English Language Arts Biography

My childhood was not a stationary one, from roughly the ages of 3-9 I was never in one city more than a month or two at most, from 9-12 I wasn’t in any one house, but in the same city, for more than three months. It did lead to any form of stability, and so I was a homeschooled kid growing up. The years that should have been middle school and early childhood were not the most well structured educationally, my mother was terminally ill, and so I sat down and read my textbooks, math work, socials, english, etc all on my own. If I had questions I was the one that had to find the answers. My mother was unable to be a teacher, and I, if I can be perfectly honest (which I can because this is my blog), was a really lousy teacher. I had no idea what I was doing and did not understand a darn thing about how to teach or learn. My grade 9-12 years of high school wound up spanning a six year stretch due to outside factors such as living on my own and having to balance a full time job, a part time job, school, and other extracurricular activities that I did not want to give up.

Since I was in charge I chose to place education and graduation as a secondary part of my life. Grade 12 Math and Grade 12 English were the last ones to be finished, and the English was a whirlwind. I had already started an Electrical apprenticeship, but needed to finish english to go to trade school. Turns out I didn’t actually need to, but oh well. Because I was now doing school through the South Island Distance Education System (SIDES), but at a physical building called the Individual Learning Center (ILC – https://ilc.sd63.bc.ca), I had teacher resources available to me. Technically I had been a student here for several years, but I only went once every week or two if I felt like it. Now, I was present daily, and the teachers not only knew who I was, but were right there to help me as I tried to wrap up all my classes in a very brief period of time.

I chose to do Technical and Professional Communications 12, which removes poetry and Shakespeare and replaces them with memos and business writing. This made perfect sense to me as Shakespeare and Poetry were TERRIBLE! After all, what sixteen year old boy enjoys teaching himself Shakespeare? I’m sure there are a few, but I was unable to make it interesting. I finished TPC12 in roughly six weeks, and wound up graduating a year later than I was supposed to. Not a big deal to me, and hey, I made it, possibly as the first of my family other than my father to graduate high school. Two of the teaches I worked with regularly, Peter and Loy, had a huge impact on time at the ILC. I am quite sure if it wasn’t for their support during my last few years of high school I would not have graduated, and I contemplated following in their footsteps (or being an autism interventionist). Unfortunately, my foot was already in the door of a red seal trade, and that involved a lot less schooling so it made my path an easy one.

Fast forward a decade and a bit and I am now married with two kids, and the desire to work with teenagers is still very strong with me. I’ve been a leader with my church youth group for over a decade and a variety of other youth based programs in town. Unfortunately, having a family takes time from the activities you desire to do. As such, my options for working with youth started to dwindle, and I really wanted to make a change. Suddenly, a plan was born! UBC and BCIT had a join program for becoming a Trades and Technology teacher. I was very interested in this program and started making arrangements. I became a student at Camosun College to tackle my first year of school, but this was done part time as I was still working full time to support my family. Eventually I heard about UVic’s trades teaching program and that got the families hopes up that we would not have to move to Vancouver, or I would not need to commute back and forth and only be around on the weekends. This program only lasted a year, but the desire to not commute was too strong, and so I looked into other options for teaching. I was enjoying psychology and absolutely loving my political science classes, which I eventually learned was because of the teacher, not the classes. However, I had no real strong feelings towards any other subject. Knowing that once I had my foot in the door as a teacher I could shift to a different topic I decided to get a teaching degree in whatever areas would ensure me the opportunity to teach.

I reached out to the local school districts and two got back to me saying they needed physics, shop, and english teachers. So with more than a little bit of reluctance I decided to do a double major in Political Science and English. So far at Camosun I had taken the two required English literature and composition classes that are required for any program. Neither of my instructors for those classes really cared about anything. They were just there. The material was either bland and uninspired, or it was topics I do not care for (horror). Couple this with neither of them being concerned about what was going on in my world, and it did not fill me with inspiration to be an English teacher. Yes, my wife is having a surgery in two weeks and I need to be at home to take care of the kids while she recovers so I will be absent from class for two days. No, I cannot have an extension for the in class mid term because of this? Well crap. So I made it through these courses with no real support, and teachers that were clearly uninspired. I did another pair of english classes at Camosun and one of my instructors was very passionate about the material, but did not really invest in getting to know her students. So I was already feeling bleh about my desire to be an English teacher.

Then I made the transfer over to UVic. I registered for a second year class, and a pair of upper level classes, and was not looking forward to them. Boy was I in for a shock. Within the first five minutes of my 200 level class I was realizing things were going to be a bit different here. I only had one uninspired professor through the process of my English major at UVic, and I learned how interesting some aspects of the subject could be. Shakespeare, which I had loathed as a teenager, became on of my favourite subjects. It was introduced as being an influence in all stories. Seeing the pieces of Shakespeare in the literature I enjoyed reading, and having an instructor who worked to find ways to make it interesting for everyone by including a variety of different mediums for introducing us to his works made it imminently more enjoyable than I had ever imagined it could be. My English degree wound up being far more interesting than I ever could have imagined it would be, and this created a desire in me to not teach shop, but to become an english teacher instead.

