The years I taught at Schoenblick were great years, certainly for me but also for my students. I can't think of another posting in my 30 years of teaching where I might have got along better with my students.  And I loved teaching what I taught there -- Latin in Grades 10, 11 and 12, and senior English.

There are other reasons why I remember those years very fondly, one of them the fact that, being fluently bilingual -- English and German -- I had the world by the tail.  When it suited my purposes to be Canadian, I could be Canadian; when it suited my purposes to be German, I could be German. It was fun too, like when I went to a German pub with some other Canadians, the waitresses and/or some of  the locals, sure that we would not understand, would talk about us freely, sometimes in ways not at all flattering to us.  A few times I actully confronted them when we were about to leave, tell one of them in elegant German and loud enough for all of them to hear something like "Quite interesting to hear what you had to say about us and so to understand what you think of us.  You should have seen their jaws drop. 

And they remembered.  The next time I'd appear with some other Canadians in tow, they'd keep their tongues in check.

What follows is the full story why the principal of Schoenblick High thought it in the best interest of the students and the school to fire me.

The reproduction of it is legible as it is but you can make the reading of it easier if you do this: Right-click a page and then select “View image.” That done, you can joggle the page between normal and enlarged.  Enlarged it is much easier to read.  After you are done with a page, click the back arrow and then click the page itself.  You are back to “normal” and can go on to the next page.

There are 10 pages of it; but, if you all you want to do is find out why they had to let me go, you need to read only Pages 3 and 4.  They make up the indictment which served to justify my dismissal.  In the remaining pages I try to do what I had not been given an opportunity to do before I was fired, i.e. defend myself against the charges laid against me, most of them – to paraphrase a German idiom – quite "dragged in by the hair" – like the fact that [on a hot summer day] I was observed teaching “without jacket... feet without socks, only sandals”....