Glenn Kubish

Back to school is in the air. Hope you all have your duo-tangs, hole reinforcements for binders and your inky-pink erasers, or have helped others get the same. Here are three other things from the past (week) that left behind traces of happiness and gratitude.   Three Things, episode 138:                                 1. Microscopes I remember the moment so vividly still because it was pickled in the brine of junior high school fear and doubt. Grade 7 science class. Mr. Litwin was our teacher. He wore colourful silk scarves around his neck to hide, he said, the marks of the stitches left behind when his head was completely severed and sewn back on after a plane crash in the war. He would tell that story and gauge our reactions and smile. We were studying cellular structure one week. There were illustrations in our biology textbook showing the differences between plant cells and animal cells. It was ou...

I'm sure I learned a lot in grade seven. Some Australian history, some Guy de Maupassant, some wrestling moves in gym class, no doubt. I think I learned how to light a stage in drama class and, in health class, how cows reproduce. I began to learn that some teachers were only a day or two ahead of their students. But I also learned in grade seven how to be alone. And that was a lesson courtesy one of the few great teachers I have had in my learning life. I've never forgotten it. It was Mr. Litwin's science class at St. Francis of Assisi School in wide open northeast Edmonton. It was a time when teachers were known by their first names. Those names were either Mrs., Miss, or, as in Mr. Litwin's case, Mr. Of course, he had a first name. It was Nestor. It was still a few years before I would learn that Nestor was an iconic name, one of those names that might, in fact, indicate one's character, fate. For, Nestor was a Greek commander, counsellor to Agamemnon, kn...