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Page 5, News, Tuesday, September 24 1991 by Balan Menon Lake Superior High School © Principal's Perspective Good teachers are driven by a pas- sion for teaching. Great teachers are impelled by intense love for students as. human beings. For teaching is as com- plex as the human mind, and no teacher can be called truly great who does not approach the task as a labour of love. The task of the teacher is to expand students' knowledge, challenge their minds ad excite their imagination. Learning, ultimately, is the enhance- ment of awareness, stimulation of criti- cal thinking , and shaping of imagina- tive experience. in short, learning is the moulding of the human mind through the medium of the imagination. And the truth is that nothing is learned unless it is first visualized through the imagination. To illustrate what I mean, let me describe a teacher who in my formative years had a profound effect on me as the primary architect of my mind and indeed my life: Miss Myrtle. I think I had Miss. Myrtle in the fourth grade. She was a ster disciplinarian, Miss Myrtle, sparing not the rod of correc- tion when the occasion warranted. But in her approach to teaching, she person- ified love and dedication. Miss Myrtle taught me geography, history and English. She used maps, charts, stories and pictures --and imag- ination. We were fascinated because, in her method of.teaching, history and geography were not compendia of dry facts and dull events, but the story of people who were individualized, and far-away places brought to life. I still remember learning about Raoul and Maria ad the rain forests of South America; about Olaf the Norwegian navigating the fiords; and about Sam of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in his scarlet tunic astride his brave horse. We actually roamed free in the arctic tundra and sped in our dog sleds over snow with the Eskimo--although we did not have even the remotest experi- ence of snow. But with Miss Myrtle stimulating our imagination, we wal- lowed in snow, plunged breathlessly into torrential rapids, traversed a kalei- doscopic variety of terrain with the monarch butterflies. Miss Myrtle taught English the way any language should be taught--as a delightful adventure into the exotic uni- verse of words and experiences. She grasped our minds and made us think; lifted us up by our imagination and let us float away into the cosmos of lan- guage and literature. We plunged into a world of fun and frolic, or soared up, up and away into far-off worlds. Still fresh and alive in my mind are things that Miss Myrtle conjured up. Principal inspired by his childhood teacher She introduced me to the vivid and action-filled world of the ancient poet, Homer--with whom I saw those untraveled realms of the imagination.I was both Paris and Agamemnon: yet a boy, I fell precociously and passionately in love with Helen, whose face launched a thousand ships and burned the topless towers of Ilium. I wore the armour of both Achilles and of Hector. And with Ulysses I wandered into the enchanted island of the beautiful sorcer- ess, Circe and I heard the maddeningly haunting music of the sirens. Miss Myrtle ignited me and set me and my course, and I took off like a rocket into space, where books were my guides t planets and galaxies of the mind. She did not 'teach' us poetry and fiction and drama. She helped us to experience the rythmns and pictures of poetry and song, to think and feel like the 'real people' of fiction, to be swept away by the action of the drama. We did not merely write, we explored the power of words and their ability to pro- pel ideas and feelings. Not only did we read short stories and plays, but we also wrote them, and became the characters on the stage, and laughed and cried with them. Miss Myrtle practiced the principles of whole language long before the con- cept became part of fashionable educa- tion jargon. The wonder of it was that she was teaching boys and girls who learned English for the first time in kindergarten or the first grade; who never spoke English outside the class- room, and many of whose parents did not speak English! Inspired by Miss Myrtle, I developed a passion for reading. I read because my imagination was stirred, and because I fell in love with the power of words. I also read because reading expanded my universe, enlightened me about life, and allowed me to explore my inner self. Miss Myrtle had the two rare gifts of great teachers: first, the love of children and of teaching them, and second, the ability to think as a child, using the imagination. Learning that does not tough the imagination is rote-learning, and is as evanescent as the mists touched by the sun. Miss Myrtle did not just touch my imagination, she grasped it, breathed life into it and gave me a passionate love of learning. The child, as Woodsworth said, is father of the man. And to paraphrase that great poet, so was it when my edu- cation began, so is it now I am a man. That teacher, who stands out as the apothesis of inspired teaching, repre- sents our vision of teaching and learn- ing at Lake Superior High School. Retraining essential to North' Northern Ontario is being dragged, kicking and screaming, into