Never mind the homework, here's the Vegan Teacher

I’ve been working up to posting something decent all day. Unfortunately, I have been incapable of dredging up any kind of intelligent thought due to the fact that I’ve basically been celebrating the completion of my Ed. degree since handing in my exam on Friday. I had a wicked weekend and now a headache has replaced the heartache. This morning I worked a shift at the cafe with the ladies (who were in the same condition). We listened to Priest and Sabbath while attempting to nurse ourselves better with coffee and tofu burritos.

I only have a couple days before we head out to the west coast to play a handful of shows. You can see how I haven’t even started thinking about the Africa trip yet. No, I think that will start hitting home next week when I begin acquiring supplies (mosquito net, power adapter etc.) and taking the malaria pills. I ended up finding a new roommate and a friend of mine is going to sublet my room in June. Everything is coming together quite nicely and now that classes are finished, I’m starting to get excited about summer.

I just handed in my last paper. It was a 25 pager. I wish I had the ability to finish these things in advance but as I’ve learned over the years, my best work is done under pressure. It’s done though and it represented the final piece of work required for my degree, so that’s kind of exciting/alleviating.

This weekend I also played a show with a band that basically hires me out. It’s interesting stuff, kind of electro/rock-type jams. The best part is that when you’re a hired gun there’s basically zero pressure and you don’t have to deal with any band-drama. Anyways, the kicker on Sunday was closing the set with the Trooper which was wicked fun. At the show, I was asked if I would be interesting in drumming for a production in mid-June, a week after I leave. I can’t, unfortunate since there would be a grand in it for me. Ouch!

I haven’t driven my car in 2 weeks and I’m feeling really good about it. I wish I lived in a climate that was conducive to (comfortable) year-round biking. Fortunately, I can get a good 5-6 months in on my trusty $40 dollar steed around these parts. What’s great is that after biking for a while a while I stop thinking like a driver. Complaining about gas prices and getting angry in traffic jams lose all relevance to me which is a wonderful feeling.

I’ve been offered some really exciting work by a local artist who is putting together a piece that traces music in this here lovely city back 60 years. I’m really looking forward to being a part of the project as a similar idea once came to my mind, but I couldn’t figure out how to realize it.

I got my Owls record back yesterday after lending it to a friend a couple of years ago. Oh, how I have missed it so! Any Kinsella fans out there would agree that it was those guy’s best work. You can’t go wrong with a grown man’s Cap ‘n Jazz.

Lastly, I spent the afternoon today in a friends backyards turning the soil in his garden. In exchange for some space, I offered to help maintain it. Gardening by proxy!

I think this weekend might find me hunting for morels.

Also, I think I found a roommate who’s vegan! I hope it works out because let me tell you how tired I am of the smell of frying meat. Gross. I mean, I still think BBQ’s smell great, and though I wouldn’t actually eat a burger or steak, when prepared well I can appreciate their olfactory appeal. But fried? 5 dollars??? Get outta here…

Lastly, I’m banking a ton of hours on my stoop. This is why I pay my dues in this town for 8 months out of the year.

It seems like I haven’t made a decent entry in this thing in a while. Maybe I should have taken some time off or maybe I should have just kept some things personal. But the more I use this blog to reflect on where I’m at these days with teaching, the clearer the overall picture becomes. I’ve never been good at keeping diaries before. I’ve tried a few times in my life, but this is the first time I’ve consistently tracked my thoughts and it’s neat to have them to look back on. On that note, I have decided that this blog will probably expand a bit from it’s initial conception of simply serving to track my progress as a vegan, punk-rock teacher, but if you’ve been keeping up with me you’ve probably noticed this trend anyways.

I just wrote a midterm and it put me in the mood for remarking on the role of a teacher in society. Well, that and the fact a city cop was recently been charged with drunk driving. Anyways, the deeper I dive in this profession, the more I realize that the duties of a teacher extend far beyond the school. The fact that teachers have the responsibility to maintain the integrity of the profession sees their position as a societal role model active at nearly all times. What does this mean for me? For starters, it seems like my days of  being generally stupid are drawing to a close. The more cases I read about teachers being called out for inappropriate behaviour and the consequences they often face has put me in a position where I, acting as a free moral agent, have the choice to decide whether or not I want to accept this responsibility. What implications does this have on my life as a musician, a young adult who enjoys his brew and a social activist? I don’t think it means I have to stop being who I am, but I can’t help but feel the need to curtail a few of my behaviours and really consider their consequences. For, what is a role model who doesn’t walk the walk?

