(starts ~38min mark)
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It is
a great honour to be the recipient of this award and I would like to thank all
the individuals who nominated, supported and selected my nomination. As the
recipient of this award, it is my privilege to be asked to give the
commencement address for the class of 2017. Convocation is an excellent
opportunity not only to celebrate your accomplishments, and to imagine the next
steps of your journey, but also a chance reflect back on the challenges you
have faced to get where you are today, and how you were able to overcome them.
For me, receiving this award is –as I said- a great honour, but it also
somewhat ironic, because it was not too long ago that I had serious doubts
about my future as an educator.
When I began my position at Laurier it was with a
great deal excitement and (and an equal amount of nervousness). Landing a
tenure-track position was an amazing opportunity, and one that I (initially)
thought I was well prepared for. Throughout
my graduate studies I had had the opportunity to work as a teaching assistant,
and I had taken numerous elective courses and workshops on effective teaching
practices. So I thought I would be able to at least hold my own when it came to
teaching my first class. How wrong I was.
The first time I taught BI111 – Biological Diversity
and Evolution – it felt like everything went wrong. I had taken over the course
from a recently departed and much beloved instructor who I looked to as a model
for how to run the course. But in that first class nothing clicked, nothing
worked. As I stood in front of my sometimes confused, often bored, and
occasionally frustrated, students I felt like a failure both professionally and
personally. At the end of the semester my departmental chair came into my
office – closed the door- and told me how worried she was for my future
prospects at Laurier based on my teaching evaluations.
Now I don’t know if you – the class of 2017 – can empathize: Your first year at Laurier and getting much worse grades than you
had been expecting based on you previous experiences – but I hope you can use
your imagination.
Talking about failure is tough. Which is strange
because we all encounter it. Far too frequently reality doesn’t match our
expectations. For me it took some time to figure out how to identify why my
teaching wasn’t working, and to start upon a better path. But I did not find my
way along that path alone.
I am extremely fortunate to be surrounded by many
excellent instructors both in my department and across the Laurier campuses who
I have looked to for mentorship, for guidance and for conversation. I am here
today because of Faculty, friends, and family members who shared with me their
experiences and advice. I am also here because of some of the most important
feedback I got was from my students on what they found effective, and what they
found challenging. They inspired and encouraged me to take greater risks in my
teaching. To imagine new approaches to learning about the amazing world in
which we live, such as play-acting the process of secondary growth in eudicots, taking a busload of biostatistics students on a field trip to a literal
field to collect their data, or learning the principles of Hardy-Weinberg equlibrium with thousands of playing cards (and the occasional pictures of cats). They helped me avoid getting discouraged if these
experiments in teaching didn’t go as planned (which they sometimes did not).
And so here we are 6 years and roughly 4000 students
later. I am on this stage because of the support of Laurier community and it is
to them that I am eternally grateful. Class of 2017, today marks an important
milestone in your lives.
For many of us in this room there will be challenges
ahead, dark days in which you question your abilities and the path you have
taken. Please remember you do not have to travel alone.
Thank you
