Salted through this issue of Working Waterfront you’ll find stories about a variety of educational programs. It being September and time for schools to start up after the summer break, it seemed appropriate to look at a few examples of instruction – formal and informal, in classrooms or otherwise – that one finds along the Maine coast and in its island communities.
The most venerable of our educational examples is Audubon’s Hog Island camp, which has been offering natural-history learning opportunities to children and adults since 1936. The newest is LobsterTales.com, a website created by the Island Institute with the cooperation of a group of Vinalhaven fishermen. As you dig into your next hot red crustacean, look to see if it has the LobsterTales.com claw band; if it does, you can learn the answer to the question, “who caught me?”
In between the old and the new, there’s an array of educational offerings out there, from museums such as the one in Robert E. Peary’s house on Eagle Island (early Arctic exploration) or Maine Maritime in Bath (vintage lobstering plus E. B. White) to high-tech whale-watching and even a program of island-based riding lessons. Some educational efforts are just getting off the ground, such as the proposal on North Haven to build an energy-efficient school.
Whatever one’s interest, chances are there’s an educational program out there that fits it. It’s obvious, but we’ll say it anyway: this is a fascinating corner of the world.