Sept 18
Begin your narrative of teaching with a story of your own encounter with a mentor or mentors.
A bit of back story… at the Oak Bay Recreation Centre in Victoria, all new employee training, Team Leader training, team building events, and staff nights are organized and run by the aquatic department’s management team, who at the time were three amazing, organized, personable, and dedicated women. During any and all training events they kept telling us that should we need anything or have questions about anything aquatic to just pop our heads into the office and that they were there to support us.
A couple months later, one day, one of the instructors on a shift I was working didn’t show up and wasn’t answering their phone. So the TL went to our boss who was on that shift. She came out on deck looking very nice (which in lifeguard terms means wearing makeup, having your hair done, and wearing a well put together outfit, which is rarely seen around a pool). A lot of people commented that she looked nice and it turned out that she had a date with her then boyfriend that evening, I think for an anniversary or something. Anyway, the TL told her what was up and she goes back into her office. About two minutes later, she comes out in her bathing suit, still in full makeup. She goes over and introduces herself to the kids and hops in the pool to begin teaching. By the end of that half hour, her hair and makeup were ruined, but she was wearing a big smile on her face. I can’t remember exactly, but I believe someone commented on her willingness to hop in the pool even though she had an important evening planned, and she replied “it’s part of the job. You don’t leave the kids hanging” or something to that effect. But even though I can’t remember what she said exactly, her actions spoke louder than any words. She was willing to put the kids first and support us in the pool should anything happen. She demonstrated that she was the kind of boss who lead by example and believed in the work that she did. I know that I wasn’t the only one that was inspired by her that day, because after that incident, I noticed that the instructors who had worked that shift and witness her actions worked harder than others and were willing to do more for the rec centre in general than the others.
What attracts you to her/him as a teacher?
My example isn’t in the teaching field exactly, but I believe it is still valuable regarding the teaching profession. What stands out to me is that I walked away thinking that that was the kind of person I want to be in any future workplace. Someone who can put things aside when necessary, and someone who understands the greater picture of what exactly it is that we’re there to do.
What was it about you that allowed great mentoring to happen?
I think that my curiosity, enthusiasm and ability to pick up on small emotional cues benefits me in that it allows me to be engaged with whatever I am doing but keenly aware of those who I am doing it with. The down side to that is that I can get overly affected by people’s bad moods sometimes.
How did your subject “choose you”?
Apparently I knew I was going to go into Theatre since before grade 7. I didn’t find out I knew that until after I graduated high school and found in my graduation documents package a letter I had written to my grade 12 self, as an assignment back in grade 7. The letter stated who my friends were at the time, what books I was reading, and what I wanted to do after graduation. Apparently for me it was going into theatre at “UVic” or “UCALGARY” (I clearly had a bias toward UVic because I couldn’t even get “U of C” right). What’s funny is that between grade 7 and grade 12 I had enrolled in the Kootenay Dance Academy and had started a plan to have a long career in dance, so it very much surprised me (and my dance teacher) when I decided to not pursue dance as a profession. I also think that I knew I would want to go on to become a teacher because when choosing schools to apply for, one of my deciding factors was that a degree would give me something to build off of in the future, whereas a training program would limit me to just the field of performing arts (I think my parents would remember clearer than I can the conversations had over the flip charts of pros and cons of multiple programs across the country). I had it in my mind that teaching was something you went into after you had been in your field for a long time and wanted to go back and share what you had learned. So much to my delight when I finally realized that in reality teaching allows you to keep challenging yourself to learn and grow as you go (and so much more).
