Ten Months As A Teacher - Part Five, by Dave Jaffe

        Ten Months As A Teacher by Dave Jaffe. Part Five


     The superintendant of the Powell River School system showed up in my classes in the spring of 1970. I'd thought when I first spoke to him in 1969 that he was a sympathetic person. He may have been but now he judged me as a teacher and his report on me was anything but positive.
     "This man is not a good teacher," the report said in effect. "This teacher is inefficient and doesn't know how to fulfill his duties." This is how I remember the report. Yet whatever it said precisely it was surely negative. The report didn't surprise me because I certainly didn't do things that other teachers had like get involved in after-school activities.
     The superintendent made his report in May I think. With less than two months left in the school year I just about signed off from teaching. I'd tried to teach my classes Shakespeare's 'MacBeth', William Golding's 'Lord of the Flies' Mark Twain's 'Huckleberry Finn' and some mainstream poetry. Obviuosly I'd failed at my task.
     After I'd read the report, I read a play with a Grade Ten class. The play was on the Grade 12 cirriculum but who cared? "It passes the time," I told a fellow teacher. "And the students seem to enjoy it." Sometimes with other classes I would tell the students about poverty in The Third World. Most students got bored and some of them even went to sleep as I droned on.
     When the school year ended I got a present from my home room Grade Ten class. I was surprised and even kissed the young lady who gave it to me. Yet before that happened and school closed up for the summer, I'd clashed with about four students in one of my Grade 11 classes. They threw eggs at my basement suite windows one night. So some students liked me. Others surely didn't.
     Then it was all over for me. So for the very last time in 1970 I hopped on a Greyhound bus one June day and made my way back to Vancouver. I felt relieved to leave Powell River. Yet I also felt defeated. After all, I had failed at my first big job of being a teacher.
    When the bus dropped me off on Denman Street in Vancouver's West End late in the day I shuffled back to my father's apartment . For the next two months I once again plugged back into the joys of living in a city. I watched one film after another, some of which I'd seen before. And how nice it was to sit in a restaurant or a library for hours on end and never worry about upcoming classes. I felt lucky beyond belief to live in a city with its nice gyms, shopping malls, swimming pools, well-stocked libraries, buses and trolleys, tidy beaches and lovely manicured parks.
    And there was another positive feature of living in Vancouver. "No one knows me here," I explained to a friend. "I want to live anonymously. I couldn't do that in Powell River." For a while I did feel happy.