Teacher’s memoir highlights growing up, teaching in Mississauga. “Technology has changed. Teenagers are still basically the same,” says Geoffrey Kavanagh, longtime Mississauga resident, former high school teacher and faculty member at the University of Toronto’s Ontario Institute for Studies in Education and now, author.
Kavanagh recently published a memoir of his time as a student teacher in Mississauga called Chalk Dust and Comfortable Shoes – My Life in Teaching: The Journey Begins and spoke to Mpulse about his book, teaching and teenagers.
“I always wanted to be a teacher,” Kavanagh said. “I was influenced by the teachers I had and I was a good student. But I didn’t know how to get from there to standing in front of a classroom.”
His book is about just that, how he went from first thinking about becoming a teacher to then entering teacher’s college in 1976 and completing his practice teaching sessions at various high schools across Mississauga, graduating, and then applying for his first real teaching job.
Kavanagh went to high school in Mississauga, then on to university at the University of Toronto’s Mississauga campus. He taught high school for many years, eventually ending up at U of T, mentoring future computer science teachers. Even now, in to retirement, he still works occasionally as a supply teacher.
He says teenagers today are just like the teenagers he taught fifty years ago: “They have their own words, own music, own fashions. They push boundaries and admire the people who will reign them in occasionally. They want to know where the limits are.”
While he believes teenagers haven’ t changed, he does think that nowadays we’ re “lacking an institutional desire to show students where the boundaries are.” The ways in which the culture in schools has changed is evident in his book, which transports the reader back to high school in the 1970s, when the culture was far more formal than it is today.
For example, when Kavanagh describes getting dressed before work as a student teacher he writes, “I wanted the students in my classes to enjoy my classes, but I also wanted them to learn what I taught….In my mind, part of this was being someone that they could look up to and that meant that I had to present a professional appearance. I hoped that when they saw me, I would represent something to which they could aspire. Hence the clean shoes, pressed shirt, jacket and tie.”
While it’s rare today to see a teacher with either a pressed shirt, jacket or tie, there are many other anecdotes from the book that will sound more familiar to both recent graduates and their grandparents alike. For example , Kavanagh writes, “During the class I went through my now familiar routine of keeping an eye on the students to see which ones answered questions eagerly and those that did their best to hide the fact that they did not want to, or could not answer. I noticed some of them using the usual tricks including writing industriously with their head down or looking for something in their bag.”
Kavanagh told Mpulse his story is one of perseverance. He started teaching at age 22, not much older than some of the kids he taught and learned a lot along the way. “I got along with my students,” he said. “I believe that if you treat students fairly and with understanding, they’ll do the same for you.”
Kavanagh’s book is available at Amazon.ca and his commentary on the education system more broadly can be found on his LinkedIn account. He would also like to invite any of his former students, especially those he taught at OISE and who are now teaching in Mississauga schools, to reach out to him to say hello.
