Hometown Teacher Heroes

Dear Teachers,

Greetings, and congratulations. I am finally getting around to telling all of you, what a great job you did with me as your student. I made a few mistakes in my life – some of them big – but by and large, I made out alright. I could never have done it without your help. Anyway, I just wanted to let you know, what heroes you were to me during the time that I was with you in school. In fact, you did such an impressive job, that I became a teacher myself, hoping to pass on all I learned from you, to students here and there around the entire planet.

The first hero amongst you, that I need to mention is my Grade-One teacher – Miss Campbell. Miss Campbell was like an angel from heaven. I was sure that she swooped down, from up above, each morning, directly into our little cottage-school classroom, hung up her wings in the cloak room and began to prepare the place for the onslaught of humanity soon to arrive. Each evening she would tidy up a little after all of us left and then reattach her wings and drift back up into the clouds with the rest of her angel friends. This image of Miss Campbell – The Angel, persevered in my mind, until one day, while tagging along with my mother in the clothing shop, I came face-to-face with my teacher, thumbing her way through a bin of stockings – surprisingly very similar to what a normal earth person might do.

I remember thinking, “Angels wear socks? Who knew? I need to pay more attention to this woman.”

Miss Campbell was also my first crush. How could she not be? She was the first woman in my life other than my mother, my sister, my aunts and my grandma who doted on me. She was brilliant and funny. She taught me about “Dick & Jane and Zeke the ‘handyman’” and thus she introduced me to the joy of reading – expanding my world-at-the-time, by about a gazillion-fold. And the world did expand – we had the opportunity to travel around the planet each morning, skipping from one country to another as a reward for maintaining our own personal hygiene. She facilitated my discovery of numbers and the magic to be found in mathematics. Halfway through my Grade-One year, Miss Campbell broke my heart though. She got married to another man and changed her name to Mrs. Scoville. You have no idea, what affect her coming-down-to-earth had on me. How does someone just go and change their name like that? How does someone just give up being an angel? How is that even possible? That whole name-change thing was the main topic of conversation around the water fountain and on the playground for days. Even though we had to call her by a different name, she seemed very much like the same angel who had previously stood at the front of our class. She certainly looked the same. She talked the same and laughed the same way as Miss Campbell. She even wore some of same clothes and told some of the same jokes. So eventually, I came to understand the concept of marriage and name-changing and I totally forgave my teacher for running off with another man. She still lived in my home-town and occasionally I saw her walking down the street or in a shop when she wasn’t looking after my friends and I in the classroom. As I look back on the affect she had on me and how she gave such direction to my life – she, indeed, is one of my favorite teacher heroes of all time.

Then there is Miss Roberts. Miss Roberts, in Grade-Two, taught me the importance of discipline and enhanced my reading and speaking ability with her focus on phonics. In Grade-Three, Miss MacLean was perhaps the kindest and sweetest teacher I ever had – so smart and so pretty. She taught me how to find beauty in the world. My Grade-Four teacher became very ill part-way through the school-year so I didn't get to know her very well. She was replaced by Mrs. Gibney. Of all the teachers I have ever had in my life, she was the most energetic and the most fun. We danced, we sang, we played, we did projects and had fairs and festivals. She read us crazy stories about “The Bottle Imp” and “Epomenandus”. And, we learned about Norway. Mrs. Gibney was a lot like Dick Clark. At one time in her teaching life, she taught my mother and now she was teaching me. But she looked the same. She did not age. In fact, she seemed to get younger each time she walked into our classroom.

Grade-Five was the turning point in my life of education. I had so many great contributors in my school career to that point. All of them solidifying, within me, the likelihood of what I was to become later in my life. The finishing touch on that solidification came from Mrs. Smith. During that school year, I was given the opportunity to create, to speak in public and, to be a leader. I was encouraged to take a place on stage and to act and to be funny. I wrote letters to people, all over the world, that I didn't even know, and I was amazed with the responses I got from those same people and government organizations. I learned about the explorers and I lived with them and felt their hopes and fears and excitement. Because of that, I wanted to be an explorer myself. We were all given the chance to give exploration a try ourselves. We went on big field trips and saw as much of the world as we could, given the restrictions of time and money. Mrs. Smith brought a television into our classroom and we followed, with mouths agape, the adventures of Yuri Gagarin and John Glenn as they circled the earth in a capsule only a quarter of the size of our tiny classroom. We had clubs and fundraisers and I got to bring some pigs to school. I got to write stories, lots of stories – some true and some so wild and crazy that Mrs. Smith herself, couldn’t believe they came out of my head. I also got to do my first stand-up comedy routine when a friend and I pretended to interview a Russian Cosmonaut and an American Astronaut. There were so many 'firsts' in my life during my year with Mrs. Smith. Much later in my life, when I became a Minor Baseball coach, I had a chance to visit Mrs. Smith one day so that I could talk to some of my team players in her classroom. Not surprisingly, she was still there – turning little kids into writers and comedians and explorers and actors and world travelers. Mrs. Smith is not only a home-town hero of mine, but probably of every student that could ever ‘hardly wait’ to get into her classroom over the many years that she taught.