a new eco- nomic future. The recent rash of mill closures and- cutbacks (Abitibi-Price in Thunder Bay, Proboard in Atikokan, Kimberly Clark in Kapuskasing) are forcing the north's traditional source of employment - the resource sector - to change, or die. It's too late to point fingers at the industry for not modernizing sooner, getting earlier into newsprint recycling, or implementing pollution clean-up pro- grams, so the mills would be ready for the 1990s. Employees caught in this vortex change--the ones facing the loss of jobs they've held for decades--are in need of a lot of immediate help. These workers are also the foundation of a community's new future. Most have sunk deep roots in the community, and don't want to leave. Unlike miners, who are used to a transient lifestyle, mill workers tend to stay in one place - some for more than a generation. The federal government's way of coping with this is to create local Indus- trial Adjustment Committees (IAC). An IAC is 50 per cent funded by the employer, 25 per cent by the federal government, and 25 per cent by the province. I've recently become familiar with one of these committees - the one created as a result of the shutdown of Abitibi-Price's Thunder Bay Division, 480 people have been laid off so far. This. IAC has agreed to retain a neu- tral chairman - former MPP Jim Foulds. Foulds has the difficult task of referee- ing a committee made up of representa- tives of 6 different unionized, two rep- resentatives of non-unionized employ- ees, three management representatives and civil servants from five different provincial or federal departments or Confederation College. This multi-headed monster is trying to charge off in several directions at once. Some bargaining units are only da Employment and Immigration Cen- tres (CEIC). C-21 says that a laid off worker can collect UI for up to three years if he or she is participating in a CEIC-approved retraining course. That makes a lot of sense, since the retraining needs of peo- ple like the Abitibi workers won't be solved with just one-year courses. What the Committee learned, how- ever, is that "three year training money" does not come automatically. They had interested in NORTHERN to lobby for getting their it. Bureau- membership INSIGHTS crats respon- back to work by Larry Sanders sible for bud- in the forest industry. Other unions, especially the Canadian Paperworkers Union, are turning their backs on shrinking employment possibilities in the resource industries. The Committee also has a political challenge getting Ottawa to live up to-its own legislation. You might remember Bill C-21; changes to the Unemployment Insur- ance Act. These amendments were resisted strenuously by organized labour, but eventually passed the House of Commons. C-21 was then stalled in the Senate for nearly a year, in the great GST-standoff. But it passed in the end, and is now law. Among the changes was an impor- tant new emphasis on retraining. Mil- lions of UI dollars have been channeled away from direct benefits into special training budgets, administered by Cana- gets interpret- ed the legislation in a very strict fash- ion. Not everyone, they argued, should get three year funding just because they're on UI. They don't want to let a regular student who might have a four month job between years at college and then get laid off, to be eligible for three years of UI benefits while going to school. So the Committee made a deal. Three year funding will be authorized from CEIC, but only for workers who are approved by the Committee. Ottawa has made a similar concession in Elliot Lake. The entire community has been designated as eligible for three year training funds. But other situations, such as Kapuskasing and Sault Ste. Marie, have not yet been designated eli- gible for training funds. Shifting from a labourer's job in a S survival] mill to new career in health care or computer technology is not easy. Liter- acy levels are not as good as they should be, so many have to start with basic upgrading that can last 56 weeks. After passing high school, a new career in something like nursing takes at least another two years--even at the diploma level. The other glitch is that CEIC will not pay for university. Only college level diploma courses are eligi- ble for long-term UI funding. This is a problem many other com- munities will face as the resource sector downsizes. I want to pass on two princi- ple lessons from the Abitibi experience: 1. Start early on a retraining strategy. Waiting until the mill closes puts every- one under too much stress, and results in hasty decision-making. Acting before the mill shuts down does not mean being "doom and gloom" about a mill's future. Mills need better trained workers, even if they are continuing to operate. 2. Work co-operatively, not through confrontation. Stand-offs between management and unions, or between management and the community, only undercut everyone's ability to solve real problems. Everyone should agree that, despite differences at the bargaining table, there are real people involved-- people with real training needs. These needs should be addressed now, so mill- workers can retrain and stay in northern Ontario-- a north with new economic future.