ABSTRACT
After two years of uninspired and uninspiring study for a first degree, I left university and, on what then seemed something of a whim entered a teachers college in North Bay, Ontario. It was during the final years of Ontario’s tuition-free normal schools, open to high-school graduates and university dropouts who wished to teach in the elementary schools of that province. My thinking was that teaching the young, now that the 1960s had come to a close, might be a way to continue the dream for a new world that had been that decade’s hope-filled project. Like many before and after me, I found myself determined during that one-year teacher education program to make teaching into something more like the learning that went on outside of my school days. The “master teachers” there advised me that it would be better for me and the students if I went with the standard behavioral objectives and learning outcomes after two of us led an unsuccessful boycott of an education course that would have us determine our teaching day by pre-defined behavioral outcomes for our students. Teaching jobs were scarce then, perhaps more so for failed boycott leaders. After I finished the program, I was working in a neighbor’s barn stacking the summer’s first cut of hay, when I finally got a call to come fill an opening in Sault Ste. Marie created by the suicide of a science teacher who was famous in town for being a one-armed church organist. After Labor Day, at the age of twenty-three, I entered the classroom to begin teaching with all the excitement and apprehension of the young taking that first serious step into a world suddenly made real.
