She has launched some of the most important outdoors focused teaching programs currently on offer at Jasper Junior Senior High School. She has taught children in Jasper for more than 30 years about everything from avalanche safety to proper camping and hiking techniques. Now, she is getting recognition from the provincial government.

Sandy Cox of Jasper Jr./ Sr. High School is one of 136 semi-finalists in Alberta eligible for a 2010 Excellence in Teaching Award. The award is given to educators who do a “remarkable job of inspiring Kindergarten to Grade 12 students.”

“The Excellence in Teaching Awards program gives credit where credit is due,” said Dave Hancock, Minister of Education. “The dedicated work of Alberta teachers and principals helps motivate our youth to be successful in school and in life. Their work is vital to the development of students and our province.”

Cox is more humble about her work.

“I’ve always loved my job,” said Cox. She said that’s a pretty big reward.

Cox taught language arts in Jasper for more than 30 years, in a Grade 9 classroom for the bulk of her career. She left the Grade 9 classroom in 2008 and since then has been the assistant principal at the school, and is also serving as a mentor for other teachers. She said she spent a half day teaching in Ottawa when she was starting her career but knew that day that it wasn’t the location for her. Since then, she’s been in Jasper exclusively. It’s just the right kind of unique place for her, she said.
“I think teaching is incredibly important in our society,” said Cox, who believes that teachers can play a crucial role in helping children become fully-formed adults. “Living in a town like Jasper, children don’t often see a lot of the other professions that are out there in the world. I see my job as opening the door and letting them know about those opportunities.”

For one former student, the door led her right back to Cox’s classroom. Lesley Currie, a student of Cox’s class in 1997, has since taken over Cox’s old job, teaching Grade 8/9 language arts at Jasper Jr./Sr. High School.

“It’s totally intimidating. She has such a legacy. There’s some really big shoes to fill,” said Currie.

Currie said that she was inspired to get into teaching by Cox. She said her former teacher always looked like she was having a good time. She seemed like a person who was happy with herself and happy with her job.

Cox’s class was always a very engaged place to be, said Currie. There was always a lot of group discussion, where students were prodded into giving their own opinions about the topic at hand. Cox tried to find the best way of reaching students too, said Currie. That meant finding visual tools for some students, audio cues for others and more physical methods for others.

“She wanted to reach you, to find a way to help you understand,” said Currie.

Currie says she still has a poetry anthology and global issues magazine that her class produced. The magazines were too professional looking and meaningful to throw away.

“There was a real sense of ownership. We felt like we’d really made something great,” said Currie.

Currie also remembers the Grade 10 trip where around 25 students, all carrying their own food and gear, spent a work week in the wilds of Jasper National Park. Cox was always hanging back with the slower kids to make sure they weren’t left out. Currie remembers hours of hiking, but Cox never seemed to get tired.

She also remembers students who had never really gotten outside of Jasper into the forest with huge blisters on their feet. In a place like Jasper that is surrounded by outdoor activities, Currie said that there were still students in the class who had never been on a major camping trip and who knew little about the great outdoors.

Getting the children to learn about the land around them has always been a big part of Cox’s teaching said Nancy Graham, a teaching assistant in Cox’s classes for some of the time she taught.

Graham said Cox has taken her students up Marmot Basin to partake in avalanche safety programs. She has taught them about logging operations in the Athabasca River region. She spearheaded two environment stewardship programs at the Palisades Centre that got students into the back-country mountains of Jasper National Park.

“She wanted them to be outside, in the back-country. It was a way to make learning more tangible,” said Graham. “Not all parents are pushing their children to go camping [in Jasper National Park]. Some might want them to focus on volleyball.”

But beyond Jasper, Graham said Cox always wanted her students to feel like they were connected to a larger world. Jasper may be beautiful, but there is a whole world out there beyond the mountains.

In her Action Kids programs, which focus on current events and social justice issues, Graham said that Cox never pushed her students into a specific topic. Instead, she probed her students and tried to gauge what issues were important to them. If they wanted to look at drought and starvation in Kenya, or the AIDS plight in Africa, or energy security around the world, they could do any of those things.

“She always wanted to find something that would appeal to a student and then build on that,” said Graham. That made her job much more difficult.

Instead of just telling 25 kids what should interest them, she had to find out what makes every individual student tick.

That meant a lot more work for Cox, but Graham said that she rarely shied away from that.

“Working in such a close space with Sandy, I’ve really learned that she never stops. She’s always got something on the go,” said Graham. “She’s just an extraordinary teacher with a real passion for teaching.”