The first male teachers that I had, came in Grade-Six, Grade-Seven and Grade-Eight. In fact, for those three years of my school life, I had no female teachers at all. Even though I missed the naturally caring and mothering nature of all the women educators I’d known to that point, the men that followed played a big role in helping me develop as a well-rounded individual.

Mr. Lazaroff loved science, so, naturally I came to love science as well. Mr. Krauss found the best stories and poems for all of us to read and made the study of modern Western Literature really enjoyable and interesting. Mr. Bitz was the coolest teacher I ever had, or ever saw in all of my many, many years of being a student, a parent and a teacher. He dressed like Bobby Darin. He spoke like Robert DeNiro. He wore his hair like John Travolta in “Grease”. He drove a Studebaker and he smoked like a steam engine. I wanted to be him. I, and all my classmates, hung on every word that came out of his mouth. He would walk into the classroom reading a newspaper, bring it down dramatically, with his eyes peering over the top, smack the paper with the back of his hand, just for emphasis, and then begin his lesson with a commentary on Nikita Khrushchev banging his shoe on the podium during a speech he made at the United Nations assembly, or something similar. I don’t know if the world, with all it’s Cold Wars and Space Races and Politics was really as exciting as we thought, but Mr. Bitz certainly made it seem that way.

Mr. Metropolit was a big, big man of Ukrainian descent. His home-town was not originally the same as my home-town but when he became a teacher, all that changed. He wore thick glasses and reportedly, could not see much without them. He wore a mean countenance whenever he became frustrated with the behavior of a student and he wore a face, nearly as mean, when he was happy. He had character to burn and is still probably the most-impersonated teacher of all time by any of the students he ever taught. He had a stump where his right hand had been and he used the stump to rap on the noggins of inattentive students. Despite all of his scary personal qualities, he was a brilliant man. He was the first to successfully frighten me into over-achieving in mathematics. Thankfully, I was already a natural from everything Miss Campbell and Mrs. Smith had taught me previously. His Ukrainian accent added a spicy touch to our French classes as well. I will always admire the passion he displayed for literature. I have such fond memories of studying the novel, “Jean Val Jean” and how Mr. Metropolit would oftentimes remove his glasses, take the handkerchief out of his back pocket and wipe a tear from his eye. His passion for Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shallott” was probably even more pronounced. We studied that poem for months it seemed, line by line. He would recite each line and then explain the beauty and meaning of it. At the end of it all, he encouraged us to – rather demanded that we – learn to recite the entire poem. At the time, I don’t think that any of us learned more than a stanza or two. However, since that time, I have learned to recite the entire poem and can, at the drop of a hat, reel it off with all the passion and enthusiasm worthy of the pride and praise Mr. Metropolit would no doubt have for my performance. I have also written several poems, using the same rhyme-scheme that Tennyson used in “The Lady of Shallott” (“A Poem About Pollution” and “Home For the Senses” – both now published on VOCAL). Because of the influence he had on me at that time and because of the many things I’ve done in my life as a result of his teaching, I indeed consider Mr. Metropolit one of my home-town heroes.

Mr. Sproule was my homeroom teacher in Grade 8. He was ultra-professional. He was a magnificent story-teller and he loved sports – full of the qualities I most admire in any human. Remembering the days in the 1960s, where World Series Baseball games were actually played during daylight hours, he would keep a radio on, in his office, which was just adjacent to our classroom. This, of course, was to facilitate hearing about all the exciting plays and score-changes from inning to inning throughout the games. He taught us Geography and during natural breaks in our discussions of cumulo-nimbus clouds, he would slip into his office and check out the scores. He knew us all very well and who among us cheered for the Twins and who cheered for the Dodgers, so when he returned with the latest game information he would pause and deliberate in just the right way to enhance the level of anticipation in the room to razor sharpness before he actually relinquished the score. I learned as much about teaching from Mr. Sproule in 10 months as I did in all my years of formal teacher training and, he is definitely a hero in my eyes.

