DAVID HELWIG: SooToday and teachers

DAVID HELWIG: SooToday and teachers

We were a little eccentric two decades ago. But we were helping invent a journalistic genre

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When SooToday was in its infancy as a protohyperlocal news operation, we were inventing the genre and we did a lot of quirky things.

One was to publish every teacher obituary prominently on the home page.

I did this after observing how it was quite impossible for a retired teacher to walk from one end of Station Mall to the other without being repeatedly and warmly greeted by former students.

Last year, when I mentioned this on social media, I heard back from a number of teachers and/or their spouses.

"Every time I hear 'Mr. O'Connor!' being yelled from a car or in the parking lot of the lodge, I know an old student is present and up here on the north shore," Frank O'Connor wrote me from the Voyageur's Lodge and Cookhouse at Batchawana Bay.

I knew Frank from his days as a secondary school teacher in London, Ont.

I was never his student but I'd interviewed him for The Globe and Mail after he wrote the first curriculum for Ontario's entrepreneurial studies program.

In the years since then, O'Connor had moved hundreds of miles north to become an entrepreneur himself, but even on the shores of Lake Superior, he regularly encountered former students.

"So many good conversations. Of course all of my students are all grown up now with families and careers. It is so cool to see," he said.

"David, the Station Mall comment is true," I heard from Hilton Beach Spelling Bee champion John Crack.

"Try shopping with Lavera," Crack advised.

"Whenever we went out, Ray was always greeted by 'Sir!' or 'coach!' by students," Jane Scott Barsanti told me, referring to her late husband.

"They said it with such pride and we were always touched by it," Jane said.

"In his career, Ray Barsanti taught at Glebe Collegiate in Ottawa; Lakeway, and St. Mary’s College in the Soo. He retired as vice-principal at St. Mary’s. He coached basketball throughout his career to students of both sexes. He was also the first basketball coach at Algoma University."

"For years, he was on the executive of the Friendship Games, and was fundamental in the creation and running the 3-on-3 basketball tournaments. In his spare time, he was even a referee in basketball and he continued this service until he was was nearly 70."

"He was an amazing, selfless man who touched the lives of so many. I was so proud of the respect that he received from those who he had taught or coached. It meant the world to him."

My personal all-time favourite teacher was Mrs. Hillis at Lansdowne Public School in Sarnia.

Mrs. Hillis had started her teaching career as a teenager when qualifications were temporarily relaxed during a wartime teacher shortage.

She was well past retirement age when she taught me, but somehow made each student feel special even though she was simultaneously teaching three grades in one classroom.

I remember Mrs. Hillis pretty much ignoring the formal curriculum and teaching us long-consigned-to-oblivion British Empire patriotic songs including The Maple Leaf Forever, Canada's first de facto national anthem:

In days of yore, from Britain's shore,
Wolfe, the dauntless hero, came
And planted firm Britannia's flag
On Canada's fair domain.

We sang that song pretty much every day and I can still recite every line from memory.

At the back of Mrs. Hillis's classroom was a table stacked high with original copies of every National Geographic ever printed, except for some missing issues from the first decade, 1888 to 1908.

Every student was allowed to read those ancient magazines.

I immersed myself in them, revelling in first-hand accounts of the Wright brothers' first flight in 1903, William Peary's expedition to the geographic North Pole in 1909, and Edmund Hillary's 1953 ascent of Everest. (Getting to interview Sir Edmund will forever be one of the highlights of my journalistic career.)

But my appreciation for the teaching profession deepened by miles at the 2000 Canada Games, when I was in charge of communications for main-stadium events in the brand-new TD Stadium at Western University.

I was supervising about 80 volunteers.

The night before track and field events were to start, we were advised by Athletics Canada that our just-installed long-jump pit didn't meet International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) technical standards.

The pit needed to be rebuilt, or no record could be recognized.

Someone managed to find a trucker willing to make an emergency delivery of sand, and at 3 a.m., the re-build was finished by a handful of volunteers.

Not one of those volunteers had signed up to shovel sand at 3 a.m.

They were self-selected, the ones who cared enough to stay late to make sure this landmark community event happened the way it was supposed to happen.

I asked each member of that group what they did when they weren't volunteering.

To my amazement, every last one of them turned out to be a current or retired teacher.

I learned a lesson that day.

Wiser SooToday editors have discontinued my practice of recognizing teachers on the home page, but it was my way of paying tribute to some remarkable people.