A lot of junior high students are mutant humanoids. So says John F. Robbins, a former science teacher with a 35-year career at Ellerslie Junior High.
A lot of junior high students are mutant humanoids.
So says John F. Robbins, a former science teacher with a 35-year career at Ellerslie Junior High.
“A colleague of mine said that junior high kids wake up every morning … climb aboard their little spaceships from their planet and they fly to planet Earth and they say, ‘What planet am I on today?' They're halfway between kids and adults. He called them mutant humanoids.”
Now retired, he's also become a self-published author and he's bringing his 2014 book, Wombats and Mutant Humanoids: Field Notes of a Junior High School Teacher, to the St. Albert Public Library for a public chat this weekend. Science is, was, and always will be his first love.
“I was teaching out of my passion. I always thought science was pretty cool.”
After all, he was a bona fide scientist, working as a geologist with the Alberta Research Council before he picked up the chalk and yardstick. He liked working with kids so teaching seemed like a smart move. It turns out he knew what he was doing.
A year of going back to university got him his education degree and he quickly found an opening in Ellerslie, then still a part of Strathcona County.
“When I got to Ellerslie, it was called ‘the Hellhole of the County of Strathcona.' The first time I stepped into a classroom, it was where I was meant to be. I was lucky.”
“The neat thing was that in 1976, Grade 8 was Earth Science. I could just teach geology. A lot of kids didn't know anything about earth science or plate tectonics, things like that. It was cool to teach them that. We used to go on field trips to Drumheller. We'd take 130 kids down for four nights of camping out. They would learn so much. It was just power-packed with activities, visits to the museums, going out to the river valleys looking at the hoodoos, looking for fossils and things. It was pretty cool to be able to partake of my knowledge of geology to young kids and get them interested.”
He also taught Grade 9 chemistry and physics.
“As I told my kids, Science is the only important subject.”
It turns out that he could have considered Language Arts as well. Robbins was born into a family of writers, going back to his grandparents. They always said one person in each generation should write a story to give to the next three generations down the road.
His own book is a product of his times, including the early influences of technology such as CDs, DVDs, and iPods.
“I talk about how those things came through in the '90s and how they changed kids and that they knew everything,” he said, perhaps rolling his eyes at the notion.
The book, published just last year, is a collection of more than 160 stories of what it's like to be a science teacher to students from Grade 7 to Grade 9. There's some venting in there, he noted, some passing on of knowledge, some grumbling about how schools are run, but most importantly, what he thinks a person needs to be a decent teacher in a junior high environment.
To clarify the title of the book, he noted that every teacher has nicknames for their students. His kids were wombats.
Robbins will be in conversation with Julian Di Castri, former administrator with Greater St. Albert Catholic Schools.
The event takes place on Sunday from 2 to 3:30 p.m. at Forsyth Hall on the main floor of the St. Albert Public Library. Attendance is free but pre-registration is encouraged. Call the library at 780-459-1530 or visit www.sapl.ca for more details.
