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. I aced all my exams and was in great
physical shape. I
was one of the top
graduates in my basic training platoon, and a favourite of the
training
sergeant and corporals, who called me in to explain that I'd
been a
close 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'd
had enough rum myself that I couldn't stand the taste for
several years
afterward, but at least I was conscious and ambulatory. The guy
who won
was a solid soldier and a great guy - I'd have voted for him
myself.
I aced my radio training too, as
you
might imagine I would; but the army 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 sign up in the first
place, but they seemed to have a lingering cold war paranoia,
even in the early '70's. I requested and received a voluntary
honourable
discharge when I learned 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.
Instead,
I
worked
at a wonderful 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,
framed
new buildings and spent one hot summer in the "cool room" of a
meat
packing plant - not on the "kill floor" upstairs, thank heaven,
although I had to make frequent trips up there. I
learned insurance underwriting as an "executive trainee" - what
a great
component of training for a future investor that was. 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, repair 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 and jazz lounge musician, and several years as a
music
teacher, including two years self-employed in my own private
music studio.
I was
a
roughneck on an oil
rig, crew for a water driller, helped install pipeline and
repair
railroad track across the prairies. I drove oil and gas
well
logging trucks, and delivered dynamite
to seismic crews. 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. This tapestry of experience formed an incredibly
rich,
informative street level curriculum that you wouldn't get from a
whole
library of textbooks.
In between jobs, I finished my
high school with marks in the high nineties - in considerable
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
various
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. I was impressed at
the invitation, and jumped at it, since they took in only two
graduates
per year, so that there were never more than four of us in the
program,
being coached by two professional playwright professors; but I
gave up
on the program at the
conclusion of my first year, once I became aware of the bleak
economic
realities of playwrights in Canada: according to Statscan they
lived on
$12,500, on average, that year.
Financial
well-being depended too heavily on a small and fickle market,
and my
vision of the future featured me as sole male breadwinner
of a household with children and a mortgage. In the early
80's, a
time of spiking 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
yearand 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 Board
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 and limited in terms of time, resources and moral
support.
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 was too heavy a workload for
one person. It was hard on my health - I had to begin taking
blood
pressure medication in those years - and an injustice to the
students, in particular the ESL kids. If you want to know
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..."
Before I met Deborah, I had already travelled
in
Morroco, Egypt, Israel, Zambia, Zaire, Angola, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya,
England,
Wales, Scotland, France, Germany, Belgium, the
Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, Austria, Pakistan,
India,
Sri Lanka, Korea, Japan and the U.S. - some countries more than
once. My international travels,
beginning in
childhood, were a strong foundation for my skills and insight
into the needs of my ESL students. My North American travels
have
included
the west coast of
the U.S.A., much of the east coast, numerous trips to Florida;
back
and forth across Canada east to west a couple of dozen times,
and into some
northern communities - including a ten day canoe trip down the
Nahanni
river in the Northwest Territories with my brother Peter and
nephew
Dylan in 2007, to mark Peter's fiftieth birthday and his son
Dylan's
eighteenth
birthday. On this map you can see
the places I've visited (black dots) and lived (tiny houses: six
cities across Canada, plus Zambia, Austria and Japan):
The detour is the destination. Two winters ago we
stayed in
the
Florida Everglades and Keys for three months on our trailerable
22'
sailboat Tiger Moth,
and that summer we spent six weeks driving out to Salt Spring
Island via
Edmonton - our fifth visit to that little Gulf island - and
detoured through numerous communities and beautiful lake and
mountain
scenery on adventurous secondary highways in southern B.C. This
trip
has been an annual tradition for us for two decades, visiting
family and friends in Western Canada. It culminates in a
group
camp site where the whole family gathers for a weekend,
somewhere in
rural, remote Alberta, often in the foothills of the Rockies. In 2010 it was
close
by the Ya-Ha-Tinda federal horse ranch, in the foothills near
Sundre,
an area filled with elk (we stumbled into one herd two
kilometres from
our campsite), deer, grizzlies and wild horses.
In November and again in January 2011 we went
to
Cuba twice for two weeks each time. Then we went to
Australia for
February and March.
On the horizon: New Zealand and Fiji, then in future years
possibly Belize, Zanzibar, Capetown, Tahiti and the Cook Islands
(especially Raratonga) and more of the
South Pacific, Central and South America; and some other parts
of Europe and the Mediterranean, possibly 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.
Now 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.
In the winter of 2010 we took 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, where we also "boat-sat" a Union 36 in Boot Key
Harbour, commuting to shore by dinghy each day.
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 100 recorded dives
in my log book. I
took a hiatus
from diving during my years in school administration, but I
hope to return to it some day. 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.
