Ten Months As A Teacher by Dave Jaffe. Part Two

         Part Two of "Ten Months As A Teacher'


    "Powell River is 100 kilometres and five days from Vancouver," one student at Max Cameron High School where I was teaching in the fall of 1969 told me. He exaggerated a bit but certainly it took time to reach this mill town of about 10,000 people. The town was named after Israel Wood Powell, who in the early 20th century was the superintendent of Indian Affairs in B.C. In 1908 a pulp mill started up and people flocked to the area to work in the mill.
     To get to Powell River from Vancouver  in 1969 usually took time. If you drove to the mill town you drove up to Horseshoe Bay in West Vancouver. Then you got on a ferry that took you to Langdale. The rain usually pelted down as you drove off the ferry and headed north. As you drove or sat in a bus as I did, you could look to the left and gaze out at the waters of the Georgia Straight. Or you could look to the right where mountain and trees towered above you.
     This twisting, turning drive along what's called "The Sunshine Coast' took some time. One man who stayed at Gibson's a then small but now growing town on the coast, said way back in 1967, "I sure didn't see much sunshine when I stayed  for the winter in Gibson's." After at least a two hour drive you got on a small ferry at Earl's Cove .This ferry ride left you at Saltery Bay. Or have I named the ferry terminals the wrong way  around? I can't remember now.
     Once your second ferry ride ends you've arrived you're in the township of Powell River. Another short drive would take you near the mill and the town.
    The whole journey from Vancouver to Powell River usually took over five hours. Now of course you could have taken a plane ride from Vancouver Airport to Powell River and in 25 minutes you'd be in the town. But of course that trip cost a lot more money than taking the Greyhound bus as I usually did.
      Another entry point to the town  was from Vancouver Island. Here you could take the ferry that went from Comox to Powell River.  The ferry churned through  grey or blue waters to the town. I never came to Powell River from this direction so I can't report on this journey.   Still which ever way you came, delays or or obstacles to the ferries running, like storms or mechanical ferry failures could stretch out your travelling time even more. And when the winter fog settled on top of the town the plane rides in and out of the place were cancelled.
       So that was it. Truly Powell River was a long way from Vancouver or Victoria. On the map though it looked close by. Yet travelling time could stretch out to six hours or more. Year later when I re-visited Powell River I was asked what I thought of it now. "It's still pretty isolated," I replied. "That unfortunately hasn't changed."

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).
    
     
    
   
    

Death and How To Avoid It - Part Seven by Dave Jaffe

        Part Seven


    There are thousands of diets out there but if you're looking for one way to extend your life the best way is become a vegan. It does seem that vegetarians live longer than those who eat meat, chicken, eggs and butter. By doing this you'll not only help yourself, you'll also help the planet.
     About 20 per cent of global warming comes from raising cattle and other animals. In his book 'Diet For A New America'  one author praised the virtues of vegetarianism and points out  that switching to a plant diet is a very good thing. I am a vegan now and rarely eat any animal food. There are other diets that may lengthen your life but a vegan diet I conclude is one way to avoid an early death.
   This is the last part of my posting 'Death and How To Avoid It'.