I first encountered this a couple months ago when I was talking with some of my Bio 12’s who were asking me where to get wasted in town on a Friday night. Instinctively, I wanted to tell them where to go for 50 cent draught and which corners they should be careful to avoid when it comes to runins with the fuzz. But is this professional? It is easily arguable that advocating for drinking as a means to have fun is not the role of the young teacher. Duh, but this was one of the first times I was faced with a conflict between my persona as a fun-loving human and my role as an educator. Which is why I think I ended up taking the opportunity to have a beer with those guys in a responsible context. It sounds rather dry, and I’m sure I’m coming off as some kind of knowitall-goof. But the fact is, now that I’ve began taking steps to actually secure a career in teaching, some things just don’t feel right to me anymore. In some ways this kind of alienates me from a lot of my peers who enjoy spending their weekends getting wrecked and acting like idiots. Does and should there come a time when you decide all that this is behind you? How far should you let your work influence your private life? Do I not have the right to be an idiot? Of course I do, but I also have the choice of becoming a roughneck on the rigs as well.

When I was enrolled in a class on Buddhism a few years back, there was a huge emphasis on being truthful and compassionate. The power of this idea is sinking in as I see some of my peers practicing what they preach, some of them selling out, and some of them treating other people as a means to an end. It can be a disappointing time too, since it seems that you character really shows once you hit a quarter-century. When you hit my age, you can’t pass the buck anymore. Like Joe Strummer once said, “When you blame yourself, you learn from it. If you blame someone else, you don’t learn nothing, cause hey, it’s not your fault, it’s his fault, over there”. I’m glad it only took me this long to be able to agree with such a statement. On that note, it’s also a fantastic time, because youthfulness has not yet been mortgaged for cynicism and I know a ton of people that are holding onto some wicked idealism. So on one hand I’ve got these friends that are bumming me out more than ever while others are filling me with all kinds of inspiration. I guess it’s this balance serves to keep a person in check.

Lastly, I have an assload of wax buildup in my ear. The doctor ordered be to fill my ear canal with olive oil and she’ll try again tomorrow to remove the gunk. So until then, if you see me on the street kind of weaving and not responding, don’t worry. I’m only 5% a clumsy jerk, the rest is temporary.

Update: the VT was on the CBC this morning AND just got a letter from the mayer regarding the plastic bag ban!

I heard on the radio this morning that the City Council here is going to be banning bottled water. I do believe we’re the first Canadian city to do so and regardless of our clueless provincial government (I’m still writing my rant about the 500 ducks that died after landing in the tailings pond up in the Tar Sands), it makes me feel proud of this dirty old town. Now we’ve got to work on plastic bags.

I missed out on being a runner for the band Megadeth by about an hour today. Some promoters called me up while I was at school wanting to know if I’d do some running around for them (get strings, sticks, food etc) but I wasn’t here to answer the call. Too bad, that would’ve been hilarious.

Got a midterm tomorrow. I’ll study for it somewhere between band practice and my Ghana cohort meeting.

I can already feel that this entry is going to deviate from my regular tales of students, studies and politics. For some reason I feel like airing a different set of laundry on the internets so here goes. I’ve been single for the longest time since I began partaking in the North American dating ritual. In fact, after my last relationship went down the toilet, I made a commitment to remain this way for a year, hoping that time would iron some wrinkles out of my mind. While it’s been good to have the time and energy to devote to finishing up with school and getting some things figured out, I’ve began noticing a few things about myself that are really starting to crack me up.

First, I am slowly becoming a man of strange routines. Since I have nothing better to do, I keep myself busy by trying to organize the large amount of clutter (both physical and emotional) in my life. This has found me doing things like coming home and hanging my keys on a hook so I don’t misplace them and making sure my coffee maker and espresso machine are parallel to each other yet perpendicular to the stove. I’m also considering reorganizing my collection of records/cds in an autobiographical format, something I’ve always wondered was actually possible since first seeing the movie High Fidelity. I’ve also found myself agonizing over such things as the placement of bookshelves. Is this bookshelf (acquired from my subletter) in a position that will maximize space while providing adequate benefits such as holding books and allowing ample room for cat perching? Can I see all of the books if it is placed in that position? Is it necessary to see all the books on the bookshelf? Do I need to even fill the bookshelf with books? It turns out that the bookshelf is still vacant and though I am not satisfied with where it sits in my room, I have decided that it serves me better empty.

Perhaps the most humorous of all my behaviours is my ability to carry on one-way conversations with my cats. Topics usually relate to food, music or the newspaper but occasionally I will ask them for opinions on on an article of clothing or I will inform them that they are being moochers and that if they continue waking me up at 5 in the morning, they are going to need to get jobs. I seem to be having a lot more of these conversations with myself than usual due to the added solitude that has come with my roommate being in the process of moving out. Yesterday, I heard a noise and immediately assumed it was one of my cats causing a ruckus. So I inquired as to “what the hell (it) was doing”. Turns out it was my roommate’s girlfriend moving some hampers out of his room.

