Book targets teacher's souls

by Erling Friis-Baastad
News columnist

Just over two years ago, Sheila Rose suddenly felt as if she were either losing her voice "or hadn't really ever found it."

Though the director of the Yukon's Department of Education admits her metaphor is difficult to explain, it sounds much like the mid-career angst that strikes people in all occupations, not just teaching.

At any rate, the former teacher, turned bureaucrat, began a rigorous program of self-discipline.

Each day, well before having to leave for the office, she would get up and write in her journal, attempting to recapture a sense of direction, to discover where she had been and where she was headed as an educator.

Then, one day, on a trip to Skagway, beside Bove Island, she had what she calls "a little epiphany." She realized her journal writing could evolve into a book.

"I started writing and not second-guessing myself."

The fruits of that discipline - and of a whole lot of moral support from her partner and friends--has just arrived in Whitehorse fresh from the Edmonton printer: To Emma: for the love of teaching.

To Emma works like many contemporary self-help books: The author shares her self-healing techniques and then invites readers to answer back, to pen their reflections on the blank pages provided, to pick up the other side of the dialogue.

"I hope someday in the future, someone will be going through a cache of books and there will be their stories," she says of the hoped-for writings by readers.

In a sense, the written dialogue will provide security in numbers for practitioners of what might sometimes feel like a lonely and thankless occupation.

"Teachers aren't perfect, but often they're expected to be that way," says Rose.

Sheila Rose's Emma was Emma Buchanan, a member of this dedicated band during the late 19th and early 20th centuries in Petrolia, Ontario.

"When I was about four years of age, my parents would send me next door to this lady's house. She was a very ancient Victorian lady who was a school teacher," says Rose.

"I think somehow when you come forth from the womb that a Creator with a sense of the absurd touches you on the forehead and with a wink and a smile says, 'You will be a teacher,'" she writes.

"She then throws people (neighbor, a relative) and things (books, ideas) in your path to keep you directed toward that destiny. With me fate was operating full steam ahead from the very beginning."

Emma looks out at us from the cover of Rose's book--with an expression of dour Victorian purpose (holding still for the camera)--Or maybe her corset's too tight.

Be that as it may, Emma was the spark the ignited Rose's "full-steam-ahead" love of the teaching profession.

"I still live in her parlor today," says Rose, who inherited her mentor's books, antiques and bric-a-brac along with her passion for education.

The key concept in Rose's book is "continuum," which she elaborated on in a speech she presented to students of the Yukon Native Teacher Education Program:

"I decided to tell them that our profession is the finest in the world. I will tell them that they will be instrumental in the lives of their students.

"I will place them on a continuum of teachers stretching back through time to the savannas of Africa, through the scribes of ancient Egypt, to Stonehenge, to the cathedral schools of the Middle Ages, to schools held on platforms in trees in South America, to schools in trains, to schools in bombed-out Sarajevo, to new schools in Whitehorse, to four makeshift classrooms in Old Crow where the community school burned down."

The bare biographical facts about author Sheila Rose are: She delayed her 'official' teaching career with the unofficial one of raising two children.

Eventually, her former high school principal steered her back on course, encouraging her to commute into London, Ontario, to earn her teaching certificate.

She went on to teach Grades 4 and 5. She calls those grades "magic," but then admits, other teachers may think of other age groups are magic as well.

Eventually, she acquired two degrees on top of her certificate and took up designing and teaching programs for especially gifted students - at least until she discovered the same techniques she applied to the gifted could be applied to enrich the lives of all students, "not just the top two per cent."

In 1980, she received the Order of Canada for her development of a Canadian communities studies program, which had by then been adopted by across the country, by the Canadian Armed Forces in Europe, and by the Royal Commonwealth Society in the Caribbean.

In 1986, she sold the Victorian home in southwestern Ontario where she had raised her children, and headed off to the University of Connecticut to earn her Ph. D.

That accomplished, she picked up a copy of The Globe and Mail, and encountered an ad for a position in the Yukon's department of Education.

She says she knew she would get that job when she applied. What she was less certain about was how she would fare, dislocated from Petrolia, away from the classroom, and working at one remove from the children.

A chapter in her book, Connect, tells about the moment when she realized that crisis had been resolved.

She was in Dawson City where she and parents, teachers and students were creating a video about the gold rush.

"At one point in the shooting I was waiting in the cold with the actors for our ride to the 'saloon' set in the Dawson City Museum.

"The girls, dressed as can-can dancers, were chilled and we huddled together under my rain slicker.

"At this moment my concerns about whether I would ever again feel bonded with my students evaporated."

A well-meaning reader has called Rose's book, "Chicken soup for the teacher's soul."

The format, tone and language are very much of the late 20th century's 'me-decades,' but the traumas and challenges of teaching are also part of a continuum that stretches back to the days when chickens first joined onions in boiling water.

Stone Age educators must have occasionally craved support and renewal.

If she can make her readers realize this, Sheila Rose will have achieved her purpose for writing For Emma.