Teaching in the Titanic Era!

The B.C Legislature has passed a bill to stop the teachers strike.Here’s the article in the Globe and Mail

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/british-columbia/bc-politics/bc-legislature-passes-bill-to-end-teachers-strike/article2370908/

That, I guess, is good news for me, as my Threshold Girl Story, Threshold Girl

about a College Girl in 1911/1912 Quebec, and my Tighsolas website are used primarily by classrooms in BC. Go figure!  OISE (the Ontario Institute for the Study of Education) has printed out a copy for their stacks,because the girl, Flora Nicholson, is studying to be a teacher at Macdonald Teachers College, in Ste.Anne de Bellevue (McGill Normal School.) This story is ALL about teaching! They still used slates back then. Today they use iPads! Think about the changes that teaching has gone through. Marion Nicholson, Flora’s older sister who is already teaching in Montreal in 1911, went on to head the Montreal Teacher’s Union during the war! I’m writing her story, too, as a follow up.

Anyway, I am an education writer, or was one, and I dug us this little piece I wrote about 10 years ago, in support of teachers. I was a writer (a PAID writer) for a new online venture called Moms Online, which got folded into Oprah’s Oxygen Network and then dissolved.

What Makes a Great Teacher?

What makes a great teacher? We all have our opinions. Some say great
teachers are born, that it’s “in the blood,” while others assert great
teachers are made — that teachers enter the profession with little knowledge
and experience and require a great deal of practice and mentoring by more
experienced teachers to be successful.

An active parent-volunteer once told me that the only reason she began
volunteering in her son’s school was to keep an eye on things and to make
sure he got the best teachers.

We’ve all been there; we’ve all heard it: parents gossip about how great one
teacher is, and how bad another is.

I’ve always tended to leave the decision of where to place my child with the
principal, who once told me that it’s more important to match a child’s
temperament and learning style with a teacher’s temperament and teaching
style than for any child to get “the most popular” teacher.

Still, working on another assignment last summer, I had the privilege of
interviewing some terrific teachers as well as the parents and principals who
admired them. Despite the fact that these teachers represented many
different grades and levels of experience and came from a wide range of
geographical locations, they tended to exhibit many of the same qualities:

- empathy and enthusiasm;
- dedication to the profession and a love of children;
- the ability to see each child as an individual and to bring out the best in
each child;
- the ability to challenge the children;
- a firm but fair teaching style;
- and the wherewithal to bring parents into the process, communicating early
and often, before major problems arise.

It seemed that good teachers exhibit many of the same qualities as good
parents: I was humbled, I tell you, hearing about these gifted
professionals. I decided to investigate a little deeper…

I phoned a representative of the National Teacher of the Year organization
who agreed: past National Teachers of the Year tended to have these very
qualities, cited above. I looked up the web site of the Prime Minister’s
Awards for Teaching Excellence, in Canada, our equivalent of National Teacher
of the Year. The web site claimed that teachers were selected on the basis
of their ability to “achieve outstanding results with students; to inspire to
learn and continue to learn; to equip them with the knowledge, attitudes and
abilities that they will need to succeed in tomorrow’s society and economy.”

Esther, a poster on the Moms Online Education Board, offers this opinion:
“My kids have had all kinds of teachers. The best ones had two things in
common: they knew and treated each child like an individual, and they could
see The Big Picture.”

Kelly, another poster, agrees. “I personally like a teacher who can teach to
the individual… a very difficult thing when there are 25 students in one
room.” Kelly prefers teachers who are organized and who can communicate
openly with parents. She doesn’t think teachers, necessarily, have to invite
parents into the classroom as volunteers.

Moms Online member Shelly claims that a good teacher is one who understands
the needs of the individual students, who is up-to-date on teaching
techniques and curriculum, and who sets reasonable and appropriate goals for
students and communicates these to the students and their families.

LDRS MOM Tea, Education Board volunteer host, says, “The best teacher my son
had called up every parent during the first week of school and asked them
what they thought were their children’s strengths, weaknesses, and needs. I
felt included from Day One.”

As with last month’s query “What is the purpose of education?,” the answer to
“What makes a good teacher?” is far from simple or clear-cut.

