Teacher+Reflections

=//This is our story...//= From Charlene Hayes, Bill Dow, Bruce Wafer, and all our students…

The long-awaited day had arrived.

“I can’t believe it! I’m only 13 and I’m a published writer!”

An excited, partially out-of-breath student said this to me in my classroom the day our students got their first look at the book that they had written. It’s a sentiment that echoed the emotion and sense of accomplishment and pride that characterized our students that day. In their hands was the product over which they had laboured - persistently, single-mindedly - for several weeks. Smiles were everywhere. So were hugs, squeals of delight, oohs and ahs, wows, and excited chatter.

Charlene and I surveyed the scene with the pride of a mother bird watching her young taking flight for the first time. They had worked hard and now they could feel the “product” in their hands. The articles they had written, the photos they had taken, the interviews they had done – they were all there…in their book.

Also looking on with a little more than a passing interest was Bruce Wafer, our “teacher-aide”. For the students, Charlene, and me, however, Bruce is more than that. He is a confidant to many of our students who need a sympathetic ear, a generous man who always puts the students ahead of himself. He guided the research, helped students with their editing, and provided his own take on the area and its families.

From the outset, we knew it was important that the students be able to make the connection between planning, hard work, and perseverance, and the feeling of success that comes with accomplishing individual and team goals. It was an important skill that would serve them well down the road, both during the project and later on in their personal lives. This project was going to demand that they set their personal bars higher than ever before, and in order to overcome the inevitable pitfalls they were going to encounter along the way, they had to develop a strong sense of team and of working towards the greater good. We worked on this every day.

Many of our students had obviously enjoyed the journey – the meetings and discussions, the strategy sessions, the endless editing and rewriting, the interviews and the research, the frustrations and victories. They had maintained a high level of excitement and enthusiasm for their own projects and the book as a whole. They had assimilated the project, made it their own, and gotten totally caught up in the discovery of their families and themselves. We thought that they had made the connection.

Our region – the Gaspé – took on a different meaning for them. In the beginning it was an ambiguous thought at best, if at all. Now it was home, rugged and beautiful, unique, a land that had molded their ancestors and shaped the values that would serve them well, too. No longer just a collection of rocky cliffs, endless beaches, and quiet, sometimes deserted farmlands, the land had acquired meaning and substance, as had their sense of their own families.

We had come a long ways...

It began as only a brainstorming session. “Let’s throw some ideas around and see what happens.” A couple of hours later, Charlene and I looked at one another, “What happened?”

Even now, trying to come up with the words that would adequately describe what transpired that day is a chore. The wave of energy and excitement that swept through the students as one idea after another sped up to overtake the next was unstoppable. It engulfed everyone in its path – students, ourselves – and I can honestly say that Charlene and I felt like bystanders.

By the time we were finished, we had an outline of what we wanted to do. We had a list of over three dozen topics that would guide our research, and a plan that would help us to reach our goals. We had the interview that would be the foundation of our information-gathering.

The next day the photos and documents began to arrive. By the time the project was complete, there were over 1200 pieces, covering a time span of almost a hundred years. Together they would paint a clear history of the area. Every photograph was handled carefully, scanned as quickly as possible into our computer, and sent back to those who had supplied them.

Our students helped with the sorting and classification, and we often sat around the big tables in Charlene’s classroom, usually at noon, while a student would share a photo, taken lovingly from an album or old shoebox, and in an excited tone, tell us a story – a grandfather’s fear as he approached the scene of a horrific train crash, the first one to arrive; a grandfather and uncle who went off to war, and the letters we read together that were sent home from their prison camps, somewhere in the Pacific; a wedding photo, taken sometime around the turn of the century, “That’s my great-great-grandmother! Look at the dress!” They were all obviously so proud of each discovery – this is who I am; this is my family; this is where I come from.

Individually, the interview packages of each family were coming in, and parents were expressing their enthusiasm and support for the project. They, too, were being reminded of their deep connections to the community and their families. Lifelong members of the community stepped forward to be interviewed; they provided photos and documents, as well. One of the most interesting of these pieces was the original contract signed by the first female teacher hired by the Municipality of Schoolbred.  Again and again Charlene and I were awed by what was happening. Students who were often indifferent toward learning were excited by their contributions and discoveries. They were caught up in the energy, and they were responding.

In the classroom, research was proceeding at a quick pace. The topics had been chosen and assigned, and every available resource was being exploited to gather the information that would form the basis of the articles that would help us to answer our essential or guiding question, “Gaspesians, who are we?”

The whole task was managed from the board, where all the topics and the “to do “list were written – colour-coded, broken into categories: Researched, Written, Edited, and Completed. As the finished articles were word processed and placed into the folder marked “To the Publisher”, they were erased, always the cause of an excited whoop or two, and students competed to remove those categories to which no one had laid specific claim.

Every written piece was proofread and edited, rewritten, and edited one more time. Photos were chosen that best complemented the articles, and we decided to put the remaining photographs and documents on a CD which would be included with the book.

We spent hours going over the photos and documents, trying to avoid duplicates and laying some kind of structure over it all. The bulk of this work was overseen by Charlene and a small group of students. Charlene duplicated eighty CD’s in the first run, printed the same number of labels, and attached them. Students pitched in where they could. The final touches were being applied, and everyone wanted some kind of role. In the meantime, we were meeting with the publisher. We chose the cover design (which is a part of the first printing only), and finalized the page format, the Table of Contents, and pushed to meet the deadline with a last few articles that just seemed to hang on… or just maybe, in the back rooms of our minds, Charlene and I didn’t want this to end. The bar had been raised for us, too, and like all of our students, we had responded well. We had gotten caught up in our students’ enthusiasm for the project and been swept along by its many “eureka” moments. We were nearing the end, and we had mixed feelings.

So did some of our students, and I think some of our parents, too, who saw the effect that this project had on their children. They were better students; they had a clearer sense of their roots; they saw the land and the bay and the rivers differently. They realized that where they came from was a special place made so because of their families who had settled here long ago - families who had put their stamp upon the land and its history, later on to be discovered and held in high regard by their descendants when they sat down in a small country school to answer a question, and eventually, to write a book which would hold the answer…


 * //“I am a Gaspesian, and this is my Gaspe home, now and forever.”//**