Death and How To Avoid It - Part Six by Dave Jaffe

    Part Six


          In part five of this story I told of how I met a rich man who boasted that he got to his present affluent state all on his own. Like many successful people he refused to acknowledge how lucky he'd been.  Suppose now that this man had been born into a First Nation family. Once again he wouldn't be living as long as many Caucasian Canadians do.
    Half of all First Nations children are poor. And many of them as they grow up die long before they turn sixty years old. Attawapiskat is yet another impoverished First Nations reserve in Canada. Its chief once went on a hunger strike to protest the terrible conditions that many of the reserve's 2,000 people were living in.
     In April 2016, 11 people in Attawapiskat tried to kill themselves. First Nations people, not just women but men too often live in the most deplorable conditions. They huddle together in very crowded houses. Many of them drop out of school before they graduate. Some sniff glue, shoot up heroin, drink themselves to death, and often die violent deaths. Not all First Nations people are poor or violent. Many aboriginal Canadians work hard and do get an education.Yet far too many die at an early age, especially if they're living in isolated communities in Canada's north.
     The cause of their despair is the Caucasian men who flooded into Canada from the 17th century on. They pushed a side the First Nations onto ever shrinking reserves and later herded young natives into terrible residential schools. "When the white man came to Africa," the U.S. writer James Baldwin wrote, "the white man had the Bible and the black man had the land. Soon the white man had the land and the black man had the Bible."
    The same thing happened in Canada to aboriginal groups. One day these people who were the first inhabitants of this country will be full citizens of Canada. Yet that days hasn't so far arrived. Right now a First Nations person is far more likely to die at an earlier age than most other Canadians.
    All the world's people live in a hierarchy. How long you live depends upon where you're lodged in the hierarchy. Many of the 7 billion people who live in this world live on the lower rungs of the ladder. They were just born in the wrong time in the wrong place. So death hovers over them much more closely than those born in a different time and a richer place.
     

Death and How To Avoid It - Part Five by Dave Jaffe

               Part Five


     Eduardo dos Santos is getting on in years. He's head of Angola, a sizeable African country whose western border hugs a large part of the south west coast of Africa. Angola is yet another African country whose history is full of conflict. Dos Santos's party the MPLA or in English the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola has been in power for many years. It took power in 1975 when the MPLA finally threw out the Portuguese colonizers.
     To get in power in Angola,the MPLA had to fight a vicious war against the Portuguese rulers.Then it had to fight off two other mostly black groups. Last it ended up fending off a U.S. backed army that ravaged Angola for at least ten years.  Final death count from all of this conflict? About two million people.
     "Anatomy is destiny," the famed psychiatrist Sigmund Freud once said. Freud's brand of therapy once was called 'The talking therapy and' is no longer so popular. In any case Freud was wrong about anatomy. Anatomy isn't destiny: Geography is.
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    If you're born in Angola you're not going to live a long time. You're probably going to die at about the age of 51. The average Angolan in short has a life span of less than two thirds of the average Canadian. Angola's not alone here. Alongside Angola there are 12 other African countries whose citizens don't live much past 50 years either.
      Now Angola shouldn't be poor and if it wasn't,  its citizens would live a lot longer. It's a country chockful of oil, diamonds and other valuable minerals. Its government alas is one of he most corrupt governments on earth. And its rulers who were once gun toting Marxists, are very rich and now support free enterprise to the hilt.
In Luanda, Angola's capital city, millions of people just struggle to survive. Meanwhile Angola's small ruling clique are very rich multi-millionaires. The 21 million people of Angola teach us a valuable lesson: Luck often determines whether we live a long life or don't.
      "I go to where I'm at,  all by myself." one rich man told me at a political meeting. "I worked hard to make my money and no government has the right to take it away from me." Like many other rich and not so rich Canadians, this man ignores how lucky he's been. If he'd have been born a black Angolan, he'd either have been dead by nowor would be eking out a bare existence in some impoverished village or just surviving in an urban slum. Instead he's driving around Vancouver in an expensive Audi. Luck doesn't figure in his calculations. Yet it should.
    
   

Death and How To Avoid It - Part Four by Dave Jaffe

              Part Four


           Smoking tobacco and drinking alcohol will lop years off your life. And so does  using certain types of illegal drugs. Marjorie, which is not her real name, was the mother of a heroin addict. "My son caused me many problems," Marjorie told me one day. "He used to steal doctors' prescription pads, hang out with thieves, and was often getting stopped by the police."
     Marjorie lived into her nineties. Her son's still alive too, but he's taking methadone these days and not injecting heroin. Mark, which isn't his real name wasn't as lucky as Marjorie's son. He started injecting heroin in his late teens. He overdosed in his late 20's and  died. Another man told me that he became a killer because of heroin. "I needed money for my drug habit," he told me. "I killed a man to get the money."
    Illegal drugs are very expensive because they're illegal. Once someone gets addicted to heroin or cocaine, they have to find some big money to feed their habit. Many addicted women become street prostitutes which is a very dangerous profession. Serial killer Robert Pickton boasted of killing 60 women. I'd bet that many of these women were cocaine or heroin addicts and sold their bodies on the street.
    Men addicted to heroin or cocaine usually turn to crime too. They steal from stores, try to hold up banks, deal illegal drugs or turn to fraud. All these activities can shorten your life.
     Of course, not all people who try heroin or cocaine get addicted to them. These people may shoot up heroin or snort cocaine once in a while. Yet even here casual use of these drugs can shorten your life. In the first nine months of 2016, close to 450 people died in British Columbia after injecting heroin. Both cocaine and heroin are often laced with fentanyl that can kill a drug user right away.
     One man told me, "Heroin addicts are human beings too. They should not be demonized."  This is true. Still, if you want to keep alive and healthy, it's a good idea to stay away from hard illegal drugs. They're nothing but trouble.
     
    
    

Death and How To Avoid It - Part Three by Dave Jaffe

     Part Three



     He was one of Canada's most famous novelists. And he disliked the man who became one of Quebec's most famous premiers.
     The novelist was Mordecai Richler, a Montrealer born and bred. The man whose policies Richler really disliked was the very short Rene Levesque who was born in Quebec's Gaspe area. A famous journalist, Levesque devoted most of his political career to setting up an independent Quebec. Richler never learned to speak French, disliked Levesque's politics and distrusted his nationalism.
    "From the beginning," Richler wrote, "French Canadian nationalism has been badly tainted by racism."
A secular Jew, Richler pointed out in his book 'O Canada, O Quebec', that many French Canadians loathed Jews in the past and that some French Canadians still do now. Richler saw a direct link between the  anti-Semitic nationalism preached by the early 20th century writer Abbe Lionel Groulx and the sovereigntist nationalism embraced by the Parti Quebecois that Rene Levesque headed up for many years.
     Nor did Richler like Levesque personally. "My enduring feeling about Rene Levesque," Richler wrote, "is that if he had chosen to hang me, even as he tightened the rope around my neck, he would have complained how humiliating it was for him to spring the trap door."So Richler didn't like Levesque for pushing Quebec to separate from Canada and Levesque probably didn't like Richler. Yet these two opponents did have two fatal habits in common. They both smoked tobacco and drank alcohol. And because they did this, they both died long before they should have.
    Levesque was born in 1922 and died in 1987. He was only 65 when he passed away and was rarely seen in public without a cigarette in his mouth.  Richler who was born in 1931 died in 2001. He too smoked continously and drank alcohol nearly every day at one of his favourite watering holes in Montreal. Even after he had been operated on for cancer, Richler kept on smoking and inhaling deadly cigarillos. He never stopped drinking alcohol either.
     Both men's lives point out what is now obvious: If you want to live a long life don't smoke or drink. They're both poisonous. Smoking cigarettes lops at least nine years off your life. Every year 19,000 Canadians die from lung cancer and most of these people got this deadly form of cancer from smoking. Also if you smoke cigarettes you're far more likely to get a stroke or be crumpled up by a heart attack.
     Drinking alcohol also cuts years off your life. Every year more than 4,000 Canadians die from alcohol abuse. These alcoholics die in car crashes or in drunken brawls. They're also far more likely to be men than women. Or they pass away from cirrhosis of the liver or other illnesses caused by alcohol. Over 3 million Canadians are risking death by drinking. And close to four and one half million expose themselves to risk when they down  alcohol . Drinking can shorten anyone's life. It's deadly. Then there's other dangerous drugs out there that I'll talk about next time.