The Profession I Love -- by Anne Shier

How does one go about finding the “perfect profession” or career? If you believe that truth is, indeed, stranger than fiction, the truth of the matter is, I couldn’t get into the teaching profession from the late 1970s to the early 1990s in Toronto, my hometown. God knows I tried. I was determined, but the school boards just weren’t hiring teachers at the time. I wanted to teach high school full time more than anything.

I wouldn’t have called myself a traditional teacher type by any means. For example, I didn’t like classroom teaching for the most part. It was the standing-up-in-front-of-a-large-group-of-students part that didn’t particularly appeal to me. It was never my intention to do formal classroom teaching and management. Rather, I liked teaching subjects like physical and health education (PHE), which often involved teaching in other environments, such as outside in nice weather, or in the gym, or in the pool area during swimming classes. Classroom teaching was for me only when health-related subject matter had to be taught, which I accepted since it was part of the curriculum for PHE.

Many times I considered that maybe I should really have gone for training as a professional coach of women’s gymnastics instead of going to teachers’ college. I’ll never forget the times when I was watching the Summer Olympic Games on TV—something I still do religiously during Olympic years. And who did I see on TV one year? Someone with whom I used to judge gymnastics competitions regularly in Ontario! She was now one of the coaches for the Canadian Women’s Olympic gymnastics team! I had to look twice to make sure it was Carrie. That’s when I knew that, even if I did get a full time teaching job in a high school in the PHE department somewhere, it would never even come close to equaling her role, the way I saw it at the time. Carrie was doing something I had always sort of dreamt of, never thinking it was possible, but here she was, actually doing it. I couldn’t help but envy her ability, perseverance and determination to get what she truly wanted in life—a full time position coaching women’s gymnastics.

It had all started for me when I was a young girl learning gymnastics as well as ballet and tap dancing. To my mother, it was important that her little girl grow up to be elegant and graceful. I loved dancing and performing. I got many chances to perform, and every time I did, I knew I was pleasing the audience. But whether I was in front of an audience or just in my backyard during the summer months practicing my tumbling moves and dance routines, my heart was completely into it. I often dreamt that I was choreographing routines of all kinds on the floor, beam and uneven bars. My routines were always very fluid, with great connections and superior difficulties, including wonderful mounts onto and dismounts from the apparatus. The free exercise event on floor was by far my personal favourite, but the beam was a close second. The uneven bars event was, unfortunately, something I never really became good at because of the arm and shoulder strength that was needed for this event, and that was one of my big regrets. However, when I started judging gymnastics at the age of 20, I got chances to judge every event on a regular basis in various cities of southern and central Ontario. At first, bars and vaulting were two of the harder events for me to judge because it was a challenge to watch every move, write it down and evaluate it all at the same time. These events were very quickly executed, but I got better with practice. I judged gymnastics in Ontario for seven years and then moved to Alberta, where I judged for another three years until after my son was born in 1984.

While I was actively engaged in judging gymnastics in Ontario during my 20s, I was attending university full time, earning first my bachelor of science and then my bachelor of education. Then, because I could not find a full time teaching job right away, I decided to do supply teaching for a year or two. This involved getting different teaching assignments at different high schools throughout the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), often on a daily basis, but sometimes for longer. I had to be very flexible and adaptable to my new job. It wasn’t a full time teaching job, to be sure, but it did pay the bills for a time and gave me some much-needed experience in classroom teaching and management. Unfortunately, supply teaching experience is not recognized officially as “teaching experience.” Still, I continued to prefer teaching PHE whenever possible. It was a subject I loved to teach. Nothing else would have made me happier.

The thing about supply teachers was that one was more or less forced to work for at least four different school boards, rotating around as needed: City of Toronto, North York, East York and Scarborough. Etobicoke and Peel each had their own boards too, but they were just too far away for me to travel to daily. Peel was never part of the GTA anyway. At the end of the year, I’d get four different T4 income tax slips to file with my tax return and I’d think, Okay, this is the price I have to pay for not being able to land a full time teaching job. Much later when I actually did land a teaching job in the now-amalgamated Toronto District School Board, I would learn that some supply teachers who had taught just as long as myself were simply in the right place at the right time and landed a job because of who they knew in the profession rather than because they were good potential teachers. When I found this out, I thought again, Life is not fair at all, is it? I really should have gone to college instead of university and gotten trained as a professional gymnastics coach. Why didn’t I do that? But I could never come up with a good answer. I only knew that a fact of life is that you sometimes just get lucky when landing a job. I was to find this out many times over the years when I would be working at other unrelated jobs after I’d finally left supply teaching for good.

The day I got an “edge” into full time teaching, I was fully qualified and experienced as a computer programmer/analyst, due to having attended Seneca College for three years and graduating with honours. A high school in the GTA approached me with a very unusual job offer. They asked me, “Would you teach the Turing programming language to a Grade 11 class?” Apparently, the teacher who had been teaching this course was not very good and was either fired or forced to resign right in the middle of the semester, I’m not sure which. Anyway, they needed a qualified teacher as soon as possible, which I was due to having earned my permanent teaching certificate. The teacher they had identified as being “qualified enough” to teach this course did not necessarily have to have computer science on his or her teacher’s qualification record card; he or she just had to know the basic programming concepts and maybe one or two languages. I had several programming languages to my credit by this time, so I became the teacher candidate of their choice. That didn’t mean I knew Turing though. As it happened, I’d never even seen the language! That’s what made the whole situation so unusual! God knows how that job interview happened and resulted in a job, but it did; I don’t think I would’ve believed it if it had happened to someone else.

After that first successful teaching experience, landing full time teaching jobs, even as an LTO teacher, was relatively easy. But in order to land a full time permanent contract teaching job, I had to take a summer additional qualification (AQ) course called computer science senior (a.k.a. computer science—part one).
So I took the required course the following summer, and the very next fall I landed a much-coveted teaching job—full time with benefits and a pension! I was so happy. Incredibly, it only took a quarter of a century to land this job, but I did it and was so proud of my achievement! Now I could smile and look forward to my job each and every day, knowing I was finally doing something I loved, and spending every day with kids in an educational setting. I am, indeed, a very lucky person to be in the profession I love.

copyright - Anne Shier, 2013, all rights reserved, published by Authorhouse, Bloomington, Indiana, USA