Ms Smit
Ms. Smit, an English and history teacher at Garneau, has been teaching for the past seventeen years. At six foot one, you might assume she played volleyball or basketball all her life, but surprisingly, she was the shortest kid in her Grade 9 class. Ms. Smit started working at Garneau in the second semester of the 2001-2002 school year after finishing Teachers College in January. After working at several different schools, she finally came back to Garneau in 2006, and worked in the history department for five years before transferring to the English department. She also helped create the gender studies curriculum with the Ontario government several years ago, but it has yet to be introduced to the students of Garneau.
Ms. Smit was born in Canada and attended Stephen Leacock Collegiate Institute in Scarborough, Ontario. Her parents were originally from the Netherlands and immigrated to Canada as teenagers in the 1950s, following the Second World War.
Unlike many teachers, she knew she wanted to pursue teaching at a very young age: “I used to play big teacher with neighbourhood kids, and I had a couple of great English teachers in high school and that was when I was like, ‘I really want to do this.’”
Despite her keen interest, she did not go directly into teaching after university. Instead, she started off by making balloon animals as a clown. After obtaining her undergraduate degree at Trent University, she was offered a job at Novopharm, a pharmaceutical company. She gradually climbed the ranks, starting from performing quality control sampling to training department employees. Eventually, she was travelling around the world for her company, auditing the factories of suppliers.
When Novopharm was bought out by an Israeli company, Teva Pharmaceuticals, Ms. Smit found herself working at a plant in Stouffville, Ontario as an industrial employee. Instead of flying to different parts of the world, which she had become accustomed to before the buyout, she was spending about two hours on the road each day to get to and from work.
In around 1999 to 2000, it was predicted that there would be an extreme shortage of teachers in Ontario. Various American colleges responded by offering Teachers Programs for Canadian students, hiring Canadian professors and using the Ontario curriculum to attract potential students. “Weirdly, we were all crossing the border to go to school in Buffalo and then come back, but I had my certification done [in Canada]. So I did that as a way of ending what had turned into not a fun job anymore.”
Reflecting on her career pathway, Ms. Smit believes that the skills she picked up from working at Novopharm really helped her as a teacher: “When I was doing audits, it wasn’t really my comfort level because I’m not a boss kind of person, but I would go into factories and people would be nervous when I’d show up because I had the power to write a report that might shut them down or cause us to stop doing business with them. So it put me into a position where I had to be more assertive than I would normally be, but I find that has been really helpful sometimes in teaching.”
In fact, she encourages those who are thinking of becoming teachers to pursue another job before they begin teaching: “I think it’s helpful to step out of the school atmosphere. When you’re a [high school] student, and then you’re in university, you’re still a student, and then if you become a teacher, you’ve never really left the academic world. I think it can be really helpful to see what else is out there.”
If you ever walk into one of Ms. Smit’s classes, you’ll find that her teaching style is very discussion-based. As a teacher, she is very interested in hearing her students’ takes on issues, describing it as one of her joys of teaching. She appreciates the “opportunity to be constantly in dialogue” and the continual “enrichment of [her] own ideas and opinions.” She builds upon what her students bring to the table, but she is also aware that speaking aloud in class is not for everyone. She implements a variety of learning methods that are comfortable for her students and finds happiness in seeing her students progress over the four years of high school: “You look at kids who come in Grade 9, and they’re small and young and kind of scared, and when you see what they become at the end, that’s really exciting.”
One of the most memorable courses she has taught is a women’s studies course, where students were so engaged that they started their own organization to promote women’s empowerment. Three of them actually went out and got tattoos of the women’s symbol with a fist in the middle. She added, “I always still kind of regret that I didn’t go out and get the tattoo with them, but seeing the kinds of things that students will be passionate about and just being able to be there alongside with them is really great.”
Another course that her students take a lot away from is history. Ms. Smit strongly believes that “history keeps repeating itself,” and she accordingly feels it’s imperative to pay close attention to the warnings of the past to avoid a repeat of similar horrific events. At the same time, she believes it’s important to follow current events and to keep up with what’s happening in the world. As a mother of three young kids, she’s worried about the changes that are soon to come to Ontario’s education and social services system.
Throughout her teaching career, Ms. Smit has explored many novels. Of the dozen she teaches each year, In the Skin of a Lion by Michael Ondaatje is by far her favourite. Her love for reading has even once translated to a desire to write her own book: “I did quite a bit of travelling when I was in between university and working at the pharmaceutical company, so I travelled around the world by myself for about six months. When I came back, I thought there were all these interesting little things that had happened to me and I thought it would be kind of fun to write this episodic book that was non-linear, but just kind of snapshots of all these funny, interesting, and sometimes scary things that would happen. I think I wrote down a couple of ideas, and that’s about as far as it got.”
Ms. Smit believes in the power of film in teaching. Several of her best-loved films, which she refers to as “dominant texts in today’s society,” include A Fish Called Wanda and Stranger Than Fiction. She also loves Dazed and Confused, which she traditionally shows her classes on the last day of school each year. She’s watched it a staggering total of seventeen times.
Outside of school, Ms. Smit has quite a few interests and pastimes. She just recently took up knitting again, which she first learned fifteen years ago. She also loves cooking, baking, and going on hikes in different parks to explore the city. If she could be anyone for a day, she would choose to be the Queen. Don’t get her wrong; Ms. Smit is no monarchist, but she describes the Queen as an “interesting person who does a lot of work and meets a lot of interesting people.”
Ms. Smit can hardly imagine being retired, but she’s confident that when the day comes, she’ll make up for her lack of travelling since working at Novopharm. She’s also looking forward to checking off the number one item on her bucket list—eating at a three-Michelin-star restaurant.
If there’s one lesson that Ms. Smit has learned over her years at Garneau, it’s to never assume you know everything that you think you know about a person or a topic: “There’s always something that you might learn that can surprise you. Sometimes, you think you know a student or you think you understand a situation and you realize you don’t, so I guess [the lesson] would be to have an open mind and to not assume too much.”
Although being a teacher can be time-consuming and stressful at times, Ms. Smit could not have been any happier with any other profession. She’s dedicated to teaching to the best of her ability and wants to ensure that all her students have an enjoyable time learning and leave her class with solid knowledge and understanding in the areas of study.
“I hope [my students] remember that I was fun, encouraging, and that I believed in them.”
