Amidst all the things we hear through out the day, we never know when to expect to hear some actually useful, applicable, and interesting information.
I found mine for the day when I had the pleasure to interview Marcus Kumala, an university graduate currently doing a practicum for hopefully a future job as a Science teacher.
Mr. Kumala is currently doing his “teaching practice” at Winston Churchill Collegiate Institute which is essentially like doing a teacher’s job. This is one of many things required for him to be able to obtain a job with the Toronto District School Board as a teacher.
Winston Churchill CI is just like any other high school weird things go down, people have their own groups of friends, and there’s always those kids with cookie-cutter attitudes. You got the smart-alecks, rebels, loudmouths, quiet ones, neutrals, comics, and tomorrow’s doctors. Now this is a tough crowd to handle, any teacher can tell you that, but Mr. Kumala was undaunted by this sort of teaching environment. “Yeah, I used to tutor high school students, so I’m all too familiar with the different attitudes.” He said knowingly with a laugh.
“They tell you not to try to reinvent the wheel, but I tried anyways” Mr. Kumala says about his teaching practice,
“Although it is tough making new lesson plans, I try to keep it as interesting and engaging as possible but not at the expense of them not actually learning anything. It’s a fine balance.”
He shares that every animal needs to adapt and change in order to keep up with its current environment, that is to say, every animal but us. Humans have been steamrolling through out time ruining the world we live in, but for what reason? Humans are the most intelligent beings on earth, but we also do the stupidest things.
Mr. Kumala shared with me that he feels he could only do five possible jobs. He said that personally he respected all jobs but to him there were five jobs that seemed to be apart of the bare essentials of society. These are the builders, farmers/food growers, doctors, emergency force, and the teachers, who help keep the process alive by passing down their knowledge. He told me that, when you get down to it all, a whole spectrum of our lives has been made by us and society that can be pretty much unnecessary. Most jobs in business are jobs we could do with out.
Everyone has their reasons for doing the things that they do, for Mr. Kumala it was that he had been born and has ties to Scarborough and he felt that he needed to give back to his community. When he was going through school, no one told him how university and a couple of steps down the road from high school would turn out to be, and he hopes to be able to tell students what he had to learn the hard way.
The trick is to know what you want to do.
