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The election of the representatives of the California Teachers' Association, Southern Council, took place January 12, 1924.

Cornelius B. Collins of Calexico and Albert F. Vandergriff of Los Angeles Polytechnic high school were elected as representatives of the executive committee of the Southern Council.

Eight councilmen to represent the southern district on the state council of the California Teachers' Association were elected as follows: C. E. Aken, Riverside: W. L. Stuckey, Huntington Park; F. E. Howard, Inyo county; A. S. Pope, Santa Barbara; George N. Moyse, Glendale; Martin Newby, Pasadena, and Jeanette C. Jacobson and Ida C. Iverson of Los Angeles.

W. L. Stephens, Long Beach; George E. Bettinger, Alhambra; R. P. Mitchell, Orange county; Merton E. Hill, Ontario, and C. Sandifer, W. B. Crane and Dorothy Wheeler of Los Angeles, were elected as representatives of the Southern Section outside the southern council.

F. W. Thurston, who was re-elected executive secretary of the association, announced at the meeting that nearly completed results of the organization's recent membership campaign showed a total of approximately 11,000 members of the Southern Section at the present time.

THE CONFERENCE AT SOUTH SAN

FRANCISCO

There was a conferenec of principals of elementary schools and high schools under the leadership of A. C. Olney and Grace Chandler Stanley at South San Francisco on Thursday and Friday, January 17 and 18. There were about 100 representatives present. There were several interesting discussions and some repartee. Mrs. Stanley in her address stressed the advantage of university and summer school credits, and deplored the fact that many teachers who hold life diplomas were called into service during the scarcity of teachers and continue to teach to the detriment of the children. Superintendent A. E. Monteith of Redwood in reply gave a number of illustrations of men in the professions of law and medicine who had made great success and who were of distinct service in the community in which they live, but who had not taken special courses since graduation, and emphasized the fact that teaching to be a profession must have special emphasis placed on successful experience. There is danger to the profession if we go too far in our technical requirements of units to solve the value of a teach

er's work. Superintendent Gwinn also spoke, touching on the value of professional training, of life diplomas, tenure, and stating that standards were in a state of transition. He emphasized the value of professional training during the period of a teacher's activity. Superintendent Hall of San Mateo asked Superintendent Gwinn is professional training would absolutely make teachers more efficient, and Mr. Gwinn answered: "It would not make them less efficient." Then Superintendent Hall asked: "Is it not possible that a teacher be made less efficient by too much training?" And Gwinn answered that, "In some cases it might be possible." Thadeus Rhodes of the Danicl Webster school, San Francisco, also contributed to the discussion. The conference was a distinct success,

Professional placement for Progressive Teachers

Chicago, Illinois

and Commissioner Olney and Commissioner Stanley will undoubtedly accomplish much that is worth while in continuing these informal conferences in the various districts of the state.

Chas. II. Camper, superintendent of Chico, deserves the appreciation of substitute teachers. He recommended to the Board of Education that it was not a square deal to take $6.00 of a teacher's salary for the retirement fund, provided she had only taught a few days and was not a regular teacher, getting credit towards retirement for her teaching. The Board of Education appropriated funds to take care of payment required for the retirement. fund for all the substitute teachers.

Discriminating Service to School Officials

THE J. M. HAHN TEACHERS AGENCY Rests on a record of ten years of successful teacher--placement in California. Serves all Educational Institutions-Kindergartens, Elementary and Secondary Schools, Normal Schools, Colleges, and Universities.

No registration fee. Correspondence invited.

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(Editor's Note. This travelogue, written by a San Fran cisco newspaper woman who took the Alaskan trip this summer with a friend, will give teachers the information they wish to have regarding a vacation trip in the Far North. Teachers who are considering such a trip will read of the delights in store for them. Those who wish to escape the routine duties of life will find they have discovered exactly the trip to take, according to this account, which will run for several months in the Western Journal of Education.)

A picturesque little town is Ketchikan, Alaska.

Built at the foot of a fir-clad mountain with its houses perched on jutting rocks and slopes, its streets wander crookedly up hill and down.

The city of greatest commercial importance in all the territory it is a town of 2,000, a center for fishing, a port for the shipment of furs, gold, lumber, fish, grain and all the products of Alaska.

