Stephen Sidney Gilchrist

My Life in a Nutshell:
Updated April, 2010
       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.
        In my late teens, I trained as a radio operator in the Canadian army, but I requested and received a voluntary honourable discharge when I discovered that because of my childhood presence in various foreign countries (Africa, Israel, Europe), they would not grant me the security clearance I would need to be posted overseas!  What an example of "military intelligence".  You would have thought that with my travel experience and lower potential for culture shock, I'd have been at the top of their list for foreign assignment.  I was one of the top graduates in my basic training platoon, second choice for the Commandant's Shield award (I had one black mark for missing the bus back to base while playing sheepdog to a drunken mate...admittedly, I was drunk myself, but at least I was ambulatory), but they lost me when they fenced in my future.  "Seeing the world" was one of their top recruitment lures, and the main reason I'd quit high school to join the army in the first place, but they seemed to have some lingering "cold war" mentality, even in the early '70's.
    
I worked at a great variety of jobs through my twenties and early thirties.  I sold pianos and organs, and vacuum cleaners, and worked in retail department stores, sporting goods and book stores.  I worked in factories building mattresses, kitchen cabinets and travel trailers, and framed new buildings.  I learned insurance underwriting as an "executive trainee".  I co-ran a summer youth hostel. I worked the front desk, switchboard, and did the nightly audit in five different hotels.  I worked in restaurants, garages and car dealerships. I was a cabaret "bouncer" (I was better at patiently talking the drunks out of the room than "bouncing" them, mind you, in contrast to some of my knuckle-busting colleagues), and a music teacher and performer: I spent three years being a travelling country rock musician plus two more as a music teacher in my own private studio.  I was a roughneck on an oil rig, crew for a water driller, and an oilfield well logger and dynamite delivery trucker.  I taught ESL in Vienna, Austria one winter, and in Japan the following summer, and taught a business management skills curriculum at an adult night school in Toronto.
    In between jobs, I finished my high school with marks in the nineties - quite a contrast to the earlier marks I was earning when I hated high school and dropped out to join the army.  Then, in fits and starts, I enrolled in different college and university programs, hunting for what I'd most like to do for a career: pre-med, commerce, fine arts and literature, a year at a jazz college, etc.  I finally earned a university degree, graduating cum distinctione from the University of Alberta with a B.A. in English and Drama (Playwriting).  I was invited into the two-year Master of Fine Arts program in playwriting but I gave up on that at the conclusion of my first year, once I realized how little playwrights in Canada earn, on average. Financial well-being depended too heavily on a small and fickle market, and at the time my vision of the future featured me as sole male breadwinner of a household with children and a mortgage - and in the early 80's, a time of high interest rates, a mortgage was a really big deal. It didn't occur to me at that age that a future wife might be a partner breadwinner.  If it had, I might have continued in that path. I enjoyed writing, and still do.

