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LOOKOUT: In praise of Mr. Higginson
Longtime BCBW contributor Joan Givner has been a teacher most of her life-in grade school, high school, community college and university-and her fiction is full of school teachers. As the labour dispute between the B.C. government and B.C. teachers was prolonged into September, we asked her to comment on how teachers are depicted in her books and the books of others, and how the role of teachers has been evolving.
My current series of children's books, about a girl named Ellen Fremedon, feature a grade school teacher in a small Vancouver Island school who is a quietly heroic character and a mainstay in Ellen's life. He recognizes that Ellen has a difficult time at home because of her mother's multiple sclerosis. When Ellen faces a lonely summer, it's this teacher who gets her involved in a home for the elderly; and when Ellen starts a newspaper, he becomes a proofreader. When her mother dies, it is Mr. Higginson who draws her out of her grief.
Such a character could not have existed in my schooldays. Our teachers, when I was growing up in England, were not concerned with our emotional well-being or family problems. It was none of their business; it was beyond the realm of their responsibility. In grade school there was a truant officer to round up kids who went AWOL, but there were no counsellors. If our teachers were heroic in those days, it was because they were totally dedicated to our education.
High schools insisted on rigid discipline and hard work. If we, the students, were overworked (as I think we were), so were the teachers. We had piles of homework every night, and there were no excuses. Mostly we wrote essays and the teachers must have spent their evenings grading them. A few kindly souls reached out. Our enlightened French teacher organized a weekly Nail Biters Club: we started by leaving one nail alone and tried to work through the other nine. Treating the symptoms rather than the problem now seems ridiculous but it was well-meant.
Unlike Mr. Higginson, our teachers were Olympian figures, distant and often mythical. We guessed at their first names-was F for Fanny, M for Millicent? Friendship was not possible. "I like your frock, Miss."; "Don't be familiar,"; one might be rebuked.
So where did my Mr. Higginson come from? He represents the best of my daughters' experiences thirty years later.
Today teachers are expected to care about the well- being of their students. One of the finest depictions of such teachers that I've read recently occurs in Caroline Adderson's 2012 young adult novel Middle of Nowhere. There, her main character's kindergarten and grade school teachers are presented as beacons of kindness and wisdom in a bleak world.
In Middle of Nowhere, Curtis faces a crisis when his mother disappears and he must cope alone with a younger brother. When the food runs out, he instructs his little brother to tell his kindergarten teacher that he forgot to bring lunch. From his own kindergarten days, Curtis knows that if a kid has no lunch, Mrs. Gill will ask everybody in the class to contribute an item from theirs.
Curtis remembers Mrs. Gill's reaction a few years earlier when his mother failed to pick him up after school. First she gave him a puzzle to do. Then she asked him to help her set up the class for the next day's activities. Then, since he had a latch key around his neck, she drove him home and decided to wait with him until his mother returned.
Once inside, Mrs. Gill sat on the couch and read to him. "I always carry a book with me, Curtis,"; she said. "Just in case."; She also carried a granola bar which Curtis tucked down the back of the couch, just in case there wasn't any supper that night.
Now in grade six, Curtis has a different teacher and a different set of problems. He needs a permission slip and money for a field trip. Mr. Bryant, his favourite teacher, weighs up the situation. Curtis is the narrator:
"If it's the fee,"; he said, pretending to pick something off his sleeve so I wouldn't be embarrassed, "it doesn't matter.";
Mr. Bryant also wears gold pirate earrings. His appearance provokes one cheeky kid to ask on the first day of class if he's a lady. Mr. Bryant replies that he's a person and he expects the members of the class to act like people, too. When the kid, Mickey, asks what that means, he gets a detailed response:
Mr. Bryant explained that human beings bore a grave responsibility because we've evolved. It was our duty to demonstrate tolerance and compassion just as it was our duty to exercise the extraordinary reasoning abilities only human beings possess. He said we would be studying all about this in science, in social studies, in language arts, in every subject across the whole curriculum, because it was what really mattered. Then he congratulated Mickey for being the first one in the class to show an interest in the subject.
Circumstances and nasty people all conspire to make Curtis turn out badly.
But instead he becomes a resilient, nurturing intelligent person. We can't be sure that Mr. Bryant's influence is the crucial factor in determining that outcome. Yet it is clear that no one other than the teacher is in a better position to exert that influence.
The current labour dispute in B.C. and the public reaction to it have highlighted an unfortunate fact. While the teachers' role has expanded, making demands on them very high, and their work is more important than ever, respect for that work has roportionately decreased.
Now I wonder if such teachers as Adderson describes will be possible in the future. Perhaps they are already part of a [new] bygone era. What is likely to happen to the Mr. Higginsons, Mrs. Gills, and Mrs. Bryants in our time?
