The Beginning

After spending a few years now connecting with kids, putting on professional development workshops for teachers, and sharing resources, my wife (Shelien) suggested that I put my stuff down in a blog to share. 
I came out of university and started teaching in 2001 with lots of energy and enthusiasm, and I hate to say quite a bit of arrogance.  My first teaching position helped me truly see the extent of my current skills...I had a long way to go before I would become the teacher that I really wanted to be.   Some kids were totally connected to me, and to some I was just another teacher that they had to put up with until June.  I was fortunate to be supported by other teachers around me (like Mike Rennie) as well as my principal Bob Latham.  In those first few years of teaching a good principal who can provide support and guidance, as well as buffer some of the school drama is very needed.
When the provincial government upped the class size limit, my wife and I went from being close to getting our own classes for September, to about 37th on the recall list.  So we decided to accept positions in the small community of Bella Bella.  This First Nations community is only accessible by ferry or plane, so all supplies to the town were quite expensive.  Quickly however, we found the community welcoming and seafood cheap and easy to obtain.  We went to numerous potlatches and were culturally adopted into local families.  Sometime later I will do another post just on the Heiltsuk culture specifically since it deserves its own space and its people deserve their specific recognition in our lives.
After Bella Bella we eventually settled in Prince George, BC.  It's amount of sunlight were a pleasant change from the coastal rainforest and we settled into our new school.  We were hired to teach at the new Aboriginal Choice School that was just opening up, and we were selected because we had taught in both the band-school system as well as the public system.  The original goal of the school was to be somewhere in-between the two systems, and could hopefully be the best of both. 
Trying to adjust to such a diversity of learners was a challenge.  I had dealt with diverse classes in the past, but these were mostly academic challenges for me.  Now I had kids that were academically and behaviourally diverse, as well as having issues with attendance.  I realized that I had to teach a completely different way, and had no idea what that was going to be. 
Figuring out how to completely redo your teaching style while being totally stressed out with classroom behaviours, meetings, testing, etc. made progress slow.  My students did not do any homework, so how was I going to adapt to that?  Some of them needed a teacher, others a Dad-like figure, and others a behaviour coach.  By the third year my new structures were in place, and it was working.  I integrated my Heiltsuk knowledge of family and protocols with a learning-centers based classroom and my students showed progress.  They were learning how to read and write, could solve math problems, cooperate in small groups and were learning First Nation's culture.
When I changed schools, I moved back into intermediate to a group of students who, when I told them to take out their novels and read for 25 minutes after lunch, actually did it, at the beginning of September!  I realized that since I was not going to be as stressed, I could further adapt my model of teaching.