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, before settling down here in Ontario
twenty
years ago. I've lived and worked on four continents; I've
visited well over 50 countries,
and plan to visit many more.
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
U of T 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 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, as well as 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, six years ago 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 also completed the four
part Experienced Principal's Development Course, but that's probably
the last school administration course I'll take. This September
(2008) I begin a new position as vice-principal at Cedar Drive P. S.,
where I anticipate closing out my public school teaching career.
My
hobbies have included playing
trumpet in the Scarborough Community
Concert
Band through the winter, and sailing in the summer. Nowadays I play trumpet
(and
keyboard for a few tunes) in a once-a-week rock band called Random
Notes. We've done school fundraisers, 50th birthday parties, and
dances on the
patio at the Georgian Downs casino just south of Barrie for the past
two summers.
I sail out of Highland
Yacht Club. We cruised the North Channel in
2004 on our CS22, and now
we sail a Mirage 27 - I hope to have photos of that one on the website
soon. 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.
I play tennis all summer
with the Scarborough
Bluffs Tennis Club. I try to keep in shape through the winter by jogging, weight-training and
swimming at Variety
Village, and by curling in a mixed league at East York Curling Club
every Friday.
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-one years) and ultimately successful
stock market investor, and I enjoy that - like a giant Monopoly game
with real money. And
of course, I've enjoyed expanding and updating this web site since the
earliest days of creating web pages with basic html code, which I can
almost still remember how to do!
