Stephen Sidney Gilchrist Updated February, 2010 early years career travel hobbies

       I was born in Saskatchewan in 1952, and grew up in Ontario and in Zambia (southern Africa), which was still Northern Rhodesia when I first arrived there at the age of nine.
        I travelled extensively from childhood to my mid-thirties and visited about 35 countries, including one complete round-the-world trip which lasted for two years, and I had lived and worked on four continents before marrying Deborah and settling down here in Ontario twenty-three years ago.  Deborah and I continued to travel together on our summer vacations from teaching, bringing my tally to well over 50 countries.  We plan to visit many more in retirement.
        I worked at a great variety of jobs through my twenties and early thirties, in sales, construction, underwriting, hospitality, music and many other areas.  I taught ESL in Austria and Japan, and spent three years being a travelling country rock musician plus two more as a music teacher in my own private studio. 
        In between jobs, I completed my education. I graduated cum distinctione from the University of Alberta with a B.A. in English and Drama (Playwriting), and also completed a full year toward my Master of Fine Arts degree in playwriting. 

    Slowly I began to realize that the jobs I'd enjoyed the most were teaching ESL to adults and music to kids.  I was accepted into the University of Toronto Faculty of Ed in 1987. I made Michael Fullan's Dean's Honour List that year and earned my B. Ed, specializing in Junior/Intermediate English, plus Instrumental Music plus Senior Basic Industrial Arts; with those qualifications, plus the fact that I was a male teacher willing to teach in an elementary classroom, I got hired in a heartbeat by the former Scarborough Board of Education. I continued learning new curriculum, and became qualified to teach ESL, and also became a Computers in the Classroom specialist.
    Since then I've been a music specialist for a whole school, a grade 5 teacher, a grade 3 teacher for four years, a grade 7/8 math/science teacher and computer lab specialist, and operated a grade 7/8 Design and Technology centre for nine years. This was absolutely the most exciting and fun job I've ever held in teaching.
    However, in 2004 I went back to the books and took my Principal's Qualifications, and two years later found myself hired back for a two year stint as a vice-principal at Danforth Gardens P. S., where I had been a rookie teacher at the beginning of my public school teaching career. Then I spent two years as vice-principal at Robert Service Sr. P. S., where I was also the computer lab and AV guy, and taught English, math, art, music, dance and drama to a split grade 7/8 class of 28 students that included fifteen ESL students with a wide assortment of mother tongues, at varying stages of fluency in English - several with no English at all.  (And I hate to say it, because I really loved that class, but that really was too heavy a workload for one person...and a severe injustice to the ESL students, in particular.)
    Over two of those years I completed the four part Experienced Principal's Development Course.  That was a good program, lots of heady ideas, but school board reality meant that I'd never get to put them into practice as a vice-principal.  I debated applying for a promotion to principal of my own school, but in September of 2008 I begin a new position as vice-principal at Cedar Drive P. S., working for someone I really liked, Karen Robertson.  That was a terrific school with a wonderful staff, and that's where I closed out my public school teaching career, and retired 18 months later - a few years early for me, admittedly, but it was Deborah's official retirement date and we decided to go out together so we could escape the Toronto winter and go travelling again.  I felt I was leaving on a high note from Cedar Drive, and old friends and staff, who have huge hearts, gave me an almost royal, very memorable send-off.

    Deb and I like to travel. We went back to my childhood stomping grounds in southern Africa in '96 for a six week visit to Zambia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, and Pretoria and Durban in South Africa.  We've also travelled together to Maui, Mexico, Nova Scotia, Cape Breton and PEI, Alberta and B.C., Florida, Grand Cayman, the Dominican Republic and many places in between.  In the summer of 2000 we went to Singapore, Indonesia (Bali/Java), Chiang Mai in northern Thailand, an island off the coast of Malaysia, and even Laos, sort of...
I love the many ways that my international travels, beginning with my childhood, have been such a strong foundation for my skills and insight into my students' needs, as an ESL teacher.

    My hobbies have included playing trumpet in the Scarborough Community Concert Band and in recent years with a rock band. The rock band practiced every week and did school fundraisers, 50th birthday parties, and casino gigs about once in a blue moon.  It wasn't comparable to the musical quality of the full time five-nights-a-week touring rock bands I played in as a young man, but it was fun.  In the summer and fall leading up to retirement, I played with an assortment of other musical groups with a variety of combinations of instrumentation. More and more former musicians are coming back out of the woodwork as they retire from other jobs and begin looking for ways to stay busy and sane; I'm open to any musical possibility. 
     I sail out of Highland Yacht Club.  We cruised the North Channel in 2004 on our CS22, and now we sail a Mirage 27.  Deb and I took the Cruising Trophy two years in a row at the annual C&C Regatta at the National Yacht Club in our 25' C&C Redline, which now sails out of North Rustico in P.E.I., and I've crewed on larger racing boats for three seasons in previous years. This winter we've been sailing on a smaller, trailerable sailboat in Florida, in the 10,000 Islands just north of the Everglades, and on the Atlantic side of the Florida Keys - Marathon, Big Pine Key, Bahia Honda, etc - the "Middle Keys", as they're referred to down here.  We've been staying for two months at a marina in Marathon, which has a wonderful small town atmosphere.
    I play tennis all summer with the Scarborough Bluffs Tennis Club. I used to try to keep in shape through the winter by occasionally jogging, weight-training and swimming at Variety Village, and by curling in a mixed league at East York Curling Club every Friday.  Now that I'm retired and in a place without snow, I'm more likely to walk, ride a bike, or use the fitness room at the marina.
    I enjoy scuba, and have trained to PADI Rescue Diver level. I have explored wrecks in Parry Sound, Tobermory and Brockville, as well as many tropical dive sites - Cozumel, Grand Cayman, Bali, Malaysia, and many others. I've enjoyed some wonderful diving off the coast of Victoria, and near Nanaimo, in British Columbia. Deborah dives with me occasionally when we're in warm southern waters, but she prefers to snorkel.
    Our friends Pat and Clare Taplin invite us several times a year to Tafelmusik concerts, where they have the four best seats in the house, and we go to other random concerts that strike our fancy.
    I'm an active, experienced (twenty-five years) and ultimately successful stock market investor, and I enjoy that - it's like a giant Monopoly game with real money, that allowed me to retire early.  It was a roller coaster ride through '08 and '09, but we came out ahead.  I still treat portfolio management like a part-time job in retirement, studying almost daily and tweaking it from time to time. 
    I've enjoyed expanding and updating this web site since the earliest days of creating web pages with basic html code, and I've made numerous web sites through the years for schools and clubs.  I'm finding time to read for pleasure again, in retirement, and occasionally do a little writing, even if it is only a fresh post for my travel blog.

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