Joan Givner's latest book in her series, A Girl Called Tennyson, is The Hills Are Shadows (Thistledown $12.95).
978-1-927068-91-5
My current series of children's books, about a girl named Ellen Fremedon, feature a grade school teacher in a small Vancouver Island school who is a quietly heroic character and a mainstay in Ellen's life. He recognizes that Ellen has a difficult time at home because of her mother's multiple sclerosis. When Ellen faces a lonely summer, it's this teacher who gets her involved in a home for the elderly; and when Ellen starts a newspaper, he becomes a proofreader. When her mother dies, it is Mr. Higginson who draws her out of her grief.
Such a character could not have existed in my schooldays. Our teachers, when I was growing up in England, were not concerned with our emotional well-being or family problems. It was none of their business; it was beyond the realm of their responsibility. In grade school there was a truant officer to round up kids who went AWOL, but there were no counsellors. If our teachers were heroic in those days, it was because they were totally dedicated to our education.
High schools insisted on rigid discipline and hard work. If we, the students, were overworked (as I think we were), so were the teachers. We had piles of homework every night, and there were no excuses. Mostly we wrote essays and the teachers must have spent their evenings grading them. A few kindly souls reached out. Our enlightened French teacher organized a weekly Nail Biters Club: we started by leaving one nail alone and tried to work through the other nine. Treating the symptoms rather than the problem now seems ridiculous but it was well-meant.
Unlike Mr. Higginson, our teachers were Olympian figures, distant and often mythical. We guessed at their first names-was F for Fanny, M for Millicent? Friendship was not possible. "I like your frock, Miss."; "Don't be familiar,"; one might be rebuked.
So where did my Mr. Higginson come from? He represents the best of my daughters' experiences thirty years later.
Today teachers are expected to care about the well- being of their students. One of the finest depictions of such teachers that I've read recently occurs in Caroline Adderson's 2012 young adult novel Middle of Nowhere. There, her main character's kindergarten and grade school teachers are presented as beacons of kindness and wisdom in a bleak world.
In Middle of Nowhere, Curtis faces a crisis when his mother disappears and he must cope alone with a younger brother. When the food runs out, he instructs his little brother to tell his kindergarten teacher that he forgot to bring lunch. From his own kindergarten days, Curtis knows that if a kid has no lunch, Mrs. Gill will ask everybody in the class to contribute an item from theirs.
Curtis remembers Mrs. Gill's reaction a few years earlier when his mother failed to pick him up after school. First she gave him a puzzle to do. Then she asked him to help her set up the class for the next day's activities. Then, since he had a latch key around his neck, she drove him home and decided to wait with him until his mother returned.
Once inside, Mrs. Gill sat on the couch and read to him. "I always carry a book with me, Curtis,"; she said. "Just in case."; She also carried a granola bar which Curtis tucked down the back of the couch, just in case there wasn't any supper that night.
Now in grade six, Curtis has a different teacher and a different set of problems. He needs a permission slip and money for a field trip. Mr. Bryant, his favourite teacher, weighs up the situation. Curtis is the narrator:
"If it's the fee,"; he said, pretending to pick something off his sleeve so I wouldn't be embarrassed, "it doesn't matter.";
Mr. Bryant also wears gold pirate earrings. His appearance provokes one cheeky kid to ask on the first day of class if he's a lady. Mr. Bryant replies that he's a person and he expects the members of the class to act like people, too. When the kid, Mickey, asks what that means, he gets a detailed response:
Mr. Bryant explained that human beings bore a grave responsibility because we've evolved. It was our duty to demonstrate tolerance and compassion just as it was our duty to exercise the extraordinary reasoning abilities only human beings possess. He said we would be studying all about this in science, in social studies, in language arts, in every subject across the whole curriculum, because it was what really mattered. Then he congratulated Mickey for being the first one in the class to show an interest in the subject.
Circumstances and nasty people all conspire to make Curtis turn out badly.
But instead he becomes a resilient, nurturing intelligent person. We can't be sure that Mr. Bryant's influence is the crucial factor in determining that outcome. Yet it is clear that no one other than the teacher is in a better position to exert that influence.
The current labour dispute in B.C. and the public reaction to it have highlighted an unfortunate fact. While the teachers' role has expanded, making demands on them very high, and their work is more important than ever, respect for that work has roportionately decreased.
Now I wonder if such teachers as Adderson describes will be possible in the future. Perhaps they are already part of a [new] bygone era. What is likely to happen to the Mr. Higginsons, Mrs. Gills, and Mrs. Bryants in our time?
Joan Givner's latest book in her series, A Girl Called Tennyson, is The Hills Are Shadows (Thistledown $12.95).
978-1-927068-91-5
Submitted on November 7, 2014 in By David.
