students as I do.

I want them to learn the delight of reading good books slowly and in conversation with others.

I want them to learn how to walk attentively across a fragile landscape and to see the small lives around them. And to stop and study that frog in a pool on the Katmai tundra, that orchid clinging to the side of a tree in Petén.

I want them to learn where their water and food come from, to work together to purify water as we hike, to consider how we have clean water at home, and how easily that could be lost.

I want them to wonder, as we walk together, who has no water purifiers, and what they drink when they and their children thirst.

I want them to marvel at the glaciers, and to see them here, now, as they are, slowly descending as the earth slowly (and sometimes suddenly) springs back up as the glaciers weigh less.

I want them to learn how to put up with one another and even to take joy in each other’s company as we walk through the talus, over the bogs, through the thickets of thorns, sweating under the weight of their backpacks, while cold rain drizzles on their heads. This is an important part of life.

And I want them to learn to love the things, the places, the people that are worth more than markets can ever measure.

If you ask me what I teach, I will tell you I teach people.

Six of my students walk across the tundra near Katmai, towards a small lake with snow-blanketed mountains in the distance.