Endings and Beginnings

I've spent quite a bit of time in the last few days thinking about Pat Clifford. We had desks beside each other in the English office at Crescent Heights High School in the early '80's. Neither of us was particularly tidy and so my stuff would slop over onto Pat's desk and her stuff would slop over onto my desk. I think at one point John, our department head, put a sign up on our two desks which read "The Cluttered Wallow Award." It was the first joint award we won.

Before either of us would put the papers back on the other's pile we would read them first. It was in this way that we came to understand that we were asking some of the same questions although we had come to them from different perspectives.

We had some great conversations and somehow cooked up the idea that we should team-teach a grade 11 English class. In practice it meant having two classes but planning together and, on occasion, stuffing both classes into one ordinary classroom.

One day we had all the students sandwiched into a classroom to watch a film on Earle Birney. We had instructed them to take notes and both of us became quite agitated when we realized that we were the only two in the room scribbling furiously. Pat, being the more experienced teacher, had the wisdom to stop and ask the kids why they weren't taking notes. They replied that they didn't really know how.

That stumped both of us for a while and sent us chasing a whole series of questions that became the foundation of my teaching. We began to talk about what we paid attention to when we took notes and how we knew what was important and what wasn't. Pat had been reading Louise Rosenblatt and we asked ourselves how we could invite students to respond openly and thoughtfully to what they were viewing or reading. We wanted something from the students other than answers to questions we, as teachers, already knew the answers to. Pat commented, "I've never read a book in order to answer somebody else's questions. Have you?" Of course I hadn't.

We came up with what we called interactive notes where we invited students to reflect on what Pat called the 'good bits' of the text, the things that made them laugh, turn up their noses or want to bop the character over the head with a frying pan. We invited them to write as they read as a way of making their thinking visible to both them and us. We looked closely at what we did as readers and asked students to engage in a similar process. Mostly the students were glad to be freed from answering mind-numbing questions at the end of each story or poem.

It was Pat who asked me to present with her at the National Council of Teachers of English conference in Edmonton. Before Pat, I had never considered that what I had to say might be helpful to others. As late as last year I had people say to me that they remembered presentations Pat and I had done together.

Our paths diverged as Pat moved on to a different job and then pursued her Masters. We talked occasionally and whenever we did, I came away excited by new ideas and possibilities for how to make learning conditions better for kids. About ten years after we worked together at Crescent I had another chance to work with Pat. I was tired of preparing grade 12 students for provincial exams and felt I either had to do something completely different or I had to get out of teaching. I talked to Pat about the possibility of going to back to Ernest Morrow Junior High, the school where I started my teaching career. Pat and Sharon, Pat's teaching partner, were doing some interesting work there.

Pat talked to the principal and I found myself on the first day of school in a gym with 300 soprano voices. That was only one of the shocks to my system moving from senior high to junior high. Pat and Sharon found a great teaching partner for me and the four of us spent two exciting years together. I seem to remember a bottle of red wine in the filing cabinet that would find its way out on Friday afternoons after the last of the kids in 'homework hotel' had gone. We were usually exhausted but we'd stick our feet up on one of the tables in Pat and Sharon's room, tell stories from the week and laugh our heads off.

At the end of my second year Pat and Sharon had the opportunity to found The Galileo Educational Network Association and our paths diverged again. When I had a deferred salary leave I did some work for Galileo and was once again swept up in the whirlwind of ideas and possibilities. The most exciting and rewarding periods in my career were the years I worked with Pat.

Now our lives have diverged for a final time. I attended Pat's memorial service last week, her death the conclusion to the six-year shadow of stage 4 ovarian cancer. And so September 2008 marks a new beginning for me, life after teaching, life after Pat. Pat who came with me to pick out my wedding dress, Pat who held my hand when I choked up reading what I had written during a writing retreat, Pat who asked me, when things were particularly rough, what I was doing for myself. Pat, storyteller, mentor, friend. In my mind's ear I hear her laugher and I will carry it with me into this new beginning.