Excellent teachers aren’t as rare as you might think.
And they’re not always the ones you thought were excellent at the time.
Those thoughts crossed my mind as I read the Langley Advance story about Tim Stephenson, the Walnut Grove science teacher recently recognized for excellence by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
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I recall one science teacher whom I suspect was nothing like the aforementioned Mr. Stephenson.
He was a gym teacher who, as was so often the case in the days when I was in high school, was conscripted to fill a gap in the science department, perhaps because he liked science, perhaps because the spaces in his weekly physical education calendar coincided with an open science block.
Those of us who enjoyed science thought he was great. He let us do whatever we wanted.
He brought in books that gave us great ideas for clever experiments. And he opened up the store room for us to play with whatever powders and potions we could find there.
We made ammonium triiodide and had a gas with it. In small quantities, droplets of the liquid dry up to leave behind a contact explosive. Touch it with something and it pops and crackles… scares the heck out of an unwitting victim.
Luckily, we never hurt anyone. So our teacher laughed with us.
We made chemical concoctions that boiled at room temperature… or dramatically changed colours… or magically grew warm in our hands… or got cold enough to freeze condensed water vapour on the outside of the test tube.
The trouble was, in retrospect, that students who were already bored by science, maybe because they’d run into similar teachers previously, just grew more bored.
After the initial circus-like atmosphere grew thin, the “teacher” lost them. They didn’t understand what a handful of us were doing, and nobody either explained it to them or tried to help them to understand.
And truth be told, we didn’t learn much either. We were just horsing around without purpose.
I liked that teacher. But he neither won nor deserved any awards.
I admire teachers like Mr. Stephenson. I’ve never met him, but I know him because I had a few like him – teachers who knew that fun is not always learning, but there’s no reason why learning can’t be fun.
