Monsieur Marc Ferron, seen in his classroom in June, has taught at Toronto's Winona Drive Senior Public School for more than 30 years.Sarah Palmer/The Globe and Mail
You could tell from across the classroom that Monsieur Ferron was no ordinary teacher.
His bullet-bald head, stubble, Quebec Nordiques sweater, and short shorts, worn year-round no matter the weather, were all trademarks of eccentricity to us, his Grade 8 students at Winona Drive Senior Public School in Toronto.
The classroom itself clearly expressed that we were in a distinct society, governed by an uncompromising spirit. A huge poster of René Lévesque’s face telegraphed Monsieur Ferron’s political convictions, at a time, in the early 2000s, when supporting Quebec independence was a more provocative gesture than it would be today.
Maps were taped to every desk and flags from around the world hung from the ceiling. Student artwork plastered virtually every inch of every wall, especially portraits of celebrities and historical figures that were an annual assignment in Monsieur Ferron’s domain. The likenesses of Busta Rhymes and Mussolini stand out in my memory.
For about 30 years he has been in that classroom now, which must be some kind of record. When I went to visit him this spring, he told me he was in the teens on the Toronto District School Board seniority list, out of more than 10,000 teachers. But how many of those ahead of him have been in the same classroom almost their whole careers?
I went back, two decades later, because Monsieur Ferron left a mark on me. He did things differently, a little bit old-school.
Eric Andrew-Gee – seated third from the right on the bottom row, in an orange plaid button-up shirt – is seen in a 2003-04 class photograph displayed in Monsieur Ferron's classroom.Sarah Palmer/The Globe and Mail
I was, for example, his sandwich runner. Several lunch hours a week he would press a five-dollar bill into my palm and send me to get him a havarti and salami sandwich, a can of Coke and a bag of chips at Dom’s, the Italian deli down the street. I got to keep the change. If the class was in detention, I got sprung early. Once when I was home sick, another kid got the assignment. He came back with a Rice Krispies square and an iced tea. The job was mine for the rest of the year.
What if something happened to me while I was running one of these semi-official errands on school time? Got hit by a car or caught shoplifting? Monsieur Ferron admitted with a chuckle that he hadn’t really thought that part through.
He is retiring at the end of this school year, finally taking a well-earned rest. He had a health scare in March, a stroke that was caught miraculously early; even his doctors can’t believe how well he’s recovered. He wryly allowed that all those salami sandwiches may have played a role.
Teaching has also changed since I was in his class, not always for the better, in his view. Students and especially parents are more sensitive now. There are no more sandwich runners. Someone recently complained about the Mussolini portrait. (Students had their pick of subjects, to be fair. Il Duce sits alongside about 15 Spider-Men.)
He probably couldn’t get away with talking to kids the way he talked to us. Once, when I asked Monsieur Ferron how I could improve my mark in art, he replied in his thick Quebeçois accent, “Eric, you have no talent. Keep doing what you’re doing, you’ll get your B.”
I immediately knew he was right and felt a wave of relief. When I told my parents, they thought it was hilarious.
He drove the point home later that year after I turned in an especially dismal Plasticine portrait of Charlie Brown, riddled with thumb marks, barely recognizable as the Peanuts character. He took the effort home as an ironic keepsake. On a field trip to a Blue Jays game that his family also attended, he pointed at me down the row of seats and said, “Look, it’s the Charlie Brown kid!”
The thing was, he knew I could take it. I was dishing out plenty in those days. The year before, a less understanding teacher had enrolled me in an anger-management course called Be Cool to curb my sharp tongue.
So I felt a kindred spirit in Monsieur Ferron’s puckish sense of humour. There was no such thing as too far. And more often than not I deserved the mockery. One afternoon I managed to swallow the tab of a pop can that had been floating in my Coke. I waited in the principal’s office for my mother to drive me to the hospital, feeling the aluminum lozenge inching down my esophagus. Monsieur Ferron came to see me off. “Well, Eric,” he said, “it’s been good knowing you.”
