Ten Months as a Teacher by Dave Jaffe - Part One

     Ten Months as a Teacher - Part One


     Leanna Leakey (which was not her real name) was a pain in my behind. A blonde attractive 15 year old, she was one of about 30 students in a Grade 10 English class I was teaching in the fall of 1969 in Powell River.
    Every time she came to class she caused me problems. She would talk loudly, gossip to her friends, ignore my asking to be silent and made fun of me.  "You are a strange weird sort of person," she wrote in effect about me in a story which I assigned her to do. I thought that if she wrote a story about why she didn't like my class, she would stop causing me troubles in my. Instead it just made things worse between us.
    At last I persuaded her to leave my class and go to the school library to read the books I assigned.
She agreed with this and so did another unhappy student in the same class. Rick Malima (again this wasn't his real name) was a big strapping hockey player who starred in one of the local hockey leagues. He was taking Grade 10 English for the second time.
     "It's just a waste of time for him," one teacher told me. "He doesn't want to be in an English class period. He's still angry that he failed English last year." At times I felt like Leanna, Rick and Ronald (which again wasn't his real name). Ronald was a big tough guy in another and smaller Grade 10 English class I was teaching. "I don't want to take this class," he told me in the first class I taught him. "I hate English. It's just junk."
     (Naturally I'm citing all these statements from memory. So the words hurled my way may have been a little different. Yet that's how I remember them). Now after a bare two weeks teaching English in the two story Max Cameron senior secondary school, I often felt frustrated. I had endless pieces of paper to fill out, attendance forms to get right and what it seemed was a whole lot of work to do.These never endings tasks I felt had nothing to do with teaching English to Grade 10 and 11 students.
     Anyway here I was, a 27 year old slacker who really didn't want to teach period. I wanted to stay in Vancouver, and lounge around in some old rickety rooming house. And there were plenty of such rooming houses  in Vancouver in 1969. In these relatively low rent places I could read progressive and/or new age books as well as novels from many countries.
     Yet I'd ended up teaching in Powell River because I needed money, and I became a teacher because I thought it would be an easy thing to do. But it wasn't easy and I quickly saw I didn't belong in a classroom and certainly not as a teacher. "I'm a learner, not a teacher," a middle aged teacher tells his son in John Updike's novel 'The Centaur'. That was me. Yet I ended up in the mill town of Powell River, a few hundred kilometres north of Vancouver. I was out of place here and out of sorts.
       (End of Part One).