My Brilliant (?) Teaching Career

    When I was attending university, I couldn’t really decide what I wanted to do in life.  My mother said, “Why not major in education, you can always get a job as a teacher.”

    Since I couldn’t make up my mind about other majors, that is what I did.  It worked out well for me because it did enable me to immigrate to Canada, where I found a teaching job available up in a lumber mill, a teaching job that no Canadian would take.  I was happy to take the job teaching in the remote (no roads in, just fly-in) one-room school.  Above you can see a photo of me and my school.

    While many people talk about starting at the bottom and working their way up.  My teaching career took the opposite track.  I started at the top and worked my way down.  In that first teaching job, I was the whole school.  I was the principal, the teacher, the maintenance man, the secretary, and even the “bus” driver (actually it was a pickup truck that I drove down to the shore of Takla Lake to pick up the kids from an First Nations family that lived down there.) 

    After 3 years of teaching in the isolated camp, my wife and I needed to get out, and I took a teaching job in Avola, BC.  There my position declined somewhat.  I was no longer a principal, but was given the title “Head Teacher” in the two-room school.  As I mentioned in the past, we hated living in Avola, despite having a highway where we could actually drive away to other places. 

    A year was enough time to spend in Avola, so after the school year was over I resigned and we moved to McBride, BC.  I didn’t have a teaching job there, but we bought a home, and I hoped that a job would materialize.  I put my name on the substitute teacher’s list, and did a lot of subbing, but a full time job never materialized, and eventually I got a job making maps for the BC Forest Service.  

    Thus ended my teaching career, from principal to substitute teacher in just 5 years.

You can see my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca