Category Archives: Jude and Megan

Stories of a Life | 1988 | The Love of My Life | VCC | Pt. 2

May 11, 2019Broadview Co-op, fixin to die rag, Jude and Megan, Stories of a Life, VanRamblingsRaymond Tomlin

Lori McHattie and her son Darren, August of 1998, at our Chesterman Beach cabin near Tofino

The woman you see pictured above is the love of my life.

In the summer of 1988, Lori and her son Darren, and my two children, 11-year-old Megan and 13-year-old Jude, travelled over to the west coast of Vancouver Island, where we rented a cabin near Tofino, and where we enjoyed the time of our lives, a memory that resides deep in me still.

This will not be the last time I write about Lori — today’s Stories of a Life will focus only on the first four days of our acquaintanceship.

Photo of Megan Tomlin, taken at the cabin near Tofino where we stayed in August 1988

As the children were growing up, given that (for the most part) during the first few years of their lives I was the sole custodial parent, sharing custody with Cathy as the children grew older, my relationship with my children was close. We talked about everything, and as far as was possible I answered every question put by them to me, as honestly and as fully as I could.

While Jude was an energetic boy of the world, making friends with anyone and everyone, full of joy and laughter, out and about in the neighbourhood and across the city (and in the mountains), skateboarding and skiing and as athletic as he could possibly be, Megan was a much quieter child, no more reflective than Jude, just more prone to staying close to me, and wanting always to converse on the broadest range of topics, and anxious to learn as much about the world (and all its complexities) as she could.

Megan was curious about the state and nature of the world, about politics and political structures, about the nature of governmental decision-making, both children attending the peace marches with me each year, as well as meetings of the progressive, left-of-centre Coalition of Progressive Electors Vancouver civic party, and various of the NDP meetings, and otherwise as engaged as she could be as a budding young feminist & community activist.

Megan, as with my mother, was also possessed of a preternatural ability.

Photo, Broadway campus, Vancouver Community College, taken from Chinacreek Park

Over the years, as we shared our lives with one another, both Jude and Megan were always curious about my “work”, what I was up to when I wasn’t with them. Arising from that interest on their part, I always sought to make them a part of my work life, taking them to the places of each of my employments, to my office in SFU’s Faculty of Education when I was working on my Masters, to attend in the elementary school classes where I taught (when they were on a ProD day), at Vancouver Community College, and later in my work at Pacific Press (which paid phenomenally well for very little work, allowing me to continue work as an arts and entertainment editor, and later, Director of Special Projects at Vancouver Magazine).

Early in the 1988 summer semester at Vancouver Community College (which I wrote about last week), Megan attended my first Monday class, sitting quietly near the back, erudite and well-read as always (better read than me, true then, true still), interjecting only occasionally to clarify some bit of information, for me or for one of the students in my English Literature class, unassuming and friendly, but clearly informed.

Midway through the three-hour class, we took a 15-minute break, most of the students leaving the classroom, with Megan standing with me outside my office, opposite the classroom, when the following occurred …

“Daddy,” said Megan, “do you see that woman standing just on the other side of the glass doors, the blonde-haired woman leaning on the railing?” Then a pause & the proffering of a question, “What day of the week is it?”

“Monday,” I replied.

“Hmmm,” she said, looking somewhat quizzical. “Monday, huh?” At which point, she seemed to find herself lost in thought for a moment, then turned to me to say, “By Thursday, the two of you will be living together.”

“Megan,” I protested, “I don’t even know who that woman is. And besides, she seems much younger than me.”

And at that, we dropped the subject, shortly after returning to the classroom, where she set about to correct me on aspects of my teaching presentation style, and information that I had imparted that she felt was not clear enough, and should have been better clarified by me, adding …

“Given who these students are, you seem not to be taking into consideration that they’ve been out of school for awhile. Your use of language, the words you choose could be better chosen to impart your message. And, oh yeah, you were telling the students that they would be expected to write papers during the semester. I want to be present when you’re grading those papers, and I want to read the papers you’re unsure as to what grade you will give. Overall, I trust your judgement — I’m just not sure I feel all that confident that your command of what constitutes good essay writing is as well-developed as it could be.”

The class was over at 9pm, I met with a handful of my students, some in the classroom, others in the hallway, and a couple in my office (with Megan waiting outside in the hallway, engaging with some of my students).

When the class had come to an end, I reminded the students Tuesday’s class would take place downtown, at a venue where a play I’d be teaching was currently being performed; student attendance was mandatory.

Megan and I left the campus around 9:30pm, stopping off at Mike and Edith’s (friends of ours) Cheesecake, Etc. on Granville Street, near the south end of the Granville Street bridge, where Megan enjoyed a piece of cheesecake topped with fresh, organic strawberries, and I had my usual fresh-baked, and toasted, baguette with butter and jam.

Both VCC Broadway campus English Literature classes attended the performance of the play, which took place upstairs from what is now part of the Vancouver Film School. My class sat close by me, while students who were taking my colleague Peter’s English Lit class sat nearby him, except …

When the lights went down, and the play began, I felt a warm hand move over my right hand, and looked over to see an absolutely radiant, beautiful young blonde woman, with her arm rubbing up against mine. I thought to myself, as I am wont to do in similar situations (which always come as a surprise me, having occurred quite frequently throughout my life) …

“Raymond, it’s a figment of your imagination. There’s no one sitting next to you, and most certainly, no one has their hand on top of yours.”

I didn’t give it another thought, returning my attention to the play.
On the Wednesday, I taught my Writing class (grammar! … I am the last person you would want to have teach you grammar … I am capable of doing it … grammar just seems so restrictive to me … but I suppose you need to know the rules, before you can break them).

Thursday I returned to teach my English Literature class.

After classes were over, and after meeting with a few of my students, a blonde-haired woman walked up to me — who I may, or may not, have been made aware of earlier in the week — saying to me …

“I’m working on a paper on apartheid, and have been told you might be of assistance in helping point me in the right direction to research the paper, and provide me as well with how I might best formulate my argument.

I’ve heard that you like to walk, particularly along the stretch of beach over by Spanish Banks. I was wondering if we might walk and talk, which would afford you an opportunity for some fresh air after three hours in a stuffy classroom? It is, after all, a lovely full moon night, don’t you think?”

I thought the idea of the walk was a good idea, and (as anyone who knows me soon realizes, I am more than voluble about conversing on issues of interest to me). I grabbed my coat out of my instructor’s office, and the two of us headed off in the direction of my car.

But I was famished.

I asked her if we might stop in for a brief moment at Cheesecake, Etc. on the way to the beach — we could discuss her paper over a bite to eat. When we arrived at Cheesecake, Etc., after consulting with her, when Mike came up to take our order, I requested two orders of the toasted baguette with jam. “Oh, you mean the usual,” said Mike. Both Mike and Edith flitted around this woman and I for the half hour of so we were in the restaurant, with Mike taking a break to begin singing at his piano, his songs seemingly directed at this young woman and I.

Just before 10pm, this young woman and I left the restaurant, climbed back into my car, and headed towards the beach, traveling down West Broadway, during which glide along the street, she turned to me to say, “You live near here, don’t you? I noticed it’s getting kind of chilly. I was wondering if you might have a sweater I could wear?” Within a couple of minutes, I pulled up in front of my housing co-op, turning to her saying, “I’ll grab you a sweater and be right down,” with her responding, “I’ll come up with you, if that’s alright, to find the sweater best to my liking.”

Upon entering my apartment, while she stood in my living room, I entered my bedroom to look on the shelving where I kept my two dozen sweaters (what can I say, I’m a sweater person). Upon returning to the living room, holding up a warm sweater I thought she would like, standing opposite her she approached me, and standing on her tippy-toes, she kissed me.

Once again, I thought to myself, “Raymond, she didn’t kiss you. That’s just a false projection. You just better give her the sweater, and head off to the beach.”

While I was having this inner dialogue with myself, she once again stood on her tippy toes, pulling my face closer to hers, and kissed me again, a long, luxurious kiss, a kiss unlike any other I’d ever experienced.

Lori and I moved into together that night.

