Home
News
ENLARGE
Each week the Free Press profiles a Grand Valley resident for its “Meet Your Neighbors” series. Look for a new “Neighbor” each Monday in the Free Press.
During his latest excursion abroad, Alan Barbee swam in the buoyant Dead Sea — at 1,369 feet below sea level, the lowest place on earth.
On that same trip Barbee, 40, explored a World War II-era British shipwreck where the gulf of Suez empties into the Red Sea. An Egyptian dive master led the scuba dive in and around the ship.
“It's like swimming through a World War II museum,” Barbee said.
Barbee, a social studies teacher at School Without Walls, an alternative Mesa County Valley School District 51 program at R-5 High School, was one of a dozen people attending Mesa State College's Outdoor Program trip to Egypt last summer.
In Jordan they visited the stomping grounds of Lawrence of Arabia; wandered around a city carved out of sandstone; slept outside in the desert on cots underneath the stars and visited the ancient city of Damascus.
The group met fellow European travelers and together rented a boat, motored along the coast of Turkey for four days and three nights, and visited historic sites along the way.
Barbee and a couple of the others from the group visited the “fairy caves” in Central Turkey where people's homes and churches are built in and around caves.
Always a traveler
Barbee was born in Hawaii where his father was stationed in the military. A couple of years later his family moved to Roswell, N.M., where Barbee was raised. He remembered his grandfather telling exciting stories of his travels around the world as a Merchant Mariner.
Barbee's first job after graduating from New Mexico State University with a degree in business administration was in a pawn shop where he could take time off whenever he wanted.
“I wanted to travel,” Barbee said.
He worked at the pawn shop a year, taking a month off here and there to travel around the United States.
Later he toured Portugal, Morocco and Spain for three-and-a-half months with a woman he met and married while in graduate school where he earned a master's degree in economics.
Ten years ago he and his then-wife moved from New Mexico to Grand Junction where he worked as a financial planner, and at St. Mary's Hospital in the risk management department.
In 2001, he divorced.
Barbee began pouring himself into the things he had always liked doing — hiking mountains, backcountry skiing, exploring slot canyons, river rafting. He volunteered with the Powderhorn National Ski Patrol from 1999 to 2003.
In 2003, “I decided to retool. I needed to do something else,” Barbee said.
He went back to school earning a Bachelor of Arts degree in history with an endorsement in secondary education from Mesa State College in 2006.
Mesa State College Outdoor Program
Barbee met Chad Thatcher, director of the college's Outdoor Program, who convinced him to go on the seven-week OP trip to East Africa the summer after graduation.
An hour before leaving, Barbee learned he'd been hired to teach at Plateau Valley High School in Collbran.
“It set my mind at ease knowing I had a job to come back to,” Barbee said.
In East Africa the group rafted class-five rapids on the White Nile river, spent a week in Kampala, Uganda, visited an orphanage, and painted a school as a service learning project.
They spent four days on safari in Serengeti National Park where they saw elephants, rhinoceros, giraffes and lions.
At one point the group split up — six people climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, while the other six went to the beach.
Outdoor Program trips are not your typical guided tours.
Thatcher educates the travelers beforehand so people can be knowledgeable, independent travelers. For an hour or two for eight weeks, Thatcher covers subjects such as passports, immunizations, credit cards, and what to do if you get sick.
“He trains you how to be an independent traveler. We talk about and then fly and go do it,” Barbee said.
Oftentimes after the first three or four weeks of a trip, the group chooses to split up to do different things. They keep in touch and reunite via e-mail from Internet cafes.
Besides the plane fare, individual spending money (projected at $40 a day) there's an approximate $300 fee that supports the Outdoor Program.
Barbee has also attended OP trips to China and Nepal, and Jamaica.
His girlfriend, Donna Lowery, meets up with him before or after the OP trips and the two cover additional ground in other parts of the world during her two or three weeks of vacation.
Teaching career
For two years Barbee commuted to Collbran where he taught state, national and world history, U.S. government, and geography at Plateau Valley High School.
He transferred to School Without Walls in August 2008 when a position opened. Barbee shares teaching duties at SWW with Mary McGuire and John Hurley.
Teaching in an alternative setting is a better fit and mix for him, Barbee said.
