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Ms. Seabourne, 1975

She passed around condoms and diaphragms for everyone in the class to examine. She had us scan glossy magazines for subliminal sexual imagery in photos of ice-filled whiskey glasses. One day she displayed a series pictures of female breasts so we could recognize the myriad sizes and shapes of real women—in contrast, that is, to those the Hugh Hefners and Bob Gucciones of the world wanted us to dream about.

Her name was Ms. Seabourne—Leslie Seabourne in the school yearbook—and she was my grade 11 English teacher in 1975. It may seem obvious now, but then something surprising and just a bit radical was afoot in suburban North Vancouver, but it had little to do with high school English.

I remember her as a person of the era, the way other teachers at Carson Graham were not. A tall woman, she wore turtle-necks, wide-belted maxi-skirts, sometimes pants of brown or beige. Her large-framed glasses gave her an owlish look. That was fashion. Her classes, however, were about the ideas and buzz phrases of the day: future shock, understanding media, the naked ape, the second sex, everything you always wanted to know… but were afraid to ask. By the end of the year, I was still afraid, but much less so. If I began an ignorant, callow youth, I emerged at least knowing as much.

On day one, even before she spoke, I knew something was up. The classroom was equipped with tables, not desks, and they were arranged in a half-circle; we’d be required to respond not only to the teacher at the front, but also to each other. For me, this was intimidating; I was then mired in a debilitating shyness that would go on for years. So I grabbed a corner by the door where I thought I could hide.

She began with the aims of the course, the themes we came to know well—media literacy, socialization, gender roles, feminism. Not a word about Shakespeare, Canadian poetry or novels, not even the mechanics of essay-writing. This was more Sociology 100 than English. We anxiously waited, though, for her to mention one thing—the talk of the school, the worry of parents, the bane of administrators: namely, her notorious sex education unit. It was a course-within-a-course given every Friday instead of “English.” While other classes were busy reading Macbeth or Julius Caesar, we’d be delving into the ABCs of reproduction, contraception, the explosive research of Masters and Johnson, Kinsey. The hope expressed mutely by many of us kids, I think, was that we’d learn how to “do it” or, if we knew that already, to “do it” better. I had a feeling that this class might have seemed a bit redundant for more than a few of my classmates, but not for me.

The day we covered birth control, I knew that wasn’t true. With condoms, diaphragms, IUDs, Pill dispensers and other items spread provocatively around the tables, the tittering, the wisecracks, the plain wide-eyed curiosity told me there wasn’t a whole lot of sophistication in the room, though some did put on a convincing show of maturity. For me, it was easy, since only in my wildest wet dreams did I imagine myself needing such arcane technology. I pretty much kept quiet that day.

Naturally, Ms. Seabourne grew impatient with our behaviour, but not contemptuous; she never patronized, nor did she assume we needed her wise direction. It was all about knowledge and attitude: the knowledge we should carry, the attitude we should have as adults.

She taught us to think, to question, evaluate. By showing us a media where nothing is what it seems, she put us on the path to a new literacy—as when we combed through stacks of consumer magazines looking for images of sexism, bias, deception, and, yes, subliminal manipulation. Her slide show of real advertisements in which elusive female figures could be spotted in ice clusters and cloud formations, or the word “sex” embedded in the design of a cheese cracker, opened my eyes to an unknown nether world. Although I didn’t find even one clear-cut example in the Time, Cosmopolitan and Life magazines we flipped through, I did get an inkling of the forces that attempt to shape behaviour in the service of a robust consumer society. In other words, she gave us the chance to challenge the world. It was here, for a time, that I forgot my shyness—I spoke up, answered questions with questions of my own; and she answered with more questions, coaxing and coaching with both criticism and praise.

Some might sensibly wonder: how did she get away with teaching English like this? How could a public school teacher be allowed to jettison a whole curriculum in favour of a collection of trendy social issues and progressive approaches to sex education? Well, she didn’t get away with it, not quite, and that was evident the days she’d come to class in a foul mood, declaring we’d be doing something because “the powers that be” required it. I remember how she prefaced her unit on grammar, something like this:

“I abhor grammar. A bunch of archaic, fossilized rules derived from a dead language. It should be thrown out of all high school English courses and would be if I had any say on the matter. However, the ministry and the administration of this school tell me I have to teach it, so that’s what I’m going to do. Starting today and every day for two weeks. Get it over with.”

So she crammed a year of graduated learning into two short weeks. Every day, her voice laced with sarcasm, she spoke of subjects, predicates, active and passive, the subjunctive mood. With such an approach, you might think I learned very little grammar and even less respect for the study of it. Ironically, Ms. Seabourne’s hatred was as memorable as her love; her unceasing exhortation not to learn what she taught made me learn it all the same. Taking daily aim at the target, she brought it into clear and succinct focus. I only know grammar now at all because of her.

For or against, pro or con, what she brought throughout the year was simply passionate teaching. She laid her cards—condoms, Cosmos, conjunctions, all of it—on the table. Then she compelled us to react. I had little choice but to show my hand: what I thought, who I was, my deeper self. It was either that or shut up, and hiding was not an option. Perhaps my poker metaphor is not exactly apt, for her class was as unlike a game as a class could be. It was serious business, conducted with the full force of personality and dedication, as all real education should be. Indeed, it was everything I always wanted to know, but before meeting her, didn’t know enough to ask.

XXX

Alan Girling lives and writes in Richmond, BC. His fiction has appeared in such venues as Lichen, Hobart, The MacGuffin, The MendaCity Review and Smokelong Quarterly; his non-fiction in the anthology, Body Breakdowns, and on CBC radio; and his poetry in blue skies, Snow Monkey, and River Walk Journal. He was a 2003 Larry Turner Award finalist and winner of Vancouver Co-op Radio’s 2006 Community Dreams Poetry Contest. His play, Whatever Happened to Tom Dudkowski was produced in 2007 for Vancouver’s Walking Fish Festival.

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