#VanPoli Civic Politics | The Death of Cynicism | Part 4 of 4

May 9, 2019#VanPoli Civic Politics, BC Politics, Canada, Jude and Megan, News, Politics, Vancouver, Vancouver Votes 2018, VanRamblingsRaymond Tomlin

From a diehard VanRamblings reader (and friend and associate, who holds VanRamblings to account), a former Park Board Commissioner, longtime politico, keen observer of Vancouver’s civic political scene, a well-respected local architect and designer, a city-builder, world traveler, husband and father, and sometimes, just sometimes, a bit of a curmudgeon…

“Not sure why you think these Councillors are doing such a great job!

In addition to being overly swayed by staff, these novice Councillors continue to sit back and leave the Vision Vancouver agenda intact, an agenda which got Vision un-elected, decimated, and an agenda that has resulted in so much damage to our City. As well, in each of your examples in your series this week on our City Councillors, the initiatives you think are so wonderful are contradicted by other decisions they have made.

In particular, Councillor Boyle’s energy shift sounds great if it is meant only to be read. But, think about how each of these ideas can be realized. She wants all neighbourhoods to be walk / bike / transit-friendly, and to use wood frame construction, and yet she voted to support the Skytrain SUBway, and it’s greenhouse gas-spewing green glass concrete towers, unfriendly to neighbourhoods, our seniors’ population and young families.

If Councillor Christine Boyle was really as good a listener as you suggest she is, as a first term Councillor she could have taken advice from knowledgeable people (think: Patrick Condon) that the two approaches are not compatible. Only Councillors Colleen Hardwick and Jean Swanson seem to have their heads screwed on straight on the transit file.

I am surprised (and disappointed), as well, to learn that Councillor Adriane Carr continues to support bonus density policies that have long proven to be and are destructive to neighbourhoods. Meanwhile, her Green seatmate on Council, Pete Fry, is trying to get everybody to drive no faster than 30kph when the most energy efficient speed is 38-40kph. While that gets him media coverage, is that sensible Green policy?

Perhaps a better sum up of Council’s performance to date is a ‘hmmm‘”.

- Bill McCreery, architect, VanRamblings reader, politico, keen city observer.

Much of what Bill McCreery writes in indisputable; he, like many across our city, is frustrated at the slow pace of change at City Hall and the cumbersome nature of decision-making, not to mention an unbecoming naïveté and acquiescence to staff, masked as the defining, seemingly newfound ethos at City Hall, now guided by “being respectful of others.”
There’s a lot of that going on at Vancouver School Board, as well - which not only makes for dull politics, it makes for unproductive, unfocused politics, politics too often in the sway of an entrenched bureaucracy, with the decision-making that takes place not for the people, but rather at the expense of the interests of the very people who elected our city officials into office, responding to a campaign of hope for better, when all we’re getting now is the same ol’ same ol, an utterly unacceptable status quo.
The lack of action thus far in civic governance is frustrating, maddening.
Swept into office on a wave of optimism and the belief that change, change for us, for parents & for children, for seniors & for renters, for the disenfranchised, for the struggling single mother and all the struggling families across our city was possible, and as assiduously as our electeds apply themselves to their work at City Hall, day-by-day, and week after frustrating week, the hope the electorate felt emboldened by last October fades into the miasma of an “I’m alright, Jack” ethos that has set our well-heeled civic officials apart from the “hoi polloi” who thrust them into office.

Sadhu Aufochs Johnston, the City Manager of Vancouver, British Columbia, the CEO.

