David Mathers’ story

Aspiring teachers have high hopes when they’re studying to become an educator, imagining the impact they’re going to have on their students. But there’s another side to teaching: frustration at students who don’t want to be there, reputation-scarring rumours, the inner workings of the school system.

The lines on David Mathers’ face tell the story that isn’t necessarily taught in teachers’ training.

Setting the stage

Getting into teaching was a total accident for Mathers.

“Well, I had an English degree,” he says, only partly joking.

After spending about a year in Montreal learning not much French and a lot about wine, Mathers’ father used some influence to get him into the insurance business.

“I went to one of the seminars where you have to learn the sales pitches and stuff, and I thought, ‘I’d rather cut my throat,’” he says.

Having decided insurance sales wasn’t for him, Mathers came back to BC to get his teaching certification, which can be tacked on to most undergraduate degrees.

“I really liked teaching,” he says. “I’m more of an introvert than an extrovert, actually, but there’s something pleasing about teaching, if you’re actually really doing something.”

He worked at only three schools throughout his career: Esquimalt Senior Secondary, Central Junior High, and Victoria High School (he taught me Grade 10 English at Central). Mathers says the job market was saturated, even in the early ’70s, but he was able to get a job fairly quickly.

“Everybody just thought if you can speak, you can teach English. Luckily, somebody at the school board saw me and thought I was good. They made that mistake, I guess,” he says, again only partly joking.

Mathers encountered all types of English teachers during his career, but literacy was always his number one goal when teaching.

“I used to go to conferences with other English teachers and they’d say, ‘Yeah, but what about poetry and the soul?’ or something like this, and I’d think, ‘That’s not my bailiwick,’” he says. “Peoples’ souls are their own, or their parents’, or their priest’s, or something like that. I don’t mind teaching poetry, but a lot of the time I’d stay away from it, because sometimes I would fear that I would ruin it for a child.”

As an English teacher, Mathers’ favourite thing was simply seeing his students’ writing improve.

“I love hoping that I helped teach good writing to students; that’s always been a focus of mine,” he says. “I love teaching writing, and I always hoped that students were engaged and interested.”

 

Damage control

In the autumn of 2003, in his 33rd year of teaching, there was an incident.

One Friday afternoon after class, Mathers says he got a fairly vague letter from the principal, stating an allegation had been brought forward by a concerned parent, an investigation was commencing, and that it may lead to discipline.

Mathers’ mind immediately leapt to the worst-case scenario. He thought he might be losing his job, or that someone was spreading lies about him. Immediately he felt physically unwell and saw his doctor first thing on Monday.

“My blood pressure was suddenly 190/190. My doctor actually looked at me and said, ‘You’re in the land of the dead.’ I kid you not.”

When Mathers finally got the details of the case, he was shocked by an allegation of anti-Semitism.

He had been teaching a book that was set during the Roman Empire. Mathers says that to put things into historical context, he explained that slavery in Roman society was often for the sake of profit, not necessarily due to any racial hatred, such as in Nazi Germany, where non-Aryans were persecuted simply for being non-Aryan.

Somewhere in that discussion a student had taken offense and had alerted her mother, who had written the letter to the principal.

What happened next was a nightmare for Mathers. The student who accused him was in two of his grade 12 classes and he decided to stop teaching both of them, partly due to health and stress issues, and partly due to the fact that there was this ongoing investigation.

One of his students at the time, Jess Housty, says it was difficult to have a sudden change in routine.

“Many of us were in both his English classes and preparing to graduate that year,” says Housty. “To suddenly have a whole string of substitute teachers teaching English day-to-day with virtually no continuity was really challenging for us on the academic side of things, and pretty dispiriting in terms of the general classroom dynamic.”

Part of the struggle for the students was that no formal announcement was made concerning their teacher’s disappearance.

“I don’t remember any point that anyone sat down with us and explained why he’d gone,” says Housty. “Those of us who went to the administration and asked were given various reasons why he left, like medical leave or stress leave, but nobody ever came to the class to explain anything.”

In a big high school like Vic High word travels fast, and because no one had told the students what was actually going on, rumours, which often bore no resemblance of the truth, were rapidly spreading.

Kala Vilches, who was in Mathers’ grade 10 English class at the time, says that a woman sat in on a couple of classes while Mathers taught.

“I mean, if you’re a teacher whose been teaching for that many years, you don’t just all of a sudden have somebody coming in and checking in on you for no reason,” she says. “And so, of course, because he’s an older man, everyone just assumed that he’d done something sexually inappropriate. Not anything really terrible, but that’s always the first thing you think of, so there were rumours going around about that.”

Chris Balmer, a counsellor at Camosun, says from a professional point of view, it’s important to provide adequate information to those even indirectly affected by problems in an organization.

“We tend to fill the gaps with speculation when there is an absence of information,” says Balmer. “The communication about things, particularly those that have any kind of moral implication, is critical, because you can’t control peoples’ interpretations of events.”

Unfortunately, this wasn’t the case, and Mathers wasn’t able to defend himself because of the investigation.

 

Administration versus union 

During the investigation, there were two major players: the administration (which consists of superintendents, principals, and the school board) and the union (which has a local branch as well as a provincial branch).

