My Brilliant (?) Teaching Career

         When I was attending university, I couldn’t really decide on 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 an isolated lumber mill that no Canadian would take.  I was happy to take the job teaching in the start-up, one-room, school that was so isolated that to get there, you had to fly in.  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 the Native family that lived down there.) 

        After 3 years of teaching in the isolated lumber mill camp, my wife and I had had enough and sought to get out to live somewhere with access to “civilization”, 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 have mentioned in previous blogs, we hated living in tiny Avola, despite it having TV and radio reception, and a highway that allowed us to actually drive to other places. 

        That long year was more than 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 waiting for me 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.   I did eventually get a full time job drawing maps for the BC Forest Service.  

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

        I recently came across the photo below, showing the teaching staff at the McBride Elementary School.  The photo has always been a puzzle to me.  That is me standing in the back row.   I was never part of the teaching staff, I just happened to be called in one day as a substitute teacher and that just happened to be the day the school pictures were taken.  The regular teaching staff insisted that I be in the photo even though I was very reluctant, saying that it didn’t seem right.

Take a look at my paintings:  davidmarchant2.ca