Granted, the teaching profession has changed over the years and is still
changing: What it takes to be a great teacher today is quite different from
what it took forty years or even twenty years ago. More is required of
teachers today. In the past, a teacher’s job was to “lecture” and make sure
the kids learned the subjects; today a teacher must also be an empathetic,
caring individual… sometimes to the extent of being a social worker. Older
teachers point out that kids have changed dramatically too — they don’t
respect authority as much.

One aspect related to teaching, however, hasn’t changed and is not likely to
in the future: ALL teachers (master teachers or not, award-winning or not)
have the power to turn lives around — and that is an awesome power indeed.

Dorothy Nixon is a Montreal-based freelance journalist and longtime Moms
Online contributor who got her start as a hack penning 30-second radio ads to
impossibly tight deadlines. She got her “online” break right here at Moms
Online many, many moons ago. Today, Dorothy writes about many cultural and
social issues, focusing more and more on education. She edited an education
quarterly in Quebec for 4 years in the ’90s and just completed a 4-year stint
on the board of the Center for Literacy, a Montreal-based think tank and
training center for treachers. Dorothy studied Communications at McGill in
the ’70′s. Her favorite book in high school was Brave New World — and that
probably explains more about why she is writing this column than anything
else.

The More Things Change..

Jules Crepeau, Director of City Services.

Today, I saw that Montreal’s Police Force was coming under fire for being soft on organized crime.  It came up on my Google News as it is set for “Quebec” (automatically I guess) but it’s a Vancouver Sun article reprint of a Postmedia article by Henry Aubin. According to Aubin Montreal has a huge police force that is very ineffective, against all crime.

Hmm. That’s what they said in 1927 with the Coderre Report. It’s all in my play MIlk and Water  -about Montreal in the Jazz Age, where I have my grandfather, Jules Crepeau, Director of City Services have a talk with my husband’s grandfather, Thomas Wells, Westmount Businessman.

Anyway, another article in the same box is from the Montreal Gazette: Best Treated Minority? Think Again. Apparently, an economic think tank has come out with figures showing that Angl0-Quebeckers are underfunded. Surprise! I have written before how virtually all projects focusing on Anglo Arts are funded by ONE government agency, Heritage Canada that also funds French outside of Quebec and since we’re ‘a minority within a minority’ we get short shrift. I’ve given up on ever getting any funding for my projects, which don’t fit the bill anyway. They are big into funding projects to do with the Military these days.  It’s all a scam, let’s face it. It’s all about Control.

But this article, by Don MacPherson discusses a report that compared Provincial funding across Canada for minorities and apparently, Quebec came out dead last for funding for minority language by far.

How is this a surprise, tho?

It’s sad that Anglo schools are poorly funded though. As I have written elsewhere, in the 1960′s the Protestant School Board of Greater Montreal was the best performing in North America.

And so many of these students went on to brilliant careers, mostly in Ontario.

I was thinking of this last night. Sometimes I play this game, where I try to invoke a ‘new’ childhood memory… It seldom works.. But last night I remembered my grade six play. I won the lead, the Princess.  I recalled going to the audition, wearing this old purple sweater I had.  We wore tunics in those days, uniforms, but there were still opportunities to show off nice clothes. I had none. (My mother had grown up rich as my play Milk and Water shows, and didn’t know how  to manage a family on a middle class budget.

Anyway, I went to the audition after school and the director was not a school teacher, but some ‘older’ woman who looked like Agnes Moorehead – who we knew as Samatha’s mother on Bewitched. Everyone made fun of that, and then they made fun of my sweater (can’t recall the context, I think because it was “royal” purple and our play as about Royalty. It had a Prince Charming. A spinning wheel. I guess it was Cinderella/Rapunzel.

So, as I said, I won the lead, perhaps because of my sad sweater (maybe Agnes Moorehead was sorry for me)… Then again, at the performance, (I recall being scared to death and HATING being on stage), my Dad said I was the only one who articulated properly.

Anyway, Prince Charming was a guy called Lorne Abugov and he refused to kiss me, (as 11 years olds tend to do) which was traumatizing enough. I think (although not 100 percent sure) that Lorne’s brother is Jeff, a man who went on to write for Hollywood, and on top shows. Cheers the Golden Girls, producer Roseanne and now he’s producer of Two and a Half Men.

Well,  maybe not a typical career of a former ango-Montrealer, but an example.