I’m happy to report that I survived the pop-tab incident. My wife and I now live in Montreal, where I work as The Globe’s Quebec correspondent – a dream job for me. Last November, we welcomed a beautiful pair of boy-girl twins, Sasha and Penelope, into our lives.
It was in a mood of sleep-deprived reflection on life (the Germans must have a word for that) that I looked up Monsieur Ferron this winter. Lo and behold, he was on LinkedIn. I asked to connect.
He replied within the hour: “Eric can you please go get my sandwich.”
He hadn’t lost a step. And after 20 years and probably about 1,000 students, he remembered me.
It made my day – and made me think about what a difference a great teacher can make.
He was, for all his peculiarities, a great teacher. He had a way of bringing subjects to life in vivid, if arguably inappropriate, ways. Louis-Joseph Papineau, the flamboyantly coiffed leader of the 19th-century Patriotes, will forever remain in my mind “the guy with the Something About Mary hair.”
Every time I am translating something from English to French, I try to avoid the mistake Monsieur Ferron warned us against, of translating too literally, like the doofus in years past who wrote in a paper that he was “un gros ventilateur de Patrick Roy” – a big ceiling fan of the famous goalie, essentially.
The truth is, I’m not sure I would be living in Quebec today, using French every day at work, and soon sending my kids to an entirely French-language daycare, without Monsieur Ferron.
Grade 8 was a pivot point for my enrolment in French immersion. Most of my classmates went on to Oakwood, a high school that didn’t have the program. My parents were committed to keeping me in the French stream, but I might have fought harder to stay with my friends if that last year of immersion had been a bust. It wasn’t. It was the best year of school I could remember.
That was partly because I had discovered kissing and weed. My grades were nothing special – I almost flunked shop class. Winona could be a tough school: I remember a breathalyzer in the principal’s office. Monsieur Ferron had a lot to contend with.
I don’t think we ever saw him flustered, though. When the class was spiralling out of control he would just sit there looking stern and whack his desk with a ruler, so hard it left marks. That usually got our attention.
We must have been a nightmare on the class trip to Quebec City. That’s a lot of hormones for an 18-hour round-trip bus ride. But what I remember most from our visit to the capitale nationale was playing at Wolfe and Montcalm on the Plains of Abraham. It helped make history feel alive.
Monsieur Ferron didn’t lecture us about how Montcalm was the good guy, even though he was a committed sovereigntist. He kept politics out of the classroom, except for that poster of Mr. Lévesque, which blurred together with the mosaic of pictures hanging on the wall. We didn’t know much about his background, except that he was proudly from Shawinigan, Que., same as Jean Chrétien, that wily federalist.
When we were reminiscing in that very same classroom this past spring, I remarked on the funny symmetry of our lives: him a francophone living in Ontario, me an anglo in Quebec.
He explained that Toronto hadn’t been his first choice. Out of teacher’s college, he applied to every school board in Quebec. He didn’t even remember submitting an application to the TDSB until he got called for an interview. His mother didn’t understand the English-speaking guy on the other end of the phone.
But he’s had a good career and a good life here in the other solitude, he said. He married a Dutch-Canadian woman and had two kids. She’s a federalist (the night of the 1995 referendum was tense in their household) and his kids mainly speak English. That’s one disappointment of putting down roots in Toronto, he admitted.
If even Monsieur Ferron – a tough-minded indépendantiste who taught French immersion his whole life – couldn’t make his children speak French, it probably says something about the fragility of the language in Canada.
It’s the kind of issue I think about and write about all the time now for The Globe. Questions of national unity and linguistic survival are my daily bread and they make for a fascinating beat. Engaging with these issues makes me feel more a part of this country’s civic life than ever before. That is partly thanks to Monsieur Ferron. A good trade for a salami sandwich.