When Mayor Gregor Robertson and his majority Vision Vancouver Council assumed office at City Hall in December 2008, the first order of business for the fledgling party was to appoint a new City Manager to carry out the programme the party had announced, run on and committed itself to during the course of their thirty-day (and night) winning campaign for office.
From 1999 until 2008, when she was unceremoniously turfed from City Hall, Judy Rogers was the city manager for the City of Vancouver, our city’s first female city manager. At the time of her dismissal by the new Council, Ms. Rogers had worked for the city of Vancouver for 25 years, spending 10 years in the role of city manager, after having become assistant city manager in 1994, and deputy city manager in 1996. She started her new employment as Vancouver City Manager on New Year’s Day in 1999.
In 2008, within one week of Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson taking office, Rogers was fired by Robertson to be replaced by Dr. Penny Ballem — who had only recently voluntarily left her role as Deputy Minister in the province’s Ministry of Health — as the new head of Vancouver’s civic administration, to provide a “fresh start” for Robertson’s and Vision Vancouver’s agenda. Ms. Rogers received $572,000 severance pay.
The catchphrase around Vancouver City Hall from late 2008 until September 15, 2015, when Mayor Robertson announced that Dr. Ballem’s service had “concluded” and Sadhu Aufochs Johnston would be her replacement was “get ‘er done.”
Dr. Ballem well understood her role: fulfill Vision Vancouver’s agenda, don’t second guess the decision-making of the new Vision Vancouver Councillors and Mayor, pave the way for substantive change and remove any impediments to change, and under no circumstance, ever, ever, ever use the word “no” when addressing Vision Vancouver Councillors, and the Mayor, during Council meetings, or when Council was in session at City Hall.
Finally, though, the people of Vancouver (and the Vision Vancouver Council) had had enough of Dr. Ballem’s strong-armed tactics, as the years went by her loyalty to her “masters” proving increasingly counterproductive to the carrying out of the Vision Vancouver agenda. Mayor Gregor Robertson all but promised the electorate during his 2014 campaign for office that he’d get rid of the cantankerous, and to many off-putting, Dr. Ballem — and after a 10-month delay, on Sept. 15, 2015 he proved true to his word.
Dr. Ballem received $556,595 in a severance package when she left Vancouver City Hall.
On September 1st, 2009 Dr. Penny Ballem announced that Sadhu Johnston would be hired as Deputy City Manager to lead the city’s environmental efforts. Note should be made that Mr. Johnston’s hiring was not that of Dr. Ballem, but of Mayor Gregor Robertson and the Vision Vancouver braintrust, who had come to know and like Sadhu Aufochs Johnston through their mutual association at Cortes Island’s Hollyhock “Lifelong Learning Centre”, which a few reporters have inferred is a “cult”, as Georgia Straight reporter Shannon Rupp wrote in an article published in The Straight on March 28th, 1996, with Rupp writing that the …

“… artificial feeling of love & acceptance is what people are paying for, but I have to admit I find these get-togethers oppressive. Perhaps the most annoying aspect of Hollyhock is its culture of conformity — Goddess forbid anyone should question anything. After five days here, I’ve found Hollyhock is really two places: the site itself is delightful, but the half-baked spiritual and psychological concepts it peddles make me uneasy.”

Over the course of the past six months as the new Mayor and eight novice Councillors have settled into their term of office and their newfound responsibilities at City Hall, as VanRamblings has attended or watched City Council and committee meetings, we have observed city manager Sadhu Johnston consistently, egregiously and unremittingly turning into “Dr. No.”
When Vision Vancouver were in power, telling the Mayor and Vision Vancouver Councillors that they couldn’t do something they had their minds set on, or even implying that there was a “no” in his address to Vision Vancouver electeds would have been tantamount to a tendering of his resignation — Sadhu Johnston was kept on at City Hall after the dismissal of Dr. Penny Ballem, to carry out Vision’s agenda, which he does these days every time he speaks at Council, and every time he scolds a Councillor with a near denunciation of their naïveté, that his is “the way things are done.”

Malcolm Bromley, General Manager of Vancouver Park Board since July 2010

The time is nearing for our current City Council to put their stamp on civic governance in the city of Vancouver.
More than one Councillor — and dozens of VanRamblings’ readers — has expressed a concern about how, as Bill McCreery puts it at the outset of today’s post, that some Councillors have been “overly swayed by staff” and that a change of city staff will be required in order that our new Council might fulfill their campaign commitments to the people of Vancouver.

“There are those of us who’d like to see a change at the top,” various Councillors have told VanRamblings, “but having to pay more than $550,000 in severance pay to the city manager, or the $1.2 million Vision Vancouver paid out in severance money to 11 employees in 2016 is just not palatable, to Councillors or the public.”

