My Early Experiences with Education

Born into the height of the post-war baby boom, I attended public schools in the east end of Ottawa in the 50’s and 60’s; the smell of stencil fluid from Gestetner machines

on damp copies still evokes vivid memories of quiet classrooms of 35 plus children, all working away at the same task. Penmanship, good spelling and circling the right answer were rewarded; teacher/student interaction was limited to the teacher asking questions and a smallish number of children waving their hands frantically hoping to be chosen. Being chosen too many times however could get one labelled “Teacher’s Pet” – an epithet which for some time I mistakenly thought was a compliment. We were only dimly aware that there were a large number of children who never put their hands up; as we grew older we realized many of them were no longer in school with us.

It was the age of the “Reading Group” – reading ability groupings of children with cute names like  Chickadees, Hummingbirds,  Ravens and Turkeys. We actually had inkwells in our desks, and in grade 5 were privileged to be given straight pens which we learned to use. Not many of us mastered them however, and were relieved when we were allowed to use new-fangled  ballpoint pens. When I tell children now about nibs and inkwells, they look at me in disbelief; however, I still have some of my scrawly, blot-strewn notebooks to prove it. Up until this point, school was largely squirm-inducing boredom – its main saving grace was the long outdoor play times, when we organized our own baseball games, played singing ball and skipping games and established a strict pecking order through fighting, running and other informal competitions. However, I was very lucky that mine was a very small elementary school, whose principal and Grade5/6 teacher, Mr. MacLaren, eschewed the strap (fairly universal at the time), encouraged us to make up plays and perform them for the class and taught problem solving in math – he was definitely ahead of his time!

In Middle School, we learned grammar, (how to parse sentences), the facts of life (according to Kotex), and how to be good homemakers ("Homemaking is an art, the skills of which, to a mere male, seem to be part and parcel of a woman's make up. But she is not born to these skills, and must be trained...This we do in the Ottawa Public Schools - and do very well." W.T.MacSkimming, Home Economics Manual). I also learned about the effects of streaming, as each grade was divided into 8 sections, each one of which was known to us for the ability level of its students. I’m pretty sure the learning opportunities for the “C-stream” children were much more limited.

By the time I finished high school and first year university where I enrolled in an Honours Math programme (because it seemed to be the only thing I was good at), I was ready to escape formal education, and took a year off to explore the world – it was the early 70’s and what I discovered outside my cozy middle class existence changed me profoundly. I set off to explore Europe, hitchhiking and backpacking around, but quickly settled in a little town in the Highlands of Scotland. I worked at a couple of low wage jobs, including as a housemaid in a geriatric hospital. This came to an untimely end, when I managed to wind the cord of the Matron’s TV around the floor polisher (which weighed more than me), yanking it to the floor. I’ll never forget the Matron’s words when she fired me, “I don’t think you are suited to this type of work… you might do better working in a shop.” During this time, I became part of a sub-culture of working class young people, many of whom had left school at the minimum age of 14 and were forced into menial jobs, but whose intelligence and grasp of world affairs impressed me. My ability to flee this lack of opportunity, back to my university place, brought home the effects of the class system and made a huge impression on me.

When I came back to university, I dropped all my math courses and switched to experimental psychology – I was fascinated by the workings of the human brain and all the ways it can be tricked, moulded and manipulated.

I think I had always wanted to be a teacher; as a child I forced/bribed my younger brothers into playing endless games of  school, and even taught one of them to read (thereby probably contributing to some of his later behavioural problems in school). However, it was a serendipitous event that found me enrolled in the B.Ed programme at Acadia University in the fall of 1974. The coursework seemed boring and irrelevant – however I fell in with a group of other disaffected education students and along with organizing protests, sit-ins and hunger strikes we also were introduced to the writings of  educational thinkers such as Ivan Illich,  John Holt, A.S. Neill, Neil Postman. We formed a tight knit group who met frequently, sometimes with one of the younger faculty members, and had several weekend retreats where we discussed these "radical" ideas. These group discussions became more influential for me than anything that was taught in the courses. 

 My first teaching job, again a serendipitous appointment in August after a job in Scotland fell through, was in Great Whale River, a fly-in community in Northern Quebec, teaching Inuit and Cree children. Here I was introduced to the poverty and social issues facing aboriginal peoples, as well as being thrust into the middle of the great language debate, having arrived in Quebec just after the passage of the infamous Bill 101 which declared among other things that English should not be used on signs and all children should be educated in French unless they had a parent educated in an English school in Quebec. This did not go down well among Quebec’s native people, who were also in the middle of negotiating the James Bay agreement…I arrived into a highly divided community, with 4 distinct language and cultural groups (Inuit, Cree, French-speaking provincial employees and English-speaking Federal employees). It was also divided physically with the runway neatly separating the whites from the natives: on the one side, bungalows with electricity, phones and running water and on the other side overcrowded, ramshackle wooden houses with none of the above.