“There's a greater flexibility the way you can work with students,” he said. “It's easier to tailor to meet their needs and wants.
“We're a school of choice so kids who don't want to be here are asked to go somewhere else. Kids come here because they want to be here,” Barbee said.
Relationships among students and teachers are strengthened through monthly potlucks and school outings like hiking, bowling and ice skating.
Last year the class went on a white water rafting trip through West Water Canyon. Cross-country skiing and snowshoe trips are in the works for this year, Barbee said.
During his free time Barbee has ice-climbed, and hiked and skied with students who seek it out.
“If it gets them out, and gets them going and gets them hooked, I'm all for that,” Barbee said. “There's a tremendous amount of learning involved.”
To support his own outdoor activity Barbee takes courses in safety. In 2000, he spent a month learning wilderness EMT at the Wilderness Medicine Institute near Gunnison.
He's attended avalanche courses, and mountain travel and rescue training.
“I pick up a course here and there and keep on cruising,” Barbee said.
Grateful students
From the in-flight catalog SkyMall, Barbee bought an 8-1/2 by 13-foot wall map of the world which hangs in the SWW classroom. Tacked to various spots on the map are printed photos from various trips he's taken with the Outdoor Program.
“My goal bringing it into the classroom is to help them develop a world view, and if they already have it, broaden it,” Barbee said.
“Nobody lives like us (in the U.S.). We are the exemption,” as far as material wealth, big houses and possessions go, he said
“I come back here and have reverse culture shock,” Barbee said.
His girlfriend keeps a scrapbook of his teaching experience. It's full of thank you cards and letters from former students and their parents from his first two years at Plateau Valley.
One is from a mother who said her daughter sang the “highest praise” for Barbee, saying he reminded her of her father.
“She tells me you make time for every kid in the classroom but remain loose enough to be funny,” wrote the mother.
Another letter from a student thanked Barbee for the “best history class I ever had.”
Lowery read from another card from a girl who wrote, “Dear Mr. Barbee, I know I was never head of the class, and was often a pain in the a—, but there's one thing you don't know about me. There were many days I sat in your class gratefully. Thanks for being a great teacher.”
Reach Sharon Sullivan at ssullivan@gjfreepress.com.
During his latest excursion abroad, Alan Barbee swam in the buoyant Dead Sea — at 1,369 feet below sea level, the lowest place on earth.
On that same trip Barbee, 40, explored a World War II-era British shipwreck where the gulf of Suez empties into the Red Sea. An Egyptian dive master led the scuba dive in and around the ship.
“It's like swimming through a World War II museum,” Barbee said.
Barbee, a social studies teacher at School Without Walls, an alternative Mesa County Valley School District 51 program at R-5 High School, was one of a dozen people attending Mesa State College's Outdoor Program trip to Egypt last summer.
In Jordan they visited the stomping grounds of Lawrence of Arabia; wandered around a city carved out of sandstone; slept outside in the desert on cots underneath the stars and visited the ancient city of Damascus.
The group met fellow European travelers and together rented a boat, motored along the coast of Turkey for four days and three nights, and visited historic sites along the way.
Barbee and a couple of the others from the group visited the “fairy caves” in Central Turkey where people's homes and churches are built in and around caves.
Always a traveler
Barbee was born in Hawaii where his father was stationed in the military. A couple of years later his family moved to Roswell, N.M., where Barbee was raised. He remembered his grandfather telling exciting stories of his travels around the world as a Merchant Mariner.
Barbee's first job after graduating from New Mexico State University with a degree in business administration was in a pawn shop where he could take time off whenever he wanted.
“I wanted to travel,” Barbee said.
He worked at the pawn shop a year, taking a month off here and there to travel around the United States.
Later he toured Portugal, Morocco and Spain for three-and-a-half months with a woman he met and married while in graduate school where he earned a master's degree in economics.
Ten years ago he and his then-wife moved from New Mexico to Grand Junction where he worked as a financial planner, and at St. Mary's Hospital in the risk management department.
In 2001, he divorced.
Barbee began pouring himself into the things he had always liked doing — hiking mountains, backcountry skiing, exploring slot canyons, river rafting. He volunteered with the Powderhorn National Ski Patrol from 1999 to 2003.