VanRamblings is not suggesting that Sadhu Johnston be fired or dismissed, rather that the accomplished Mr. Johnston be transitioned into another position of authority at City Hall, while maintaining his current salary.
Vancouver’s Mayor and Council need a leader at the top of the City Hall bureaucracy who will carry out their agenda, and not the defeated Vision Vancouver agenda. Who would that person be to replace Sadhu Johnston?
Take a look at the photo above — that is Malcolm Bromley, the current General Manager of the Vancouver Park Board, who is one of the most passionate persons with whom VanRamblings is acquainted about city-building. Most of the members of Council are familiar with the many accomplishments of Mr. Bromley, his commitment to democratic engagement, and finding a path that will enable the electeds to carry out their commitment to the citizens who elected them to office.
Councillors Melissa De Genova, Sarah Kirby-Yung and Michael Wiebe sat on Park Board when Mr. Bromley was GM. In 2014-15, when Sarah Kirby-Yung was Park Board Chairperson, Malcolm Bromley was instrumental in helping Ms. Kirby-Yung fulfill her commitment (and it was her commitment to the people of Vancouver, and not to her Non-Partisan Association party) to ban cetaceans (whales and dolphins) in captivity in Stanley Park.
VanRamblings has written previously that UBC’s Patrick Condon, Park Board’s Malcolm Bromley, and the Green Party of Vancouver City Councillor Pete Fry are the finest minds in our city on the topic of city-building, the three seasoned urban geographers familiar and admiring of the work of each member of the triumvirate VanRamblings has identified above.
Fiscal responsibility is always a concern in governance. Transitioning Malcolm Bromley from Park Board General Manager to the role of city manager, while maintaining his current salary (although he’s due for a raise), perhaps transitioning Sadhu Johnston into the role of GM of Environmental Innovation, while maintaining his salary, downsizing City Hall’s bloated communications department, would mean savings in staffing costs — and a better run city, with a bureaucratic governance in place that will facilitate the agenda of Mayor & Council, rather than appear to impede.
As we say above, “the time is nearing for our City Council to put their stamp on civic governance in the city of Vancouver,” to let the public know that they’re in charge and ready to get to work on the people’s business.

“The Death of Cynicism,” the name VanRamblings has assigned to this week’s series?
As VanRamblings has suggested throughout the week, the electorate of Vancouver displayed their unerring wisdom on Oct. 20 2018 in electing the finest group of change makers ever to sit around our city’s Council table.
Last year, when writing about the incoming Council, we wrote that it would take a year and half for our new Councillors to “find the bathrooms,” a metaphor for how long it would take new Councillors to begin to implement their agenda. And so it is, and is proving to be. Only by shaking up the bureaucracy at Vancouver City Hall, putting their own senior staff in place to carry out the new Council’s agenda, will this Vancouver City Council achieve their goal of creating a healthier, fairer and more just city for all.
VanRamblings remains confident that our new Council will usher in generational change, and that by 2022 the vast majority of the electorate will come to view governance in our city differently, knowing that the Mayor and all 10 Councillors are on their side, working for them, while achieving and putting into practice the change that will serve us all, each and every one of us, on the road to the death of political cynicism and the renewal of hope in our city, in every neighbourhood, across every diverse community.

Don't Miss Any of VanRamblings Must-Read Content. Click On This Graphic for More

Music Sundays | Gorgeous Dream Pop Canadian Music | Yeah!

May 5, 2019A & E, Canada, fixin to die rag, Jude and Megan, Music, Pop Culture, Vancouver, VanRamblingsRaymond Tomlin

Oshawa Ontario-based dream pop group, Dizzy, winner of the 2019 Juno award for Best Alternative Album, Baby Teeth. Dizzy was also up for the Best Alternative Group Juno.

Mid-week last week, I was listening to Gloria Macarenko’s afternoon CBC show, On the Coast (I will say, I much preferred Stephen Quinn in the afternoon, alas). Ms. Macarenko was speaking with frequent guest, Andrea Warner, who was in the studio to discuss a Canadian music group of some note, all but anonymous to the uninitiated (that’s you and me), but as presented by the erudite Ms. Warner, worthy of your time & consideration.
This past week, Ms. Warner wished to tell all of us how much she loved recent Juno award winners, Oshawa’s dream pop group Dizzy, who recently picked up the Alternative Album of the Year Juno award for their absolutely outstanding début album, Baby Teeth. Dizzy had been up for the Breakthrough Group of the Year Juno at the Halifax-based celebration, but lost to bülow, who VanRamblings also loves and has long been on our iTunes playlist. Quite honestly, the Breakthrough group award oughta have been a tie. Just below, you can hear music from bülow.

