I grew up in a small town on the edge of the Canadian shield, a clearing in the forest of no particular importance to anyone except the three thousand people who called it home. It was in many ways typical of the Canada of that time. The town had been founded because of the surrounding forest and a few descendants of French-Canadian lumberjacks still lived there, but now the town lived on tourism and was predominantly Anglo-Saxon. A handful of Greek restauranteurs were the major minority group. There was a Chinese family which owned a laundry, a mulatto businessman and a few other families who could be identified by ethnic origin. There was also an Indian reserve near by and a few children were bused to the high school. As I grew up, I assumed everyone recognized and accepted this patchwork quilt.
By the time I started my second year of high school, I was comfortably established in the middle of a class of thirty three students. Being quiet, I had ample opportunity to observe my surroundings, although I devoted little time to the analysis of the data collected. Looking back however, I can see that this was the most influential year in the development of my view of the world beyond that small town.
One of the first tasks at the beginning of the year was the selection of courses to take. English and mathematics were compulsory. Being in the university stream, a language was strongly encouraged but could be dropped by taking a course from the non-university oriented commerce program. Three courses had to be taken from physics, biology, history and geography. Being unable to decide between history and geography I allowed the stroke of a pen to let the opportunity to become a biologist pass me by.
In making selections I had also, by default, made a selection of my teachers for the year. Although this had not weighed heavily in my consideration, it was to be of greater significance in the long run. It was this unique collection of individuals who would present me with their world views and in so doing ask me to choose one for myself.
The youngest of the group was Mr. Jacks, my English teacher. He had been born and raised in the town and was a graduate of the high school where he now taught. He had taught at the elementary school for a number of years and moved up to the high school the same year that I had. As a result, this would be the fourth consecutive year that he would try to impress upon me the value of knowing something about English literature. His success with me thus far had been somewhat limited and I had the feeling that he had given me up for lost.
To those he liked, Mr. Jacks was a jovial man which fitted his round figure. To those less fortunate, he had a cutting command of the language when he wanted to be critical. I think his aim was to push us to do better, but he was a bit of an intellectual snob. My fifteenth place standing did not impress him.
I don’t know if it was the provincial syllabus or just Mr. Jacks’ view of the world, but the course of study for the year was tragic heros. From MacBeth and A Man For All Seasons to Death of a Salesman, it was enough to drive anyone to suicide. Mr. Jacks tried to lighten the load by relating his own heroic epic. He had attempted to pay his way through university by joining the army officer training program at Royal Military College. He said he hated every minute that he spent in Kingston but he still had his brush cut.
Mr. Jacks was still a young man but somehow he had become trapped in this small town and like his literary heros he could not escape. If anything, he taught us to dream of a better life and encouraged us to escape. Possibly this is why he was in charge of improving our cultural education through school trips to watch live theatre in Toronto and at the Stratford Festival. The bright students, who loved Mr. Jacks, sat at the front of the bus and, I presume, engaged in clever conversation. We who were more ambivalent, sat in the middle. For a handful of the class, the cultural growth was in the form of sitting at the back of the bus learning the words to drinking songs and playing strip poker.
Mr. Jacks was also in charge of the school drama club which produced a number of quite good plays each year. I worked behind the scenes with lighting and sound effects. The highlight of this year was the Remembrance Day assembly which was turned over to the class. It included readings from T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and the playing of the Doors’ Unknown Soldier, as sound person that was my job. The effect was much more dramatic than the usual parade of the cadet corps and flag waving. Ten years later, while I was traveling in France, I would remember that assembly and take time to visit Vimy Ridge.
Our math and physics teacher was Mr. Jones, an elderly Welshman. An engineer for most of his life, during the War he had worked on the bouncing bomb told about in the movie The Dam Busters. He brought his skills to Canada but unfortunately he worked on the Avro Arrow, the great Canadian plane disaster. As a result, late in life, he had been relegated to his current position. Mr. Jones was not a storyteller, he had confided this information to a small group of us after class.
It was clear that Mr. Jones was not a teacher in the traditional sense of the word, yet he tried to spark in us an interest in his subject areas, where he was extremely knowledgeable. Mr. Jones loved us all. On warm days, he would take us outside and we would sit on the rocks beside the school and take turns reading from the physics text. This may have worked for Socrates but it only encouraged day dreaming in our group. We all loved Mr. Jones probably more because we realized that he had lived the adventures which Mr. Jacks only dreamed of, but in the end memories were all that he had to show for it.
Having proven in grade nine that my linguistic abilities were negligible, I was one of seven class members who opted for commerce over Latin. The commerce program was designed for those who would not go beyond high school, indeed for those who would not go beyond grade ten. It included courses in typing, bookkeeping and business machines. I had taken typing in grade nine and was ready to move up to Marketing and Business Law. My ambition was to go beyond high school, a single year of Latin not withstanding.
Mr. Roberts was as businesslike as you could get teaching a bunch of soon to be dropouts. I can remember typing class when in the middle of his lecture someone would accidentally lean on a return key and the old machine would react with a crash and a "ding" which identified the guilty party. In marketing, Mr. Roberts recognized the potential of the seven of us who were out of place, and set his exams such that the other members of the class had to answer four of five questions on a test but we had to answer all five. Despite this, I did well and my first class scores made me glad I had not taken Latin.
Mr. Roberts had some unusual talents. For example, he was a calligraphist. One day he wrote the word salesmanship right across the twenty feet of blackboard at the front of the room and it looked beautiful. If that didn’t earn respect, nothing could. Mr. Roberts was also in charge of the finances for the students’ council. As treasurer, I spent many an hour after school balancing books with him. I remember the first afternoon that I presented myself to him.
