Butterflies in Wiarton, Ontario, Canada

Brian, thank you for sharing this. One of the most creative teachers I known, worked with was in Wiarton, Ontario, Canada, at the high school, where I taught with him for four years. He was the geography teacher. He had kids make maps of our area, at the base of the Bruce Peninsula, which separates Lake Huron from Geogrgian Bay. After they made the maps, he arranged for them to go to the local airport and go up in a small plan to see how their maps compared with what they saw! Of course, the principal of our school, D.H. Nickel, now deceased, RIP, saw the creativity in his geography teacher and gave him scope to exercise it! I can go on and on with more examples. The teacher ended up in Wiarton because when he taught in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, the nation's capital, he was a threat to the "cogs in the machine" in charge and peers. He came to Wiarton. It was the classic "Butterfly Effect," based on the theory of complex numbers, which states: change occurs on the edges, not at the center. Amen. This teacher is now retired; he even wrote his own course textbooks - or manuals - and supplemented them with photos that he took on his jaunts literally around the world every summer! He had no car so he could do this travling! On our last visit, he told how he had taken a group of students to the Arctic Circle, literally, to visit with and live in an Eskimo village! Learning geographic, physical and cultural, does not get better than this. I have met nobody his equal since.