Last night totally felt like the beginning of summer. I got together with a bunch of old-schoolers that I haven’t seen in ages and we went out to have a great time seeing a band we’ve all been into at one point or another. The set was good, the band drew on an extensive catalog of skate punk tunes including Dinosaurs will Die, Linoleum, Kill All the White Men, Reeko and their cover of the Rancid tune Radio. As a unit, the band are still on top of their game, the songs sounded great and the banter between them was pretty amusing with Fat Mike taking a few cheap shots at random audience members in between dodging various projectiles. I really enjoy seeing bands like NOFX who have been at it so long. The performance is such a fluid spectacle, they are able to make light of anything that goes wrong on stage and the audience is composed of all walks of life. In the end I think they played for about an hour and a half and everyone went home more or less satiated from a healthy dosage of punk.

I’m enjoying that class I’m taking too. We’re looking at a variety of issues from different perspectives and the composition of the class is really making for some healthy debate and discussion. Today we also learned about lockdown procedures at schools in the city. This is something fairly new to me, but they’re essentially as common in the city as fire drills. Thing is, after a lockdown is called, no student is allowed to leave the classroom so we’re talking about instances like kids being locked inside schools when they’re supposed to be on flights to Disneyland and so on. Epipens too, we’re learning about how teachers have a responsibility to act in loco parentis which can at times force them to be in the position of a kid’s parent or guardian. A lot of this stuff is mandated in various codes and whatnot to prevent injury to a student or lawsuits. Overall, I can see why they’d like you to take the class after you’ve had your experience in the field since it gives the material a little more context.

Back home now. Spent the weekend biking around the ‘hood, connecting with some friends who I haven’t seen in years and others who I won’t see again for months. Yesterday, I hit a craft fair up that was organized by local artisans. One guy was selling amplifiers he’d made out of neat old objects like vintage fans, space heaters and matchboxes. Another girl was selling records she had turned into clocks. Too bad I was way too broke to buy any of it! While I’ve got 5 weeks until I leave for Africa, my next mission is to find a job I can work in the evenings.

Anyways, I’ll wrap up my experience now. In bio on friday, we did a lab where you extract DNA from strawberries. It was super fun and the kids were pretty stoked to be able to actually see DNA since it’s not a very tangible concept. The Science kids had a test to write and I spent the rest of my day getting my resources back to where they needed to go, tidying up my work space and saying my goodbyes to all the staff. I received 3 letters of reference, got some tips on how to construct a working portfolio and spent a couple hours after school marking the Unit tests.

After that, I bid adeau to my mentor teacher and it was kind of sad. Even though it seems like there was a bit of tension between the two of us the past couple weeks, I really appreciated how he helped me through and he seemed to dig the new things I brought to the table. So when it came time to say goodbye, we kind of did the man thing, you know, the “see you down the road”. He offered to refer me anytime and told me to let him know if I wanted any ski passes next season. Shake hands and see ya later, Mr. B. What a wicked dude.

Then it was off to the pub where I met up with my students. We ended up shooting the breeze for a good 4 hours. It was nice to see them outside of the school and it was really funny to get their opinions on a few things. Actually what was really funny was this conversation I had with one of them who asked me why I waited so long to come out. “Well, what, like you’re going to take your student teacher seriously on Monday?” and he goes “Ha! It’s not like if you were to kick me out of class I’d be all heart broken like ‘oh, Mr. T., I thought we had something!’”.

I asked them what their plans were for this summer. After graduating, the majority of them are leaving town to either travel or go to school. I was really happy when a couple of them asked me about life at University. Happy, I guess, since I was able to put their minds at ease. They have some funny ideas about life in the city and I was glad to dispel myths such as “is it true that there are places in the city where you can’t go or else you’ll get killed?”. What? The media is great at constructing perception and distorting reality.

Drove back on Saturday, arrived to my subletter moving out. It was nice of her to take care of my ridiculous cats, one of whom chewed the head off her teddy bear.

Now here I am. I’ve got class in 45 minutes, a three week one that is essentially the last class I need to finish my degree. I can’t believe it’s been two years since I started this thing. I can’t believe I’m almost at the end. Summer is around the corner and I guess the next chapter will see me attempting to try to get a job with my new $20K piece of paper.

I’ll probably keep this thing going between now and my arrival in Africa, but it might be a little less consistent. I’m thinking of trying some other things on this site in the meantime. Well see.

As a last day gift, a student bought me a ticket to SNFU tonight. Coincidental, as I’ve been talking about them on here a lot lately. I’m quoting my student who upon first glance at Chi remarked, “holy shit, he looks like Father Time”. That’s all I will say about that.

Anyways, my last day at the school was today. It rocked. I went out to the pub with my Bio 12 students and they asked me for advice/some words of wisdom. After chuckling to myself (because it’s me, seriously), I basically told them that it might sound cliche, but after they graduate they can do whatever they want as long as they don’t wait for someone to hand it to them.

More on my last day once I get home.