Not to confuse you, above is bülow, winners of Breakthrough Group of the Year at this year’s Juno awards ceremony. We’ll get back to writing about Dizzy in just a moment.

Since the release of Dizzy‘s début album, Baby Teeth in 2018, fans in rapture have fallen for Dizzy‘s distinctive vibe (the group has received a great deal of play on CBC Radio 2, as well as on CBC Music).
Dizzy‘s lush and low-key sonic landscape paired with evocative lyrics that run the gamut from confessional, specific and heartfelt to esoteric, universal and wry has captured the imagination of those who became aware of Dizzy‘s distinctive brand of music, and then became fans.
Vocalist / songwriter Katie Munshaw and Charlie Spencer started playing together in high school and were more of an acoustic folk-pop duo than anything fully resembling Dizzy. Over time, the two novice but ambitious musicians sought to stretch their musical chops, the two going on to form a larger, more diverse band that came to include the latter’s three siblings, all one year apart: Charlie, Alex and Mackenzie Spencer.
All the band members grew up in and around the ‘burbs of Oshawa, a city that backs onto Lake Ontario. In an interview with New Music Express last year, Alex told the interviewer that the environment in which he grew up “does have its beauty and its little moments of innocence — it’s very quiet and secluded, and that helps nurture our sound in some way.”

On Baby Teeth, it’s obvious how much creativity the band draws from their sleepy hometown. Bleachers and Pretty Thing are intricate compositions that place as much value on hushed moments as on memorable, prickly guitar parts and swooning choruses. Swim, however, bucks the trend with imaginative lines that see the band plead for some escapism: “You are the athlete / I am the astronaut, for thousands of miles I float / Still, you carry me home” | New Music Express, 2018.

So now I imagine, you want to hear what Dizzy sounds like. Here goes …

Stories of a Life | 1988 | Teaching English and Writing at VCC

May 4, 2019Jude and Megan, Stories of a Life, Vancouver, VanRamblingsRaymond Tomlin

In the winter of 1988, I was hired to teach English literature and writing at the Broadway campus of Vancouver Community College, located on the eastside of the city, about a block west of Clark Drive.
The head of the College Foundations Programme in which I would be employed was a gregarious, erudite fellow in his mid-50s. I went in for the interview in early February of that year, and what started out as your run-of-the-mill confab, turned into a 3-hour gabest, where the two of us spoke about our lives and the various experiences of our lives over the years.
While I was a flaming, long-haired radical, the button-downed department head was a staunch Conservative party member. Now, in those days that meant Progressive Conservative party, with the emphasis on progressive. Turns out we had much in common, agreed on many issues (particularly human rights), felt the same way about the English language (always, always use the English spelling, never the bawdlerized American spelling).
During the course of our three hour discussion, he informed me of a number of issues for my consideration respecting my pending job …

Vancouver Community College’s College Foundations Programme was a provincially funded high school completion programme for adults who wished to go on to a post-secondary education;
The student drop-out rate for College Foundations classes was 75% by the end of the term, as had long been the case, with a full 50% of the students generally withdrawing from classes in the first 3 or 4 weeks;
Arising from the high drop-out rate, class sizes were set at 30. Of the 30 students enrolled in each class, all were working class with troubled backgrounds, a full third (sometimes more) of the class were sex trade workers still active in the profession, while the remaining two-thirds worked at minimum wage jobs, if they could find employment at all;
The mid-19th century novel I was to teach for the summer semester (to begin in May), was Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles. I told the department head that under no circumstance could I teach the anti-feminist Tess, all the moreso because of the makeup of the class I was to teach. The creation of Tess was entirely a male construct, I argued, the lead character passive and accepting of a guilt that was not her own, hardly an inspiring figure for the women students enrolled in my class.
Instead, I told him I would wish to teach my favourite novel, George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, the protagonist, Maggie Tulliver, the strongest feminist heroine in 19th century literature, as passionate and bright, as obstinate and loving, as imaginative and sympathetic, and intoxicatingly beautiful a woman — for her mind, and the world of ideas in which she lived, with a sensuousness that charmed all in her world — as one could hope to find in the novel. Not to mention which, George Eliot was just a pen name, the working class author’s true name, Mary Ann Evans, presenting her characters as social outsiders subject to small-minded persecution, with Maggie triumphing throughout the book.