During this time in UVic I realized that the small social circle that I have included several teachers. During a dinner event I was hosting one evening I realized of the eight people that were sitting in my backyard I was the only person who did not have a teaching degree. This group of people have provided me a tremendous amount of insight as to what it is like to be a teacher. Of the eight, four were english teachers, and two more regularly taught english even though it was not their teachable area. Each one had different techniques to engage their class, and I can see a variety of ways to incorporate each of their ideas in future classes. One friend has made a point of reading aloud to his classes, another provides a selection of books for the class to read but also allows students to pick a book not on the list and then she reads it with them so they can discuss it, and a third worked with me to find a way to create an interactive game that his class could participate in for analyzing text and creative writing. Through the course of covid I was housebound with my landlords, who are both teachers, and was a part of my landlady creating several classes to administer to her class. It was great to see how these classes are put together, but more importantly I got to see the behind the scenes of how she would take her students interests and find ways to blend them into the classes learning methods. Does she know anything about super heroes? No, not a bit. But she felt there must be a way to use super heroes to explain the rule of threes, and so she turned to me to come up with a way to do this.

My experiences as a high school student were bland. It was self taught and lacked everything. There were no underlying theories, no methods, and no approaches, save one exception at the end of my education. My introduction to college was no better, but university and peers radically changed that perspective. Two of the big ideas in the english curriculum right now from grades nine and up are “The exploration of text and story deepens our understanding of diverse, complex ideas about identity, others, and the world” and “Language shapes ideas and influences others.” (https://curriculum.gov.bc.ca/curriculum/english-language-arts/11/literary-studies) These two passages speak a lot to me, as an individual and as a prospective english teacher. While the students may be learning how language shapes and influences people, or that exploring a text allows us to understand the world around us, the same things are reflected back on us. In order to teach and to invest in the lives of youth we need to not be ridged. We need to realize that in our classrooms, or in one on one sessions with a student, they are being shaped and influenced by us.

In our Wednesday seminars a teacher that I have had the pleasure to work with explained to me how he had a student, in the late 90s, who was failing most of his classes. He took the time to work with this student after class and get to know him in a one on one situation. By the time this student graduated he was an A student and part of his graduation included explaining how his teacher had done the impossible, he had taught him to enjoy poetry. The teacher ran into that student again about a decade and a half later and they caught up. The student was pumped to see him, and recalled some of their conversations they had after class, but had absolutely no memory that he had been taught poetry. What he remembered was fact that his teacher cared enough about him to invest in him and care about him when no one else would.

This teacher makes lesson plans, but he doesn’t use them. He uses what he has called “lessons lived” and “lessons live” in that he comes up with a plan for his classrooms, and then abandons it once the students lead the conversation somewhere organically. Particularly now with covid and 2.5 hour classes it can be very hard to structure an english class in such a way that it stays meaningful for students. You can factor in whichever approaches you want, but you need to have the flexibility to abandon those plans when you need to.

https://www.thoughtco.com/develop-positive-relationships-with-students-3194339

This link provides a few helpful tips, some as text, some in a video form, of ways that educators can build positive relationships with their students. I see many of these methods reflected in a variety of ways in my friends who are educators and in our Wednesday seminars. Though the 4H’s from the video clip do not readily apply in this post covid world (high fives and handshakes are questionable, forget hugs) the rest of the ideas have merit and can be readily adapted to building meaningful connections with students.

I realize I am supposed to link this back to the BC ELA and theories on language learning, and at this point I have not yet as I got stuck in biography mode. I realize there are plenty of options to choose from, but I am a fan of Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory (https://www.simplypsychology.org/vygotsky.html), that language is learned through social interaction. But I also feel that there is a lot to understand in that theory. This is not to discredit Behaviourism, Cognitivism, or Constructivism (was there a fourth I am missing). They all have value and will be worked in to my teaching style subconsciously if not by conscious decision. I may be on my way to being an english teacher, but I also realize that the youth I will be teaching can use the internet to search for any grammatical questions they have, they can find novel study guides that explain what a book is about and help form their thoughts on it, and I realize that all of these systems will change over time. The BC ELA curriculum looks different now than it did when I went to school, so everything is changing and evolving. My friends have shown me the importance of finding ways to engage with the students in ways that they are receptive to, and the teacher I am shadowing at Lambrick Park High School has shown me that it is more important to connect with these youth then to focus on the minutia of what they are learning. Hearing the story of the student remembering his connection with his teacher as a meaningful relationship during his teenage years was more impactful than the lessons he was learning in class. I cannot pick specific schools of thought or methods that I will be using as I see myself centering my teaching style on what will benefit my students most. This means that I will be dipping into a little bit of each area as I need to in order to form a meaningful connection with my students and will let a variety of methods flow from one to the other as I need them. Constructivist approaches or Sociocultural will both be a part of my lessons. I will wind up using a mix of lecturing, discussion guided exercises, problem solving, and creative writing opportunities depending on what fits the class best.

I do not remember much of my high school english lessons, but I do remember how my teachers invested in me. I see my friends actively investing in the lives of their students and finding ways to engage with them. I hear about, and see, students who forget their lessons but remember the impact their teachers had on their lives. That is the approach I plan to use. The one in which the students remember the investment their teachers made in them.

I want to be that teacher.

These photos represent what happens when people invest, no its not related to english language arts, but it is an example I can draw on. In my teens I worked for the Queen Alexandra center, my role started off simply as helping an eight year old child with autism. I had the opportunity to teach him many things, some practical like how to refill his own water bottle with varying degrees of success, some I’m sure his parents would have preferred he not learn (why not teach the autistic kid how to slide down the stairs head first? Its a great idea right?). Through those moments of teaching and supervision I was able to invest in his life. It is now twenty one years later and those investments I made when he was young are still continuing. As we are both adults, though at different levels of social functioning, we still hang out regularly to this day and have made each other’s lives richer. This is a different level of investment than what will come from my career as a teacher, but for a personal (and photographable) example of the value of investment it works wonders.