    My career, in summation:  Slowly I began to realize that apart from writing, 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 diverse qualifications in addition to my international travel and work experience, 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 formally 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 in two schools, a grade 7/8 math/science teacher and computer lab specialist in two schools, and operated two grade 7/8 Design and Technology centres for a total of nine years. This was absolutely the most exciting and pleasant job I've ever held in teaching - as I always describe it, "the best job in the system".  One of those assignments was a seven year stint in a school where a close personal friend, Greg Martin, was principal.  He had a larger vision of the educational needs of his clientele than most principals of senior schools, and worked hard to keep his technology centre open even as they were shut down in similar schools.  I was his teaching union steward as well as his D&T teacher, and we had a good partnership.  Our friendship continues to this day.
    However in 2002, panicked by an end-of-June announcement of the closing of my D&T centre due to neo-conservative funding cut-backs (a decision which was subsequently reversed by the school board), I signed up for my Principal's Qualification courses, with Greg's encouragement.  Two years later I found myself serving as vice-principal at a school where I had been a rookie teacher at the beginning of my public school teaching career, and teaching ESL at all grade levels and "music appreciation" to the grade 7's and 8's - that's music for the kids who hate music, or who can't focus and behave well enough to be included in the band. It was a challenge, but I designed a program that they enjoyed, with an immersion in modern musicals, historical and classical music.  Being a rookie VP there was a weird and difficult situation, caught in a state of constant conflict between a Thatcherite principal and a strong union-oriented staff, most of whom I'd worked with as a rookie teacher.  Coming into administration straight out of a decade of service as a union steward made it even more uncomfortable: I related to the teachers and wanted to support them as much as possible so that they in turn would deliver the best possible programming for the kids; I was trusted and became friendly with most of them as well as with the union steward on staff, but I was castigated by my principal for sympathizing and connecting with them on that level, and my effort was pinched off, limited.
    I spent the next two years as vice-principal at a senior school 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.  I really loved that class, but that really was too heavy a workload for one person.  It was hard on my health, and an injustice to the students, in particular the ESL kids.  If you want to what I really think about my years in teaching versus school administration, click here.
    In
September of 2008 I began my final administrative role as vice-principal at Cedar Drive P. S., working for someone I really liked, Principal 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 could well afford it, so we decided to retire together, escape the Toronto winter and go travelling again.  Friends and staff from Cedar Drive and several of my earlier schools, who have huge hearts, threw us a memorable send-off and made generous donations to two of our favourite charities.  I left on a high note, and I didn't look back...it was fun, but now it's done.  Or as we used to say when I was young, "it's been a slice..."

    Travel: 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...
    Before I met Deborah, I had already travelled in central, east, west and north Africa, Israel, several visits to much of Europe and the U.K., Pakistan, India and Sri Lanka, Korea and Japan, and the west coast of the U.S.A.  My international travels, beginning with my childhood, were a strong foundation for my skills and insight into the needs of my ESL students. This past winter we stayed in the Florida Everglades and Keys for three months on a 22' sailboat.  On the horizon: Zanzibar, Capetown, New Zealand and Australia, the South Pacific, and Central and South America.  And perhaps parts of Europe and the Mediterranean, including some sailing destinations.



    Recreation: 

     Sailing: Deb and I sail out of Highland Yacht Club.  Some of the boats we've owned in the past can be seen here.
    This year we
sail Awelyn, a Mirage 27, and Tiger Moth, a trailerable Hullmaster 22.  We cruised the North Channel in 2004 on our CS22, and plan to return there some day.  We 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 sailboats for three seasons in previous years. 
    This past winter we took our Hullmaster, Tiger Moth, to the 10,000 Islands just north of the Everglades in Florida, to Cayo Costa near Fort Myers, and on the Atlantic side of the Florida Keys: Marathon, Big Pine Key, Bahia Honda, etc - the "Middle Keys", as they're called.  I described the three months in a travel blog, with photos that you can click on to enlarge. We stayed for two months at a marina in Marathon, which has a wonderful small town atmosphere, and we also stayed on a Union 36 in Boot Key Harbour for two weeks. 

    Tennis and Fitness: I play tennis all summer at 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 able to winter in places without snow, I'm more likely just to walk or ride a bike.  For rainy days in the summer months, I've found a local weight room that I can join for one month intervals whenever it is convenient to my schedule of travel and other activities.

    Scuba: I enjoyed scuba, and I trained to PADI Rescue Diver level.
I have about 150 recorded dives in my log book. I took a hiatus from diving during my years in school administration, but I'm hoping to return to it in retirement.  I have explored many wrecks in Parry Sound, Tobermory and Brockville, as well as many tropical dive sites - Cozumel, Grand Cayman, Bali, Malaysia, and others. I've enjoyed some wonderful diving off the coast of Victoria, and near Nanaimo, in British Columbia. Deborah became certified in Singapore, and she dives with me occasionally when we're in warm southern waters, but she prefers to snorkel. 

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