It would be safe to say that Tristan Jackson, 26, developed an early understanding of self-sufficiency.
At age seven, he was living with his family year-round on Green’s Island, a 400-acre island off Vinalhaven, in a building originally designed as an unheated boathouse with no running water or electricity.
Living in a place like Green’s Island in which he could not easily take common amenities for granted “had a very profound effect on my appreciation of the energy of all types that it takes to do the things that most people do without thinking,” Jackson said.
“You actually feel the limitations of the geography and if it’s not on the island, you’re not going to get it, at least not without the expenditure of extra effort… It makes you think more about resources and things like pollution. It’s hard to externalize some of the costs of where you live.”
With this appreciation of self-reliance and environmental consciousness, Jackson has had a big impact on Vinalhaven.
Jackson’s parents, Mark and Karen, came to Green’s Island after buying a 7.5-acre plot of land there in 1989. Along with his older brother and younger sister, Jackson began commuting daily in the fall of that year in his parents’ small, open skiff across the quarter-mile thoroughfare to the Vinalhaven School.
However, after staying in the island public school system for three years, Jackson made up his mind to pursue his own educational path.
He explained that did so partly out of a desire to learn from his immediate surroundings.
“I took our [family’s] boat to Vinalhaven for the third, forth, and fifth grades, but I actually never much liked it,” he said. “I was a good student and all that, but I didn’t really click with the scene-didn’t like sitting behind a desk…I didn’t want to be told what I had to learn…I wanted to see what was the connection to the real world.”
“Eventually,” Jackson said, “I just sat down with my parents and said, ‘Seriously, there’s got to be a different way than going to that school every day.'”
Homeschooling became the solution to Jackson’s clash with traditional teaching. Uninterested in the kinds of conventional instruction that did not seem relevant to living on Green’s Island, Jackson and his parents designed curricula around the demands of island life.
“One of the math projects we had in the first year that I was homeschooled was to use trigonometry to figure out the length of cables needed to support a stone-lifting [device] that we picked up several-thousand-pound rocks with to assemble our house,” Jackson said. “Getting the length of cables to the inch so that we could stand up a boom and have it work-that was cool to me. I wanted to study the kinds of things I could do something with.”
Jackson excelled in his studies and, after seven years of homeschooling, entered Cornell University in 2000-his only school choice-on a three-quarters scholarship.
Jackson continued his practical approach to learning at Cornell. On a campus of 20,00 students, Jackson turned to the social sciences to better understand how to best navigate the collegiate territory.
“I had never really engaged with a whole lot of people before,” he said. “I studied sociology and psychology [to learn] how to communicate with people, to learn from them the things I wanted…It was about what’s practical, what’s useful.”
Jackson also gained from Cornell an understanding of what his education on Green’s Island had not emphasized: rigorous academic structure and frequent assessment.
So, when Jackson returned to Vinalhaven in 2005, he was not only interested to rejoin the community in which he started his education, but also to combine the educational philosophies of both his homeschooling and classical schooling careers.
“I wanted to bridge the gap [between the two teaching philosophies] in a way, or meld the two: a hands-on, self-directed, curiosity-driven education, and a structured, teacher-to-student work within a system,” Jackson said. “I decided I would like to a) work in education, and b) conceive of a new program that didn’t currently exist on Vinalhaven…to meet the unmet educational needs of the day.”
Recalling the practical work and place-based projects that had interested him as a learner, Jackson joined the Vinalhaven School in 2006 as a Vocational-Technology instructor and the alternative education coordinator for the town’s new CO-SEED (Antioch University New England’s Community-based School Environmental Education) program.
Jackson’s early discomfort in the traditional classroom sensitized him to the segment of Vinalhaven’s young people whom standardized education does not serve well. “Most of the people who find their way into a vocational program make up a group to which I once belonged: the disengaged students,” he wrote in an essay for the Working Waterfront in 2007.
As his acquaintance and sense of community with Vinalhaven’s student body and school leadership grew, Jackson spearheaded a collective project designed to give young people the resources and opportunities he valued as an adolescent.
Jackson explained that he wanted to use Vinalhaven’s “local resources, the local economy, natural environment, the social environment to teach people about applicable, usable life skills. And, not just to teach them, but to train them in the use of important life skills.”
From this desire-along with countless hours of organizing, soliciting for donations, and physical work-sprang the ARC, Vinalhaven’s Arts and Recreation Center, a non-profit organization offering an open space for community events, a recreation space, and an Internet café. The ARC opened last year and employs two staff members and 10 middle- and high-school students.
“It’s one piece of what I was hoping to do all along,” Jackson said of the ARC. “We’re training workers who otherwise might not have easy access to a job…And were not just training them how to sweep and serve coffee…we’re teaching them what it’s like to run a small business.”
Jackson plans to expand the ARC to include an outdoor public recreation area in several years time. Meanwhile, he continues to live on Green’s Island and teach his students and employees the value of self-sufficiency. Against the pressures of increasingly expensive fuels and costs of island living, Jackson wants to work to preserve Vinalhaven as a vital community.
“I do hope to build a sustainable future for myself within this community which automatically means a sustainable future for this community,” Jackson said.
Micah is participating in the Working Waterfront’s summer student reporting program and is the son of Island Institute president, Philip Conkling.