 

As it happens, I’m getting to work on Diary of a Confirmed Spinster, about two teachers in 1910, (Edith and Marion Nicholson) the follow up to Threshold Girl and I am contemplating that angle, wondering exactly how classrooms ran in those days. Probably not unlike the way they ran in my day. Marion left behind a diary during her first year of teaching, but it’s all about her boyfriends and her activities at the skating rink. No shop talk. (Well, I guess diaries for teachers are considered an invasion of privacy. Tell that to What’s his name, Gervais Gervase Phinn, the guy who writes his experiences about North Yorkshire schools.) Or maybe they don’t have time to keep work diaries. Marion didn’t have time with her 50 ‘very bad’ students. Or maybe teachers, as a rule, are ‘action=oriented’ not introspective. Marion was totally action-oriented. That’s why she became a union leader during the War.)

I know a diary exists at Harvard, of a more serious girl who did no dating….

Apparently teachers who were interested in getting boyfriends (the majority) didn’t mention that they were teachers. A teacher was not a profession that attracted the boys. So it goes. Marion was an exception and this makes Edith jealous (in my story).

Everything is Point of View

Left: Flo on the beach near Boston in 1908.

I posted this picture in an earlier blog, stylized a bit, but now I’ve re-scanned it and posted a clearer version. This is probably the clearest picture I have in the Tighsolas Photo Album of young Flora Nicholson.

The next clearest photo would be a studio shot for McGill Normal School – and that’s three years on in my story of Flo in the City, about a girl coming of age in the pivotal 1908-1913 period in Canada.

As I write the first chapter Just a Change of Colour right here on this blog, and as I work out the fourth installment, I have come to a realization: I have to write this from Flora’s Point of View.

I have known this from the beginning of my project, but now I FEEL it. I am starting to put myself plunk in Flora’s place to write this. I am starting to inhabit her, which means she will become a bit like me. And that’s odd as I am more like her older sister Edith, I think.

This is a bit of a trick, as most of the Tighsolas letters are written by Margaret, Norman and Edith.

In 1908, there exists only one letter by Flora. She doesn’t write home, for she is at home. From what her correspondents say, she isn’t big on writing letters period, and I will ascribe this to her lack of self esteem.

She is often spoken about in the letters, of course. This was a close family.

Still, it is only when she is at teaching school that she writes home regularly, that would be in 1911. And, to be honest, I have to draw on letters written in 1914 and beyond, to steal some of her figures of speech.

So, in this next scene, I have Margaret going to Three Rivers, but I can’t write about that event: I have to write about the girls at home.

I will have Marion coming from Montreal to take care of Flora and cousin Mae Watters. Mae will have ‘teaching’ on her mind, as this is her last year at school and her sister asked her if she wanted to go into that profession in the letter in the last installment.

So here I can get in some descriptions of McGill Normal School and what it is like to teach in a country and city school. (This was a key issue in the era, the problem of rural schools and of city schools.)

I will use Marion’s diary from the previous year to reveal what she does in her spare time in Richmond. I will reveal Marion’s formidable take-charge character. (She became a union leader later on.)

All from Flo’s Point of View. Flo, who is failing at school. Flo who is the only one at home now, with her mother. Flo who is sheltered from problems, but who knows that the Nicholson’s fortunes have fallen dramatically, if not irreversibly, in the past year…and that nothing will be easy for any of the girls from now on. That is unless one of them marries well – and how likely is that?

In the scene where Marion advises Mae about a career in teaching, Mae will innocently turn to Flo and ask: Where do you see yourself five years from now? The question Flo has been avoiding. Flo, frazzled to be met with such a blunt question, will answer, “I will take up public speaking and become a suffragette, a militant brick throwing one, I will live in London.”

Marion: Well, Mother will be pleased, that’s for certain. But how will you eat?

Flo: Edith will support me, as she will marry that boy, what is his name, that friend of Gordon’s, who dropped in at Easter, the one who is studying dentistry at McGill

Marion: And we all know there is money in dentistry.

Flo: And you, well, by that time you will be principal of Royal Arthur. No better, principal of that brand new school in Westmount, Roslyn.

Mae: A much better class of student.

Flo: Yes. And Marion will meet a well-off widower, the father of one of her pupils, and marry him and move into a mansion on the Boulevard.

Marion: This conversation started out sensible enought, but it certainly has taken a turn for the silly. Let’s see about tea.