The Golden Age Of Teaching

New Title, Low Salary

School boards encouraged teachers to improve their academic qualifications and backed this up with financial incentives. They built salary increases into teacher contracts for every five university courses completed and a hefty increase for completion of a B.A. degree. After some years, and much burning of the midnight oil, my initially pitiful salary started to resemble a living wage. By the end of my career I was earning a very respectable income, 30 times higher than my starting salary.

The focus of my personal life changed dramatically after moving to Kingston. I was a now a family man, with a young daughter. We purchased a tiny house in a quiet suburb of Kingston, about 15 minutes from my work.

The Fort Henry school was another exceptionally rewarding work experience, with happy kids, supportive colleagues, and a dedicated principal. During my time there I taught grades 5 through 8. I finished my degree at Queen’s through night school and summer school and my Bachelor of Education at the University of Toronto after completing required assignments and one summer’s attendance on campus.

It was not all smooth sailing. There were several lean years when money was very tight, making me sometimes wonder if I should have heeded a close friend’s repeated advice to quit teaching for a better-paying job. He was a farm machinery salesman earning several times my meagre salary.

I am fond of telling a story about a conversation that I had with Cathy, my wife, in my fourth year of teaching after we had just moved to Kingston. We had a young child and a bare-bones, recently-purchased little house in the suburbs. However, we were really scraping bottom, financially. It was near payday at the end of the month when she said, “We have nothing for dinner. I will have to make porridge”. I became irate and said, “There is no way we are having porridge for dinner!” I scrambled around and found one dollar in change. I went to the grocery store and bought three pounds of hamburger for that little pile of change. BBQ hamburger sounded much better to me than porridge for dinner.