I grew up in Elkford, BC, a small coal-mining town in the southeast corner of the province. My upbringing was a whirlwind of tromping around in the bush, completing Super Mario Bros. 3 ad infinitum, yelling in basements with my punk band, and doing awesome in school while freaking out the establishment at the same time.
When I graduated high school, I moved to Calgary, where for some reason I did a business diploma at Mount Royal College. While bored by business classes, I became involved with the all ages punk rock scene. I was a part of the now-defunct, but then prolific collective, Just a Bunch of Kids (JBK). I also played many shows as an acoustic punk singer-songwriter, eventually becoming a moderate to slightly more than moderate draw at shows in community halls in basements. Around this time I was also involved with Food Not Bombs, a youth based activist group that served meals to homeless people on the downtown streets. While at business school I found that I excelled at the more philosophical side of things, like management and human resources, so I started taking Sociology and Creative Writing courses in addition to my amateur cultural analysis work as a punk rocker and activist.
Eventually, I came to realize that I liked the study of languages best, so I started a BA in English Literature at the University of Calgary in 2006. In 2007, I transferred to UBC in Vancouver where I found an institutional home to guide my process of inquiry into becoming a confident scholar of literary studies. I did an honour's degree in order to gain a more personal focus in my inquiry, and also to experience a broader education in philosophy and literary theory. In 2010, I wrote my honour's thesis on the fraught construction of personal identity as a conflation of personal memory, photographs, myths, garbage, and cultural memory within Margaret Laurence's The Diviners.
I graduated in 2010 with my BA and soon found work in document control, report formatting, and writing/editing at an Environmental Engineering consulting firm. Despite my lack of enthusiasm with business education in my youth, I found myself quite capable of contributing to the culture and success of the company. I learned a lot about collaborative work and working as a group of specific experts that combine skills to complete tasks bigger than could be completed by an individual alone. I found the collaborative and inclusive culture of that company to be congruent with the style of collective organization that I experienced with JBK and Food Not Bombs.
In 2011, after realizing that I still had a lot questions to sort out regarding my approach to the study of English Literature, I started my MA at UBC. I excelled in courses on poetry and literary theory, and I did my thesis work on graphic novels. I worked as a TA for four semesters, leading a discussion group of around thirty first-year English students. In following a syllabus laid out by an established instructor, I learned the importance of a well-structured curriculum that focuses on general themes that can by analyzed in specific instances in each work. After four semesters of teaching, I learned to follow a guided path of inquiry that inspires questioning among my students while teaching them the tools and methods of the discourse that must be followed.
I started my MA with intentions to do my PhD and then try to become a professor, but I found that I just loved teaching so much that I decided to make that my main focus. I noticed that I found the interactions with the younger students just out of high school to be especially rewarding. By the time I finished my MA thesis--on the frustrated potential for ecological interconnectedness in Alan Moore's Swamp Thing comic series--I knew that I wanted to be a teacher more than anything else. In 2013, I moved back to Calgary with my wife and applied for the BEd. at The Werklund School of Education at the University of Calgary.
Through it all I have learned a lot and had my mind changed a million times, but I've stayed true to my punk roots. Knowledge is always transgressive, like punk, but learning to apply that knowledge requires structure and the willingness to work within a framework. As a scholar and punk I know to question everything as much as you possibly can, but as an aspiring teacher I know that all that questioning leads nowhere without the use of established method to organize your thoughts. I aim to teach using a discipline-focused approach to inquiry with an emphasis on the importance of the community of the classroom and the collaborative construction of knowledge. This blog is an account of life as I finish my path to becoming a high school teacher. You will find posts about teaching, coffee, poetry, punk rock, and my adventures with my wife and cat.
When I graduated high school, I moved to Calgary, where for some reason I did a business diploma at Mount Royal College. While bored by business classes, I became involved with the all ages punk rock scene. I was a part of the now-defunct, but then prolific collective, Just a Bunch of Kids (JBK). I also played many shows as an acoustic punk singer-songwriter, eventually becoming a moderate to slightly more than moderate draw at shows in community halls in basements. Around this time I was also involved with Food Not Bombs, a youth based activist group that served meals to homeless people on the downtown streets. While at business school I found that I excelled at the more philosophical side of things, like management and human resources, so I started taking Sociology and Creative Writing courses in addition to my amateur cultural analysis work as a punk rocker and activist.
Eventually, I came to realize that I liked the study of languages best, so I started a BA in English Literature at the University of Calgary in 2006. In 2007, I transferred to UBC in Vancouver where I found an institutional home to guide my process of inquiry into becoming a confident scholar of literary studies. I did an honour's degree in order to gain a more personal focus in my inquiry, and also to experience a broader education in philosophy and literary theory. In 2010, I wrote my honour's thesis on the fraught construction of personal identity as a conflation of personal memory, photographs, myths, garbage, and cultural memory within Margaret Laurence's The Diviners.
I graduated in 2010 with my BA and soon found work in document control, report formatting, and writing/editing at an Environmental Engineering consulting firm. Despite my lack of enthusiasm with business education in my youth, I found myself quite capable of contributing to the culture and success of the company. I learned a lot about collaborative work and working as a group of specific experts that combine skills to complete tasks bigger than could be completed by an individual alone. I found the collaborative and inclusive culture of that company to be congruent with the style of collective organization that I experienced with JBK and Food Not Bombs.
In 2011, after realizing that I still had a lot questions to sort out regarding my approach to the study of English Literature, I started my MA at UBC. I excelled in courses on poetry and literary theory, and I did my thesis work on graphic novels. I worked as a TA for four semesters, leading a discussion group of around thirty first-year English students. In following a syllabus laid out by an established instructor, I learned the importance of a well-structured curriculum that focuses on general themes that can by analyzed in specific instances in each work. After four semesters of teaching, I learned to follow a guided path of inquiry that inspires questioning among my students while teaching them the tools and methods of the discourse that must be followed.
I started my MA with intentions to do my PhD and then try to become a professor, but I found that I just loved teaching so much that I decided to make that my main focus. I noticed that I found the interactions with the younger students just out of high school to be especially rewarding. By the time I finished my MA thesis--on the frustrated potential for ecological interconnectedness in Alan Moore's Swamp Thing comic series--I knew that I wanted to be a teacher more than anything else. In 2013, I moved back to Calgary with my wife and applied for the BEd. at The Werklund School of Education at the University of Calgary.
Through it all I have learned a lot and had my mind changed a million times, but I've stayed true to my punk roots. Knowledge is always transgressive, like punk, but learning to apply that knowledge requires structure and the willingness to work within a framework. As a scholar and punk I know to question everything as much as you possibly can, but as an aspiring teacher I know that all that questioning leads nowhere without the use of established method to organize your thoughts. I aim to teach using a discipline-focused approach to inquiry with an emphasis on the importance of the community of the classroom and the collaborative construction of knowledge. This blog is an account of life as I finish my path to becoming a high school teacher. You will find posts about teaching, coffee, poetry, punk rock, and my adventures with my wife and cat.