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18 Professionally Speaking June 2020 REMARKABLE TEACHER 18 Professionally Speaking June 2020 REMARKABLE TEACHER The Write Track Award-winning author Ian Williams on his middle- school teacher, who encouraged his love of writing. BY RICHARD OUZOUNIAN n the evening of November 18, 2019, Ian Williams made his way to the podium at the Four Seasons Hotel ballroom in Toronto, through a haze of colleagues’ Ocheers and congratulations. He’d just won the Giller Prize — Canada’s richest literary award — for his first novel,Reproduction . In that heady moment, in a heartfelt acceptance speech, Williams thanked Peter Lucic, the teacher who introduced him to the world of writing at Sir John A. Macdonald Sr. Public School in Brampton, Ont. “When good things happen, people say it feels surreal,” says Williams, now a professor in the Creative Writing Program at the University of British Columbia. “It feels like you are multiple people at the same time, living multiple realities at the same time. In that instant, I was the university student who needed to thank Margaret Atwood for what her work meant to me, and I was also the 12-year-old boy who spent three magical years with Mr. Lucic.” Lucic describes the young Williams he met in 1991 as shy. “It was hard to get a fix on him at first. But I immediately noticed his meticulous handwriting.” “Yes, I was shy, right until university, I think,” says Williams, with a laugh. “Brainy and quiet and introverted and watchful.” The class that Lucic taught, with his teacher partner Ursula Keuper-Bennett, was part of a Peel Board of Education program for students identified as gifted. “I spent three years with Mr. Lucic,” recalls Williams. “He made an impression on me from the beginning. A large, teddy bear kind of man. Very gentle. He was our school dad. There was such warmth from him.” “If you have kids for three years like that,” Lucic volunteers, “you can truly personalize the work you do with them. You can almost become a kind of conduit to their futures.” To the young Williams, it was a lot simpler. “We’d just show up and trust him, and together we’d all get our stuff done. You don’t realize you’re learning. You’re just in a space and time with someone, rather than being instructed.” One of the things Williams remembers most vividly about Lucic is that he would read novels and stories to them aloud … through a microphone. “We were June 2020 Professionally Speaking 19 REMARKABLE TEACHER Michigan and WIER (Writers in Elec- tronic Residence) at York University.” Williams brightens at the memory. “He had us on this makeshift computer network with guys from the University of Michigan — Americans and Can- adians swapping poems in the early days of the internet! We had current affairs projects that connected us with American kids, learning about each other and the tech world that most people didn’t yet know existed. He gave us challenges. He was preparing us for a world that he saw as digital.” Lucic brushes aside any suggestions he was a prescient educator. “You just do what you need to do in teaching and hope it will be what the child needs.” Clearly his work suited Williams’s needs; he went on to earn his Hons. Ian Williams (left) reunited with former classmates and Peter Lucic (right) last fall. B.Sc. in psychology and English, as well as an MA and a PhD in English, all working in a pod situation that served Lucic recalls an Open House activity at the University of Toronto and all by two Grade 6 classes,” explains Lucic. called The Imagination Café. “During the time he was 25. He then taught at “One very large room with a dividing one session, I remember Ian playing the Fitchburg State University in Massa- wall separating it into two smaller piano while his classmate Vicki read a chusetts and published a short story classrooms. I needed the microphone poem. It was truly moving. Kids serving collection and two poetry collections, to be heard, but I also enjoyed the hot drinks and selling cookies. There one of which, Personals, was short- drama it gave the readings.” were a lot of different coloured lights listed for the Griffin Poetry Prize. Williams chuckles at the memory. and music suited to a coffee house But Fitchburg was also where “Oh yes, he was a bit of a storyteller. atmosphere. Many of the students’ Williams lost all his worldly possessions When you’re in Grade 6, you’re a little poems were illustrated and printed when the condo building in which he bit too old to be read to, but you still for the audience.” lived burned to the ground. He moved like it.” What kind of stuff did Lucic Williams now sees that “Mr. Lucic had back to Canada and started writing read? “An eclectic selection,” he says. a bunch of these old-soul kids who could Reproduction shortly after. “Some award-winning books like nerd out on their subjects. There was In his mind, he now brackets the Katherine Paterson’s Bridge to Terabi- a stable community in that room with night of that fire with the night he won thia and others that I just enjoyed, like a person who was looking out for us, the Giller Prize. “Those moments have Roald Dahl’s The Witches.” which left us free to be ourselves.” He something in common because they’re To the young Williams, “It never felt like says Lucic understood that the best very clarifying.” Williams recalls what something was missing. It all felt really thing he could do for his students was to he said to himself as he watched his organic. In Grade 6, we wrote every single encourage and support them, rather life going up in flames: “Ian, you’ll have day. We’d get a seven-minute power than critique them. “He kept us excited to rebuild yourself again, but you have writing exercise. We got a topic and then about what we were doing. He was a everything you need in your head.” wrote as much as we could. We wrote brilliant educator.” He knows he began to discover that poems or stories.” Lucic’s teaching Lucic was also broadening his confidence in Peter Lucic’s classroom partner would suggest a topic and students’ horizons, introducing them nearly three decades ago. “Something provide the structure. “We kids just got to the internet many years before it magical is possible if you trust the on board and ran with it,” says Williams. would be become common practice. people who are guardians of your From Lucic’s memories of the time, “I came to computers fairly early,” childhood,” concludes Williams. “And it was a period of wide-ranging artistic admits Lucic. “I’d bring in these old Mr. Lucic always delivered. He never experimentation. “Sometimes we’d Commodore PET computers and wire disappointed that trust.” PS put together journals. I remember one them into a primitive network. I got was called Choices. Ian wrote a really funding for a phone line and modem. In this profile, notable Canadians honour interesting poem about two sisters, This allowed my young authors to the teachers who have made a difference in their lives and have embraced the College’s one of whom was being abused by her connect online with the International Ethical Standards for the Teaching Profession, father. It was almost scary.” Poetry Guild at the University of which are care, respect, trust and integrity. PETER COURTESY LUCIC OF PAGE) (THIS MORRIS; JUSTIN (PREVIOUS PAGE) PHOTOS: 20 Professionally Speaking June 2020 20 Professionally Speaking December 2020 REMARKABLE TEACHER Wonder Woman Actor and Avengers star Cobie Smulders sheds light on the teacher who helped her discover her superpower. BY TEDDY KATZ “ eah, you did it! You guys friggin’ did it!” That was actor Cobie Smulders in a recorded video message last June that went to the graduating class at YLord Byng Secondary School in Vancouver. It was Smulders’ high school, too, until she graduated in 2000. In her message, Smulders tries to speak directly and genuinely to each of the graduates in this unusual year, saying, “Let’s just call it what it is: A bummer.” She’s talking about COVID-19 disrupting their end-of-school rituals and celebrations. “Guys, I know first-hand what a challenging place high school can be. I did it. I’m a survivor as well,” Smulders jokes in her message. In the two-minute video Smulders is at times silly, at times poignant, touching and human, and speaks about their shared experiences. “I mean, I know that Mrs. Hughes is still teaching there,” say Smulders. “[I remember we read] Animal Farm and it got very real.” Mrs. Hughes is Amy Hughes. She also attended “Byng,” as the students call it, and has been teaching English and theatre at the school for 31 of her 33 years in the profession. Hughes taught Smulders English in Grades 10, 11 and 12, and definitely left her mark. “I think Mrs. Hughes — it’s still hard for me to call her Amy — was the first teacher I saw as a human. Not just as an educator but a woman with a life outside the classroom,” Smulders says. “She instilled in me a broader view of the world and had me read books that enabled me to see from a new perspective.” Smulders’ video message came about after Ryan Reynolds, another Vancouver- raised celebrity, posted a video and bought pizza for all the graduates at his alma mater, a neighbouring school that just happens to be Byng’s biggest rival.
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