This story has a lesson which I didn't learn for a long while after the initial occurrences. It took many years to come to the final outcome.
As previously noted, I took a long time to come to the realization that I did want to be a teacher: that I was in fact a teacher, and that I loved it.
I didn't particularly love my first teaching job. I was teaching in Kitimat a town of about 14,000 people. It was then that I realized that I was not a small town boy. I wasn't particularly fond of living in a small town, with the social restrictions that that involves. I used to tell people that I was living forty miles from nowhere, nowhere being defined as Terrace, which was the next town up the highway.
Although I didn't realize it at the time, I was in a teaching position that was possibly the worst type of teaching position I could have been involved with. I was teaching in the largest elementary school in Kitimat. Although nobody knew it at the time, the principal of that school was sexually abusing young boys within the city. Therefore, the basic policy for the operation of the school was that nothing could attract attention. I attracted attention.
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.
I was blissfully unaware of how many people I offended, and who, and how. I saw problems in regard to the educational tasks I was given to undertake, and tried to address them as effectively as I could. Unfortunately there were additional factors in play.
One of those factors was that the government of the day had undertaken what it referred to as a "restraint program," which, in essence, meant that they were trying to reduce the costs and wages of any civil service or government related jobs. This was specifically targeted at education in a variety of ways, since teachers are generally paid out of the public purse. The teachers union was, at the time, blindsided by a series of pieces of legislation mandating restrictions in budgets, longer working hours for teachers, and reducing any limits on class sizes.
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