We climbed miles up and down its rough board streets, looking into its curio shop windows, closely chaperoned, by the town dogs that come to meet all boats in Alaska and accompany the tourists about the town and back to the very gangplank.

After our life in a big city, the two most noticeable things to us in all the Northland, aside from the magnificent scenery, were these droves of dogs which make friends instantly, and the wooden streets up which come lumbering horses and wagons and an occasional Ford.

Here, too, we saw the first natives we had met on the journey-the sturdy cannery men and women, brown-skinned and with a decided Mongolian cast of countenance. They were every place, for they work in large numbers in the canneries all through the summer and carly fall.

In the stores we came across vast quantities of fine furs, but discovered they were no cheaper here than in California, and were told to go further north and inland for real fur bargains.

We wanted to see "how the wheels go around" in a salmon cannery, and were led by a native through the devious passageways of one of the largest.

Never fear the purity and cleanliness of canned Alaskan salmon. They come to the cannery in great shining silver piles that remind one of Rex Beach's "The Silver Horde" of a decade or so ago. They are be-headed, be-tailed, be-finned, and slit open by machinery, washed in a stream of constantly flowing water, chopped up and passed into the tins with no human hands touching them. Indian girls fill the top crevices, the lids are clamped on by machinery, and the cans pass through the cooker, are labeled and boxed ready for the markets.

One of our great joys in this little fishing village of Ketchikan was in wending our way up the mountain streams and secing the salmon run-that most wonderful

of all natural phenomena-the eager return of millions of fish through the cold waters of the Pacific to their home spawning ground in Alaska where they ascend the little streams, leaping their way up the rapids in a silver mass, fighting their way over nets and barriers back to the spot where they were born and where they return to spawn and die, thus fulfilling life's mission of reproduction.

In Ketchikan, too, are some of the finest totems. Chief Johnson's totem, surmounted by the fabled bird Ka-juk, stands in front of his cabin, which is painted a bright pink and decorated across the entire front with a huge whale with wide-open mouth.

Eight delightful hours we spent in the town. Then sailed away for the most scenically beautiful part of the entire trip-the passage through the far-famed Wrangell Narrows-a waterway so narrow and with

SO

many devious and twisting channels that, as we stood in the pilot house beside Captain Enquist and watched him direct the course, we fairly held our breaths at the beauty and the wonder.

Gulls wing their way from the shore to the boat, wild ducks soar and dip. An enchanting scene-the sea before us azure and calm, with the dark tree-covered slopes rising from the water's edge-waterfalls pouring merrily down the mountains and ever in the background the line of towering, jagged peaks, dotted with patches of snow, that pierce the sky-line.

Soon we were nearing Wrangell, a town of 1200 placed at the mouth of the Stikine river, founded as long ago as the carly nineteenth century, named after Baron Wrangell, the governor of Alaska and famous for decades as a trading post.

Wrangell is flatter than Ketchikan, but has the same rambling plank streets, perhaps a little wider. It boasts a good hotel, a newspaper and many stores.

In its curio stores we were first introduced to the Chilkat blanket, that oddly striking piece of native handiwork woven in semi-circular shape from the wool of the mountain goat, a brilliant yellow color, decorated with light blue designs symbolic of clan traditions, and crossed by black squares and other emblems.

We also found here curious garments of cedar bark make by the natives, unique. baskets, vests fashioned from moose hide, embroidered and beaded.

Every place was there a riot of flowers. Don't imagine for a second that southern Alaska is barren and flowerless in summer. On each of our stops we found more verdure, giant brakes, blossoming shrubs and wild flowers than we have seen in any place in California. Each front yard is neatly fenced and filled with cultivated. flowers of every species and hue.

We paid a pop call upon J. W. Pritchett, editor of "The Wrangel Sentinel," who told us all about the late President Hard

ing's visit to Alaska and of the fine hunting grounds back of Wrangell-wooded stretches where moose, deer, caribou, bear, wolf and goats abound.

And when we got back to the "Queen" three of our voyage companions didn't show up for dinner. They had been won over to the lure of remaining in Wrangell and going on a hunting expedition in this paradise of the sportsman.