My argument carried, with permission granted to teach Eliot’s fine novel.

When classes started in early May, my first impressions of the members of the class was that, as a whole, here were a group of mostly young people in their early to mid-twenties who had been beaten down by life, who had been subject to much abuse, and an utter lack of love and support.
As we got to know one another, I learned of the dreams that my students held for themselves: one wanted to be a police officer, another an airplane mechanic, yet another a day care supervisor, another a social worker, and yet another a university professor. I also learned that the friends and families of the students did not offer their support to my students in their “trying to better themselves,” rather their friends and families experienced the ambitions of my students as their being “too big for their britches”, as a disloyalty to their working class roots, as a pulling away, a desertion.
I also learned that a feature of my students’ lives was a propensity to have their friends argue with them, which inevitably — in many cases — often meant coming to blows, a decidedly unsatisfactory end to a dispute.
I decided to begin each of the two three-hour evening classes each week by teaching the students a new word. The first word I taught was specious …

The definition of specious: superficially plausible, but actually misleading and wrong.

After discussing the word specious with my students, its connotative and denotative meaning, I suggested to my students that the next time they found themselves in an argument with a friend, rather than appear to disagree with their antagonist, instead say something — with a big, almost revelatory smile on their faces — along the lines of, “Thank you. What a wonderfully specious thing to say,” that all the time their friend was thinking you were saying something kind, thoughtful and seemingly agreeable, in actuality you were calling him or her a fool — but only my students would know that, as it was unlikely that their friends knew the meaning of specious, and the implications of employing that word.
Unsurprisingly, several of my students did exactly as I prescribed above, returning to class a few days later with shit eating grins on their faces, saying, “I tried it out. It worked perfectly! I didn’t have to get into an argument with my friend, and what was even better, I felt that I’d won the argument, defended myself, allowing us to enjoy our evening and to have a good time out drinking at a bar, with the both of us feeling just great!”
Ah, the power of language — it’s just a wonderful thing, don’t you think?

Now on to teaching The Mill on the Floss. Early on my students could not make hide nor hare of Eliot’s novel, they protested that they didn’t understand the flowery British language of 1860, and that as far as they were concerned, the novel I’d chosen was a no go — they couldn’t and they wouldn’t read it, and that was all there was to it. The students were adamant (another word I taught them the meaning of, and gratefully so).
Little wonder, I thought to myself, that students long out of school would experience some difficulty with deriving meaning from mid-19th century British literature. I asked my students how many of them had been read to when they were young children. Not one had had a parent, an aunt or a teacher read to them at any point in their lives. I decided to change that.

“Ah, my child, you will have real troubles to fret about by and by,” is the consolation we have almost all of us had administered to us in our childhood, and have repeated to other children since we have been grown up. We have all of us sobbed so piteously, standing with tiny bare legs above our little socks, when we lost sight of our mother in some strange place; but we can no longer recall the poignancy of that moment and weep over it, as we do over the remembered sufferings of five or ten years ago. Every one of those keen moments has left its trace, and lives in us still, but such traces have blent themselves irrecoverably with the firmer texture of our youth long since past; and so it comes that we can look on at the troubles of our children with a smiling disbelief in the reality of their pain. Is there any one who can recover the experience of her childhood, not merely with a memory of what she did and what happened to her, of what she liked and disliked when she was in a pinafore but with an intimate penetration, a revived consciousness of what she felt then, when it was so long from one Midsummer to another; what she felt when her school chums had shut her out of their game because she would pitch the ball wrong out of mere wilfulness; or on a rainy day in the holidays, when she didn’t know how to amuse herself, and fell from idleness into mischief, from mischief into defiance, and from defiance into sulkiness; or when her mother absolutely refused to let her have a tailed cape that “half,” although every other girl of her age had the cape she so desired? Surely if we could recall that early bitterness, and the dim guesses, the strangely perspectiveless conception of life, that gave the bitterness its intensity, we should not pooh-pooh the griefs of our children.”