In 2003, “I decided to retool. I needed to do something else,” Barbee said.
He went back to school earning a Bachelor of Arts degree in history with an endorsement in secondary education from Mesa State College in 2006.
Mesa State College Outdoor Program
Barbee met Chad Thatcher, director of the college's Outdoor Program, who convinced him to go on the seven-week OP trip to East Africa the summer after graduation.
An hour before leaving, Barbee learned he'd been hired to teach at Plateau Valley High School in Collbran.
“It set my mind at ease knowing I had a job to come back to,” Barbee said.
In East Africa the group rafted class-five rapids on the White Nile river, spent a week in Kampala, Uganda, visited an orphanage, and painted a school as a service learning project.
They spent four days on safari in Serengeti National Park where they saw elephants, rhinoceros, giraffes and lions.
At one point the group split up — six people climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, while the other six went to the beach.
Outdoor Program trips are not your typical guided tours.
Thatcher educates the travelers beforehand so people can be knowledgeable, independent travelers. For an hour or two for eight weeks, Thatcher covers subjects such as passports, immunizations, credit cards, and what to do if you get sick.
“He trains you how to be an independent traveler. We talk about and then fly and go do it,” Barbee said.
Oftentimes after the first three or four weeks of a trip, the group chooses to split up to do different things. They keep in touch and reunite via e-mail from Internet cafes.
Besides the plane fare, individual spending money (projected at $40 a day) there's an approximate $300 fee that supports the Outdoor Program.
Barbee has also attended OP trips to China and Nepal, and Jamaica.
His girlfriend, Donna Lowery, meets up with him before or after the OP trips and the two cover additional ground in other parts of the world during her two or three weeks of vacation.
Teaching career
For two years Barbee commuted to Collbran where he taught state, national and world history, U.S. government, and geography at Plateau Valley High School.
He transferred to School Without Walls in August 2008 when a position opened. Barbee shares teaching duties at SWW with Mary McGuire and John Hurley.
Teaching in an alternative setting is a better fit and mix for him, Barbee said.
“There's a greater flexibility the way you can work with students,” he said. “It's easier to tailor to meet their needs and wants.
“We're a school of choice so kids who don't want to be here are asked to go somewhere else. Kids come here because they want to be here,” Barbee said.
Relationships among students and teachers are strengthened through monthly potlucks and school outings like hiking, bowling and ice skating.
Last year the class went on a white water rafting trip through West Water Canyon. Cross-country skiing and snowshoe trips are in the works for this year, Barbee said.
During his free time Barbee has ice-climbed, and hiked and skied with students who seek it out.
“If it gets them out, and gets them going and gets them hooked, I'm all for that,” Barbee said. “There's a tremendous amount of learning involved.”
To support his own outdoor activity Barbee takes courses in safety. In 2000, he spent a month learning wilderness EMT at the Wilderness Medicine Institute near Gunnison.
He's attended avalanche courses, and mountain travel and rescue training.
“I pick up a course here and there and keep on cruising,” Barbee said.
Grateful students
From the in-flight catalog SkyMall, Barbee bought an 8-1/2 by 13-foot wall map of the world which hangs in the SWW classroom. Tacked to various spots on the map are printed photos from various trips he's taken with the Outdoor Program.
“My goal bringing it into the classroom is to help them develop a world view, and if they already have it, broaden it,” Barbee said.
“Nobody lives like us (in the U.S.). We are the exemption,” as far as material wealth, big houses and possessions go, he said
“I come back here and have reverse culture shock,” Barbee said.
His girlfriend keeps a scrapbook of his teaching experience. It's full of thank you cards and letters from former students and their parents from his first two years at Plateau Valley.
One is from a mother who said her daughter sang the “highest praise” for Barbee, saying he reminded her of her father.
“She tells me you make time for every kid in the classroom but remain loose enough to be funny,” wrote the mother.
Another letter from a student thanked Barbee for the “best history class I ever had.”
Lowery read from another card from a girl who wrote, “Dear Mr. Barbee, I know I was never head of the class, and was often a pain in the a—, but there's one thing you don't know about me. There were many days I sat in your class gratefully. Thanks for being a great teacher.”
Reach Sharon Sullivan at ssullivan@gjfreepress.com.