High School was a bit of a blur. I don’t remember so many of the affects that teachers had on me, because there were so many other agents of change working to influence my development as a young man. I was ill for the first month of Grade Nine and missed all of September. When I finally came back to school, I felt dissociated and out of touch with everything that was going on. The one teacher that really looked after me through those agonizing catch-up months was Mr. Einhorn, our P.E. teacher. I wasn’t allowed to take part in any physical activities until after the Christmas break. He knew it was killing me, but he made sure I followed the doctor’s orders so that I would be ready and able to take part come January. He made me feel important, even though I was basically a lump sitting on the stage in the gym while everyone else took part in games and gymnastics. When I finally did recover, he showed a lot of confidence in me and gave me special roles on the softball teams and football teams. Because of him, I got to shine and help the teams win some important ball games. His instruction in my life carried on into my adult years when I enrolled in coaching clinics and officiating courses that he taught. He was definitely one of the reasons I continued to love all aspects of all sports through my entire life and why I played, coached and officiated and why I pursued a Phys. Ed. Degree and then a Master’s Degree in Kinesiology. I always remember how well he treated me even when I was the most non-athletic student in the school. When I became a Phys. Ed. Teacher myself, I brought that with me and made sure that every kid in my class felt like a star. Thank you, Mr. Einhorn. You were my hero.

Ms. Brown was my typing teacher when I first entered high school. Her classroom was at the exact opposite end of the school from my homeroom, so really, I wasn’t supposed to walk all that way to be in the class. But my Doctor gave me permission to take the class, if I promised that it would be the only walking I would do every day. Mr. Einhorn was there also, to make sure I followed orders. Anyway, Ms. Brown’s first name was Mary and she loved having me in class – not just because I was a good student, but because my name was John Smith. Everyday she would wait for me to get to class so that there would be a John Smith and a Mary Brown in the room to get things going. She would stand over my shoulder and dictate to me - “The lazy brown foxes jumped quickly over the green fence.” And, she would do that so I could take a break from reading out of the typing book that never seemed to stay open to the correct page, or fit where it was supposed to on the table beside my typewriter. I think it made me faster – having her watch me. As a result, I became quite a good typist, and typing, with maybe the exception of Driver Training, was definitely one of the most practical classes I ever took in school. Ms. Brown’s kindness, caring and knowledge of typing definitely made her one of my heroes.

I had other High School teachers who were indeed characters but none that were ever as kind as those already mentioned. Mr. Lundbach was my Maths and Geometry teacher in High School. I found out later in life what a nice man he was, but in High School I was afraid of him. I was always very good at Math, but I tried even harder with Mr. Lundbach just to escape his wrath for not getting homework done or for not doing questions the proper way. It wasn’t until my adult life and I saw what Mr. Lundbach did for the community, that I learned to truly admire the man. When I got to know him as a person, and see him as a performer and a sports enthusiast and a kind and loving human being, I really grew to enjoy the post-high-school moments we had together. He indeed became one of my heroes – not just as a teacher, but as a human being.

From High School, I went on to the University of Saskatchewan and took classes from some of the best and brightest instructors and coaches on the planet. I studied Sports Philosophy from Barb Dorsey and Pat Lawson, both famous athletes in their own right. I learned about hockey from Dave King, famous for coaching in the NHL and internationally. I learned about volleyball from Mark Tenant, who was the Canadian National Women’s coach at the time. I was lucky enough to study biomechanics and gymnastics from Eric Sprigings and Keith Russell - the latter being the Canadian National coach during my two years there. He also later became a CBC television color commentator during the Summer Olympic Games. Lyle Sanderson was my Track & Field Coach. He coached some of the greatest Canadian track & field athletes in the history of the sport. And then, he took the time and exercised the patience needed to coach me. He forgot way more about Track & Field than I will ever know. Howard Nixon and Chester Anderson hooked me on Outdoor Education. Dick Bell started me on a path of interest in the field of exercise physiology. He looked so calm and relaxed during every one of his classes and I remarked on that to him one day. He replied that, in fact, he was super nervous before he took the stage in every single class. He was a great and honest human being. When I began my studies at the University of British Columbia, I was greeted and cared for by Dr. Gary Sinclair. He was a coach of coaches – so intelligent. He, along with Dr. Ungerleider and Dr. Mosher, made up my advising team for my Masters Degree in Physical Education, and steered me in the direction I needed to go to help me become who I am. All of them are my heroes.

With all the wonderful examples and role models I was fortunate enough to have as my teachers in school, I guess it was easy for me to slip into the role of being a teacher myself. I had so many of you wonderful teachers during the time that I was a student. You were perfect models for me to follow. Each of you helped to make me who I am and all of you have earned a place in my heart. I will truly love every one of you forever.

Lots of Love, from just one of your students,

John Oliver Smith (Row 3, Seat 1)