"Where’s your pen?" he asked.
"I don’t have one," I said rather meekly.
"A treasurer should never be without a pen," he stated bluntly. I carried a pen for over twenty years, even though I was only treasurer for ten months.
Mr. Roberts showed me how to count coins faster than any bank teller and balance books to discover how much had been lost at the last dance. Part of our shortfall was due to the physical education teacher taking home a crate of pop as payment for being chaperone. Mr. Richards was good enough to recover the "leakage" as he called it.
Mr. Thomas was our home room teacher. A rugged man from the northeast of England, he had a love of the world, of life, and of learning. It was in his geography classes that I had my first introduction to the natural wonders of the world beyond my little town. He encouraged learning through deduction rather than by rote. He fostered individual achievement and challenge. His favorite question was, "what do you think about that?" Mr. Thomas’ bus trips were to limestone caves and ancient lake bottoms, both of which looked like farmer’s fields to the uninitiated. Rather than asking us to see a world which could be, he drew us into a world which once was. One might think that would have been the job of the history teacher.
Down the hall was Mrs. Halton’s classroom. This was the year that I would have her for modern world history. Mrs. Halton still lived in the dark ages. She was lean and wrinkled and balanced her yardstick like a slave driver’s whip on a Greek galley. Indeed, she ran a tight ship; main headings double underlined, other headings single underlined, in red. My book was inspected every few weeks until that day at the end of June when it was burnt with the trash.
Mrs. Halton knew everything. She would relate the events of the Second World War as if it were a personal memoire. She would slowly remove her glasses from the tip of her nose to create a gentle emotional effect and then suddenly snap them back into place for dramatic emphasis. This was usually followed by the lowering of her head and surveillance of the class from over the top of her glasses.
To embellish her lectures, Mrs. Halton liked to show films. The school had a policy of training students to operate the projectors as the vice-principal had found this to be easier than training the staff. I was one of five students in the class who had taken the training. True to form, Mrs. Halton always ran the projector herself. As a result, the films always had a black line in the middle with the top of the picture at the bottom of the screen. I think she thought it had something to do with the age of the film rather than her lack of knowledge of the frame button. They were old movies to be sure. Full of tanks and air raids and then suddenly a freeze frame picture of Mussolini and the narrator would say, "if you see this man, kill him!" I’m not sure if Mrs. Halton knew that the Duce was already dead.
Mrs. Halton also seemed to be unaware of the volume control, for all her films were shown at "maximum". Not only did her room echo with the whistle of falling bombs and the inevitable crash of impact, but so did the rest of the school. One day when we were next door in English class, we waited for the familiar whistle of bombs and then all ducked under our desks as the great roar of impact came through the walls. Mr. Jacks excused himself to "go and borrow some chalk." After that the air raids were less frequent.
I worked hard for Mrs. Halton and yet my marks never seemed to reflect this effort. At some point during the spring I began to realize that there was a correlation between a student’s success in the class and the social standing of their family in the community. She never liked me. My blue collar family meant that I should be out sweeping chimneys or cleaning stables, not in her classroom. I didn’t resent this attitude, after all, there were things she hated more than commoners. Bill, the class pacifist, tried to question the bombing of Hiroshima one day and was bluntly asked, "how would you like Japs walking down your main street?" He was tempted to suggest to her that it was no longer fashionable to call people from Japan, "Japs", but held his peace. Peter Smith, was a new kid in class. On his first day he had somehow allowed his socialist leanings to show. Mrs. Halton finished her first conversation with him by saying, "well, if you like it so much, why don’t you go live in Russia for a year." Given his likelihood of success in her class after that encounter, he might as well have taken her up on it.
Mrs. Halton had her favourites too. April Walters was a bit rebellious but her father was a prominent lawyer. Linda Hamilton’s parents owned the largest retail store in town and she might have become a world class tennis player but she married a rich tennis player and retired at twenty one. Then of course there was Mrs. Halton’s only daughter, who always did very well, and repaid her mother by eloping with the school’s other history teacher. If Mrs. Halton’s goal was to have us memorize world history, she was a success. If she had any other goals, they failed.
In contrast, Mr. Thomas inspired learning of all kinds. He was the ideal model for a future teacher. As the year progressed it became increasing clear that Mr. Thomas was having difficulty maintaining the level of physical activity we had grown to expect. Cancer drained away his ability to do the things he loved, but it could not remove the sparkle from his eyes. Mr. Thomas died that summer and never got to see the influence he had on me and many other members of the class. We have all learned how to question the world around us.
Mr. Jacks taught us to use our imaginations and to see the potential of the world around us. He stayed on at the high school for a few years after I graduated but passed away long before retirement, another victim of cancer. Mr. Roberts taught me to be practical in my dealings with the world, to remember the bottom line, and to keep a little bit of whimsy alive for special occasions. He settled into a happy retirement. Mr. Jones always gave me hope. He continued on at the high school and died of old age while I was at college. Mrs. Halton also continued to the bitter end. She eventually retired and still lives in the town. I never met her after graduation, but I always wanted to thank her. In her peculiar way she tipped the scales for me between studying history or geography in my senior year and then at university.
It was my geography training that took me around the world including, despite Mrs. Halton’s warnings, Japan and Russia before I was twenty five and I had lived in five countries before I was thirty. By middle age I had come to know all of this vast country we call Canada, but in that one year at high school I learned a great deal. I learned to value the past but not try to live in it. I learned to search for a positive future. I learned that growth only comes through change, and that is what I have become.