Somewhat ironically, given where I have ended up, one of the jobs that I applied for was in Port Alberni. I remember very little of the interview, but I do remember that, while waiting for my appointment time, I had one of the best clubhouse sandwiches I have ever eaten in one of the local Port Alberni restaurants. Which is undoubtedly closed by now.
Eventually I ended up in Kitimat. The word "kitimat," depending on who you ask, means either people of the snow, or land of the falling snow, or some variation on those ideas. Yes, it snows an awful lot, being just far enough inland to be slightly away from the moderating influence of the ocean, but still close enough that the moist air coming in off the Pacific still holds a fair amount of moisture, which, once over the first barrier mountain on the coast cools enough to fall as snow, on Kitimat.
Kildala was the largest elementary school in Kitimat. We had 600 students.
I was not particularly impressed by my fellow teachers at Kildala, and didn't have an awful lot of contact with teachers at other schools. My animus to the teachers at my own school was not simply to the science teacher who had failed at teaching science for fourteen years, or the many math teachers who had failed at teaching math. Basically, possibly because of Cyril Portman, the attitude in this school was that we were paid to babysit, not really to teach.
The position that I obtained within the school was that of a specialist science teacher. This was not a usual position in an elementary school. Elementary schools, particularly of the day, held that teachers should teach all subjects in elementary school and specialists were to be avoided. The science teacher who had preceded me in the position had, basically, taught science by doing fancy experiments as demonstrations for the kids, without really teaching any science principles. This had gone on for a number of years.
Science was not the only subject to have been neglected in that particular school, over the preceding years. The intermediate grades in elementary school, that of grades four through seven, had a specialist music teacher. The specialist music teacher, therefore, had to have the regular subjects for his classes taught by other teachers. In addition to the science that I taught in all grades from four to seven, I also taught all of the math for all the grades six and seven.
It quickly became apparent that the students in grades six and seven had not even learned the math concepts that were supposedly taught in grade four. So, I had to bring all of the grade six and seven students, up from a grade three level, to their own grade level. In addition, of course, I had to teach science up to the proper grade level.
There was one additional factor. The previous year, the school district had decided on a new science curriculum. This new science curriculum was massive. Given approximately seventy hours of instruction for an entire year, each of grades four through seven was supposed to be instructed in at least 150 different concepts. A number of these concepts were completely unrelated to science, such as song, dance, and puppetry.
As one, and only one, example of the general attitude to teaching in the school, because of donations from the mills in town, basically any time the schools wanted ice time for their students or classes, they got it. All we had to do was make a request. Then we could troop our students over for an hour, or two, or three, even if it was only one classroom. The kids got to skate, and the teachers didn't have to teach. A lot of times the teachers didn't even bother to hang around the rink. They would just tell the kids to go home when they wanted to. I did take my class over sometimes when other teachers had booked the rink, but I always stayed. The other teachers knew this, and by Christmas time in my second year, I was being asked simply to take all of their classes, sometimes four and five at a time, over to the rink, and then dismiss them from the rink. This being requested, I would dismiss the other classes, but I would walk my own class back to the classroom, and dismiss them from the school. Probably overkill on my part, since the skating rink and the school were no more than four blocks apart.
At the beginning of my second year, given a grade five (and only grade five) class, I told them on that first day, that there were things they would like, and things they would not like, and that was too bad because this is all part of education, and besides, there would be days, even if they didn't believe me, that they would not want to go home. Predictably, they didn't believe me and pooh-poohed the whole idea. However, that Christmas, having taken a bunch of classes over to skating rink, and having dismissed the other classes (by their teacher's request), and trooped my own class back to the classroom, I dismissed them from the school. At least a dozen doesn't didn't go. Noting that our classroom was to be painted, during the Christmas break, I set them to taking down everything off the walls, so that the walls could be painted. About half a dozen of the students left after that. The others still wouldn't go. So, I set them to cleaning up other areas of the classroom, such as taking some stabile artworks that we had mounted in the ceiling, down from the ceiling, and things like that. (I must admit, in getting them to do that, it's quite likely that I had students standing on stools, perched atop tables. I don't recall that particular configuration, but I suspect that it happened. So that's another rule of teaching that I broke: that would have been very dangerous for the students. At least in legal eyes, if anything had happened.)
A couple of them left after that, and, having moved all the desks to the center of the classroom, I got the kids to sweep the floor. But four students still wouldn't leave. So I reminded them that they had not believed me when I told them, at the beginning of the year, that there were going to be days when they wouldn't want to go home, and that they had to go home, because I was leaving town during the break.
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