Teacher Appreciation: Mrs. Cari Bell

My journey to becoming a teacher was very unconventional. I went to three different universities and it took me ten years to figure out that I wanted to teach. The short story is that, in all my part time jobs and interactions over those ten years, I always gravitated towards teenagers; they were the group of people that I really loved. I think the real clincher for me was my work at the Queen Street Mental Health Center in Toronto with psychiatric patients who ranged in ages from 16 to 100. I had 35 patients that I worked with, and I loved working with the teenagers most of all. Even though they had such deep struggles, they had their whole future ahead of them. I felt that I would really love somehow being a part of shaping that future. That was when I said I was going to become a teacher. So, I went from having an outdoor recreation focus to a therapeutic recreation focus to teaching English.

 

My grandpa said that when my parents named me Cari he said “Oh, Care! That’s what she’s going to be all about — care.” Since then, my parents have always called me Care, not Cari. I’ve always known that I really do like to care for people.

I love teaching at Shawnigan. I appreciate how we are a part of students' lives both inside and outside of the classroom. Our ability to connect is huge. We can see them in the boarding Houses, in fine art, in the classroom, sports, and inter-House. You really feel that you know the whole student, not just the student in your classroom, and I love that. In an English teaching context, that knowledge helps me select literature or build a lesson plan around, say, the Chapel service, the House mottos, or where the students come from. It’s an opportunity to dovetail knowledge about students with the curriculum in a very unique way because we get to know the kids so well.

It sounds really cliched, but my students have taught me that individual successes are all so different. I think that I know what the lesson outcome will be and what that will look like, but then 19 different people who received the very same lesson will experience it differently and the outcome will be unique to them. I think when I started as a new teacher, I was looking for more of a cookie cutter result, something that would look the same, and I felt frustrated with myself and my students if it didn’t all come out in one uniform shape and size. Now I celebrate the diversity because my students have shown me that learning will look different for everyone; they have taught me to celebrate uniqueness and not try to create uniformity.

Having a connection with the kids brings me so much joy, and I find it very rewarding if they find deep or personal meaning through literature or writing. If those activities become something that allows them to be their best selves, then that’s pretty joyful, because that's where we’ve connected the curriculum with the student. The process is more important than the product, and it’s that process of finding just the right poem or short story or book for someone that brings me a lot of happiness. That’s why I am missing our students so much right now, because we don’t have quite the same opportunities to really connect.

During this time, I hope our students all know how much we miss them and how much each of them matters. They are individually very special and they have such a unique gift to give the world. I would love it if they could use this time to really figure out what matters to them in life and then find the resolve and the fortitude to pursue it. I know I’m certainly discovering things about myself that I’m grateful for, and I know the only reason I’m discovering them is because I am being forced into focusing on the present more. We are all wishing for a lot of things right now that are beyond our control. The best we can do is to figure out a way to work with the here and the now in a way that helps us to be our best selves going forward."

- From an interview with Mrs. Cari Bell (English Teacher)