Learning Center

Education:

Bachelor of Science in Biology - Seattle University

Teaching Certificate - University of Alaska Southeast

Master of Education, Mathematics Education - University of Alaska Southeast

Biography:

Laura Murph has been teaching and working in math/science related fields throughout her working career. After completing a Bachelor of Science in Biology, Laura worked ten years in fisheries for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, the US Forest Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service. After meeting and marrying a civil engineer/land surveyor, Laura began working as a civil engineering technician and land surveyor for a small engineering/land surveying company that she and her husband established in Petersburg, Alaska. Together they worked throughout Southeast Alaska for over 15 years. Laura has also worked as an electrical engineering technician for Ketchikan Public Utilities, an AutoCAD draftsman and an accountant.

Teaching has always interested Laura. After completing a teaching certification program at UAS, Laura began teaching middle school math and algebra as well as tutoring adult students in math for the UAS-Ketchikan Learning Center and for the Ketchikan Builder's Association Construction Academy. In addition, she has taught AutoCAD for UAS-Ketchikan as an adjunct faculty member.

Laura has lived in Southeast Alaska nearly all her life and has raised three boys. As a family, they enjoy hiking, boating and traveling. Together they spent a year exploring the United States and have visited every state in the union!

Education:

M.F.A., Northern Michigan University; B.A., University of Michigan. Teague Whalen specializes in creative writing, composition, communication, and literature.

Biography:

Raised by two passionate educators and two feisty younger sisters, Teague quickly learned that summers meant time to travel America's blue highways and to romp through small towns and national forests by bicycle, canoe, skis, and foot, followed by nights spent sleeping in a tent and usually with close friends in tow. Teague's college teaching ventures have transformed the classroom into kitchens, lakes, mountain tops, and tents when he was a Lecturer I for the University of Michigan's New England Literature Program for two spring terms in rural Maine. While a teaching fellow for Northern Michigan University, he pioneered an outdoor ecocomposition course in the wild Upper Peninsula (U.P.). When he could no longer "Say yeah to the U.P., eh?" he wondered how Alaska compared to the great-lake state. Used to two-tracks and lakes, pine-riddled hills, and weather that could change any minute, he found his mother was right (as a good mother tends to be) when she said that Alaska was like the U.P. on steroids. He has not been disappointed yet, and when he finds Ketchikan raining too much, he keeps his fingers busy composing lofty poems of a bluer heart or stories of longing for a drier hue. When that doesn't work, he takes up his axe planed out of Sitka spruce and gets down to picking away the steel strings in search of a cloudy love song.