My first classroom was one of those wooden houses in the “village” with a large oil stove in the middle. I had about 15 Inuit and Cree non-English speaking 7 year olds – it was their first year of English, and the first year without a native-speaking assistant in the classroom. The Inuit and Cree children couldn’t talk to each other either, except to say things like “Eskimos eat dog”, so language became a major issue. I realized that I didn’t have a clue how to teach reading (my education degree dealt almost entirely with theory, and gave me virtually no practical strategies for classroom management or how to teach anything), and all the children were non-readers – I was expected to use the Ginn 360 series of readers,  “The Dog Next Door” all about a lovely white suburban family. Since I didn’t know what I was doing, I fell back on how I was taught and wrote vocabulary lists on the board, used a pointer and, horror of horrors, divided the children into ability groups for reading. I thought I was being very modern by naming the groups after local animals that in no way implied speed or slowness. However, the whole thing fell apart the day a few months in when we encountered the word “park” in the reader; even with the picture in the book of a treed, grassy space, I could not make them understand. So that was the end of the Dog Next Door, and the beginning of my theme teaching. The children wrote journals everyday (for months, some of them wrote “Today I had bannock and tea for breakfast.” every day), we played ESL games, wrote stories using the “Language Experience” approach and built models. I still remember the papier mache beaver dam we worked on for weeks!  I found the Creeways series of books about life in the north, but there were far too few of them, so we wrote our own books. 

Since my classroom was isolated from the main school and was down in the “village”, no one from administration ever came down and I got away with ditching all the textbooks. I have no idea how much the children learned that year – it seems that most of them learned to read a little, and I think their English became more fluent, but I doubt that they met too many of the benchmarks for grade 2 (since it was a federal school, all of which were gradually being fazed out, it’s possible we didn’t even have benchmarks).

My second year, I taught kindergarten, Inuit children in the morning and Cree in the afternoon. I was blessed with two wonderful native speaking classroom assistants who taught me so much about their respective cultures, and helped me adapt local folk tales into little dramas the children would act out. It was here that I learned more about the innate differences between boys and girls – it didn’t matter that guns and weapons were banned from the classroom. For the boys, any block or toy would substitute, and whenever a flock of geese or other noisy birds flew over, regardless of what was going on in the classroom, all the little boys would race to the window with whatever gun substitute was closest to hand, shooting wildly at them. 

It was at this time that my good friend Joanne from the rebel group at Acadia joined the staff, and the two of us banded together, starting clubs and drama groups. Our first  production was a full scale musical of“The Wizard of Oz”, chosen because I had a record of the songs, and slightly adapted to the culture. The next year’s production “Kung Fu and Cowboys” was written by the children and totally reflected the local culture: the movies shown weekly at the Rec Hall. As time went on, Joanne and I felt more and more at odds philosophically with the rest of the staff; quite a feat in a teaching environment which definitely attracted oddballs and loners, one of whom used to brag about napping in the classroom with his feet on his desk while the children “worked”!

In my third year, I was teaching grade 4, up in the big school on the other side of the runway. By this time I was receiving a little more attention from the administration, and was told that my classroom was too messy, I needed to follow the curriculum more closely etc. When the James Bay agreement was signed, and the Inuit and Cree took over their own school boards, I took the opportunity to transfer to another Federal school in Nova Scotia. Three years of “isolation” were enough, and a Mi’kmaq reserve in rural Cape Breton seemed like the height of civilization!

However this is the year I learned about “mainstreaming” children with special needs; I had a grade 4 class of about 20 children – about 10 of them were bright nine year olds who were motivated and fun to teach. The others ranged in age from 12 to 16, and had an array of difficulties such as Down’s Syndrome, what I now recognize as undiagnosed autism and every known behavioural problem. One 14 year old girl came about once a week to school, another teenage boy who today would probably be labelled with “Oppositional Defiant Disorder” used to make a great show of coming into the classroom with a wad of chewing tobacco stuffed in his cheek and when I asked him to get rid of it would spit it into the waste basket from across the room, often missing it completely. Another boy, whose father was a prominent local politician, called me an unprintable name whenever I asked him to do anything he didn’t like; this was echoed by the Down’s Syndrome child constantly… When I tried to speak with his parents, I was told that this type of language was the local dialect and reflected Mik’maq culture. I also learned about how the politics in the community can affect school atmosphere. I was unfortunate enough to arrive just after the long-serving non-native principal was fired by the band council and replaced with a prominent (but not local) Mik’maq educator. A petition was started by the other faction, and the first principal was reinstated; to make a long story short, there were two principals that year, but neither seemed able to take charge.