When we were to begin the teaching of The Mill on the Floss, I asked the students to read Book One, Chapter One, for the next class.
At the beginning of that class, I turned down the lights, and from the lectern at the front of the class, I proceeded to read cogent passages from Chapter One, injecting meaning and emotion into the words. When I was done, the lights were turned up, and I could see that there was hardly a dry eye among the students in the class, who’d found the passages I’d read moving beyond anything they’d experienced in their school years to date, as many of the students exclaimed to me. We went on to discuss what occurred in Chapter One, the meaning that could be derived from the chapter, and why I had chosen the passages that I did to read to the class.
As the Wednesday evening class was drawing to a close, I assigned one of the students (who I had consulted with in advance, in my office, and during the mid-class break) to read passages from, and present Chapter Two to her fellow students at the next class, and to do as I had done, reflect on the meaning of Eliot’s words, why they were moving, what we learned about Maggie, her brother Tom, her parents and aunts and uncles and cousins, about where she lived, and what she and they thought of her parents and who, perhaps, was the more loving and supportive parent.
After the mid-class break at the next class, the student I had assigned to read passages from Chapter 2 did just that, coming up to the lectern, the lights now dimmed. Again, reading for meaning, when the lights were undimmed, there was not a dry eye among the students. All of the students came to love George Eliot’s Maggie Tulliver (as for me, both Cathy and I called Megan “Maggie” all the time she was growing up, and still do).
We read through the thirteen chapters of Book One of The Mill on the Floss, just as we had for chapters one and two.
In the third week of May 1988, the head of the College Foundations Programme — the man who had hired me — took a leave. Three weeks later he was dead, the first person I’d been close to who had died of AIDS.
A new department head was put into place, a feminist woman and left wing activist of some note, who proved to be very much the authoritarian (rather than a humanist, as her antecedent had been) and proved, as well, to be much less open than had been her predecessor to my approach to teaching. She scolded me for teaching The Mill on the Floss rather than the assigned 19th century novel I was teach for the summer semester, Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, also frowning on the dimmed lights for the reading of passages of the first Book of Eliot’s 1860 novel; neither was she particularly enamoured of the easygoing camaraderie that had developed between the exhilarated members of the class and myself.
“Unprofessional,” she harrumphed, telling all of her administrative colleagues at VCC of what a terrible teacher I was, how I had demeaned my students both by reading to them, and allowing them to read to one another, which imprecations by her, and more, carried over into my involvement with members of the civic party of which I was a member, the Coalition of Progressive Electors, prominent members of whom taught at Vancouver Community College, and who made no bones about the fact that they knew me to be a terrible teacher, a teacher who demeaned his students, treated them improperly and with unconscionable disrespect.
Sometimes, youse just gotta love the authoritarian, holier-than-thou left.
Thing is, though, while students dropped out in droves from the classes taught by my colleagues in the department — as the now deceased head of the department had said had been a common circumstance for years — not one of my students withdrew from my class before semester’s end.

Over the years, I have run across more than a dozen students from the class the students and I shared at VCC in the summer of 1988.
During that summer semester of 1988, and beyond, I provided out of class assistance to the student who wished to be a police officer, which he is today, having gone on to a baccalaureate degree in criminology, and then a Masters degree, both from Simon Fraser University. The student who wished to become an airplane mechanic? Ran into him at a Dollar Store on Commercial Drive — he told me he had taken specialized training, and now travels the globe providing service that only he and very few others are able to provide. The woman who wished to attain a degree in Early Childhood Education did just that, only recently retiring from her work at the child care centre where she was a supervisor for a near quarter century.
The young woman who wished to be a university professor?
Well, she has long worked as a consultant in the federal corrections system, directly with offenders, and on the way to attaining her PhD in Psychology was hired first as an instructor at a British Columbia university and then as a professor, all the while raising her family and running a successful private therapeutic practice, for which work she has received much recognition.
Teaching? I loved teaching.
But as anyone who knows me soon realizes, I can be obstinate, and when I believe myself to be in the right, no one and nothing will direct me away from the path that I have chosen, a path always in the service of others.