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As an "air force brat" I have lived on
Air Force bases in Manitoba and Southern Ontario as well
as in
Newfoundland and the state of Maine. Many of my
summers were spent at the family cottage at
Saskatchewan's Last Mountain Lake northwest of Regina.
After completing high school in North Bay, Ontario I attended
the University of
Victoria and graduated in 1970 with a major in Canadian and American
history and a minor in geography. My particular
interest was in the frontier experience - whether it was
in the east during the 1600s or in the west in the
1800s.
I began my
teaching career as a grade 5/6 teacher in BC's Okanagan Valley. During
the next ten years I taught grades five through seven as well as special education classes. During the same
period I completed a Masters degree in curriculum
development focusing on Social Studies. This led to
membership on two curriculum committees with BC's
Ministry of Education that were responsible for
redesigning the province's elementary Social Studies
curriculum and the selection of teaching resources.
My teaching
career led me to the northern parts of British Columbia
in the early 1980s where I was a principal of
schools in the small communities of Dease Lake and the now
closed asbestos mining town of Cassiar.
While I lived in these communities I was able to pursue
my interest in the history of Native peoples and the
development of frontier regions of Canada.
I then
moved to the Queen Charlotte Islands where I spent three
years as a V-P and principal of a secondary school.
It was here that I first worked with Aboriginal students
enrolled in alternative programs. Working with
these students and living in Haida Gwaii introduced me to
the Haida viewpoint of Canadian history. In 1990
my family left the Queen Charlottes and moved south to
sunny Victoria on BC's Vancouver Island.
In
Victoria, I spent the remainder of my career teaching at
the Victoria Youth Custody Centre. Teaching
multi-aged groups of students with widely varying
knowledge, skills and needs required that I develop
flexible approaches and a broad range of teaching
resources. It was in this setting that I started
developing the fore-runners of many of the resources
that I am now publishing as Better Classroom Guidebooks.
I retired
from active teaching in 2006 and now have more time to
pursue my interest in Canadian history in general and
the frontier in particular. I also have had an
opportunity to do what I rarely did while I was a
practicing teacher - take my "rough and ready" teaching
materials and refine them to the point where they can be
shared with other teachers. It is this work that
has resulted in the various teaching resources listed on
this website. I hope you find them of use in your
classrooms.
David John
Victoria,
BC
Follow the links on the left of
this page to
find out more about other Better Classroom Guidebooks
teaching resources.
If you have
any questions about our materials, please feel free
to contact Better Classroom Guidebooks at
info@bcguidebooks.ca or 1‑250‑477‑6619.
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