Mathers says he’s always felt the administration has a certain detachment from the classroom.

“What the BC government does is they publish these huge curriculum guides that are filled with endless abstract criteria like, ‘You will teach children how to communicate properly and respect each others’ values,’” he says. “They have like 500 of these apple-pie statements, which are all carefully crafted by the guys in power to mean absolutely nothing, but to also be something they could turn around with and say, ‘Well, did you do this, or didn’t you do this?’”

In this way, he feels that teachers are essentially unprepared and unprotected when dealing with controversial subjects.

“What really happens is you get into a class and you mention that Joseph Conrad wrote a book called the Nigger of the Narcisses, and somebody says, ‘You can’t say that, Mr. Mathers,’ and you say, ‘Why can’t I? That’s what it’s called,’ and you end up explaining the origins of the word, and talking about derogatory terms, and so on. That’s the reality of life. The curriculum guides are so vague that they mean nothing.”

Mathers doesn’t believe there’s accountability within the structure of the school system.

“When it comes to the union, it’s simply a double-edged sword, in the sense that it protects incompetent teachers,” he says. “It demands from the public too much money for not enough product. There’s no point in having a school system unless students are learning. Where are the exams, where’s the verification of learning, and is the BC taxpayer getting bang for their buck?”

He feels that it’s impossible to weed out the bad teachers with the current system, but that there’s a flipside to the coin.

“The BC Teachers’ Federation is absolutely necessary to protect against the victimization of competent and ‘innocent’ teachers, possibly by the administration,” says Mathers.

By the time the final settlement agreement between the school board and the union was reached it had been almost a year. The details of the settlement remain confidential, which Mathers feels is just another way that the system lacks accountability.

“There was probably tens of thousands of dollars spent by the public on this investigation and yet the administration refuses to release the details,” he says. “Why?”

Although Mathers eventually returned to work full time, he feels that the investigation went on a lot longer than it should have. He has copies of interviews conducted by the principal with students who had been in the class, all saying that what the student alleged never actually happened.

Still, he was first given a letter of discipline, which would have essentially been the first of three potential strikes before he could be fired. After argument from him, it was downgraded to a letter of direction, which is of no consequence, but both the letters indicated that he was guilty. Mathers says he was encouraged by the local union to accept the letters and move on, but by that point it had gone so far that he wasn’t willing to let it go.

“In the end, nothing was really going to happen to David Mathers,” he says. “At the very worst I was going to get a letter of direction, which doesn’t mean anything, except that it’s a stain upon my reputation. And it didn’t happen.”

 

Rules of engagement 

Although she had heard only rumours about the incident, Vilches, Mathers’ ex-student, says she wasn’t entirely shocked when she heard Mathers had offended a student in one of his classes, because he had such a lively teaching style.

“There was always talking [in the class], which was part of the reason it was so great,” she says. “We could sit there and have an actual conversation where he valued our opinions, but didn’t coddle us. He wasn’t afraid to be like, “That’s a stupid opinion.’ But that was nice because you knew that he was going to agree with you when he agreed with you, and when he didn’t agree with you he was going to tell you. But it wasn’t in a way that discouraged you from voicing your opinion again.”

Housty never understood the accusations of anti-Semitism, having witnessed the alleged incident. She actually credits Mathers for inspiring her to pursue a Masters degree in English literature. She says his teaching style was different from most of the other teachers she had, and that’s what she enjoyed.

“Most teachers stuck pretty closely to the curriculum and they had a… I don’t want to say bland style of teaching, but nothing very imaginative,” she says. “Mr. Mathers worked really hard to make sure that everything he was doing was really interesting and engaging and he really put a lot of punch into his classrooms. He encouraged a lot of independent investigation in students, so if there were things that came up in classroom discussions that particularly interested us, he always made sure that we had freedom to do other research, to bring it up in class and carry on the conversation.”

Mathers says that new teachers are often shocked by what the reality of the classroom looks like. He recounts a story of teaching a grade 8 class at the beginning of the year and asking all the students about their elementary school.

“This little group of girls starts giggling, and tells me how they had been playing games, rolling things down the aisle, turning around and talking, until they made the teacher cry,” he says. “Then they made her cry some more, until she eventually left.”

These kids were laughing at what basically amounts to a nervous breakdown.

“There is that instinct amongst children if they sense weakness,” he says.

Another common mistake is trying to make friends with the students.

“You’ll get eaten alive; it’s the worst thing you could possibly do,” says Mathers. “You’re just offering yourself up as a sacrifice.”

 

The last act 

At 66, Mathers is retired from formal teaching, but says he loves the tutoring that he’s currently doing. Teaching in a classroom of 30 people is so challenging, partly because everyone is at different levels, and everyone has different strengths and weaknesses.

“You can teach reading and writing to anyone, but like everything else, some people have a natural propensity for it,” says Mathers. “We should have an educational system that’s much more like England or Germany, where kids who are not intellectually gifted could go into another stream, but not a lower stream. They could go into mechanical engineering or whatever. I used to loathe looking into a classroom and thinking, ‘I don’t want to be teaching to 80 percent of these kids who really don’t want to be here.’”