Another important lesson I learned from this year; how not to set up a student government/peer mediation team. Someone had an idea of how to tackle the discipline problems in the school – make the students responsible for monitoring each other’s behaviour, on the theory, which I think is fundamentally sound, that if you want to change a child’s behaviour, give them more responsibility and put them in charge of something. However, having older children (some with violent tendencies) barging into my classroom and dragging children out to "question" them started to give me the feeling of teaching under a despotic government with the habit of "disappearing" the opposition. A few of these children did let the power go to their heads, and after some children were hurt, the programme was stopped.

After this difficult year, I resigned from the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development and took a break from teaching for a couple of years. My year at Eskasoni had been positive in many respects: I had the privilege of teaching next to and getting to know some excellent educators : Sister Dorothy Moore and Murdena Marshall, people whose paths I would cross later on in the multicultural milieu in Halifax.

 My next job was with CUSO; a two year contract as part of the TESL programme teaching English in Nigeria. I was sent to a boys boarding school in a medium-sized town called Pankshin,  Plateau State. In addition to teaching English literature to the secondary school boys, I was also asked to teach in a staff primary school situated on the compound. By my second year there, I was the Headteacher of the Staff School, by virtue of being the only teacher on staff with an education degree (indeed a degree of any kind). Here I learned a multitude about cross-cultural issues, about running a school with few resources and no trained teachers and about the impact on a culture of an education system which does not reflect that culture at all. Nigeria inherited the British education system and the Cambridge examinations which it applied to its secondary schools with little or no adaptation. As a result, students who started learning English in first year of secondary school were expected to write the same type of exams at the end of their 6 years of school as native-speaking English students.  Understandably, the pass rate was about 2%, and a great many bright  students missed out on going to university.  The statistics do not reflect the huge effect on a nation’s psyche caused by the sense of failure this engenders, and as a teacher, I can attest to the loss of many teachable moments when students are demanding strict adherence to the syllabus. Understandably, students do not want to “waste” time learning things that they will not be tested on – with such high stakes testing, it makes perfect sense.

Coming back to Canada after 2 years in a developing country was a difficult transition, particularly since it was a time (early 80’s) when teaching jobs, and employment in general were scarce.  I began working at the International Education Centre at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, one of a network of Development Education Centres across Canada, funded by CIDA whose mission was to work with schools and the community to educate Canadians about global, multicultural and enviromental issues.  My first job there was as Speakers Bureau Co-ordinator, linking up international students and others from the developing world with classrooms and community groups around the province. Because it was not well known as a resource (and it was free!) we used to take groups of speakers on tours to schools in different regions, and  I spent a lot of time promoting the service and travelling to schools. One school I didn’t have to promote to, but which used lots of speakers was the tiny Dalhousie University School, an “alternative” school on Dalhousie campus. They made up in enthusiasm for what they lacked in numbers – sending a speaker for 12 or 13 children didn’t do much for our statistics (# of contacts), but the speakers always spoke highly of the children, their knowledge and curiosity. Later on I became Education Co-ordinator, and worked with teachers supporting their work on incorporating a more global perspective in their teaching.

By 1991, the International Education Centre along with all the other Development Education Centres had lost its CIDA funding when the government of the time changed its focus from educating Canadians about global issues to promoting Canada’s business ties with the developing world. Its legacy can be seen today in the generation of students of the 80’s who benefited from attending IEC programmes on topics ranging from liberation movements in Central America to World Food Day to Amazonian deforestation, whose teachers were inspired by Global Education for Teachers conferences and by two courses (Global History and Global Geography), now part of the Nova Scotia curriculum, which were promoted and nurtured by the IEC.

After obtaining an M.Ed from University of Ottawa, it seemed like fate when I was hired as a contract teacher at the same Dalhousie University School to which I had sent so many speakers in the 80’s. From the beginning, I was ecstatic to find a place which so closely reflected my personal philosophy of teaching – the theme approach with its integrated, discovery based, hands-on teaching.  Although I was hired to replace a teacher on maternity leave (in those days it was only four months), by the following year I was on a one year contract and the year after, I was Headteacher. With only 37 students at the time and 3 teachers, two of whom were part-time, this was not the mercurial rise it sounds like – I had found my niche, and no one else wanted the job.