David McNorton (Teacher)

To my all-time favourite class at Cawthra - you're the bunch that I kept teaching over and over again when my timetable kept changing! I have a few million memories of the five years that I taught at Cawthra, and they're almost all good ones.

I went from Cawthra to make brief appearances at Meadowvale and Erindale before going to Mayfield, where I spent the rest of my teaching career. I became the head of Science there, and actually got to teach classes in my specialty, Physics. This is for all of you who remember me as a Chemistry or Biology teacher...

After 1988 I never even got to see any of you who were my neighbours, since we moved to Hillsburgh to avoid the killer drive to Mayfield. I got into backpacking, birding and travel during this time. It kind of helps when you stop being so poor that food, rent and gas aren't your main expenses, right?

Since then we've done a lot of travelling, mostly to Europe in spring or fall and to the tropics to escape Canada's deadly winter. I live close enough to Detroit to get to see live concerts and sports there. No, I'm not counting the Lions as a live team. Windsor's actually a nice place to live if you don't have a job. You definitely blend in with the locals...

So if you want to catch up, you can find me on facebook. I'm a lot less older than you are now - assuming you're figuring it out by dividing rather than subtracting. Which is exactly what you're doing with ages now, right?

Well, there was the time when I set off a spoonful of Nitrogen Triiodide by hitting it with a meter stick. The chemical exploded, and a piece of meter stick about 10 cm long flew off across the room and stuck in the bulletin board at the back, narrowly missing about five people...

And I remember going to the Toronto Zoo on a trip when one of the students (no name mentioned) just got so involved that he missed the bus and had to take a taxi back to Mississauga. I think it was the same day that I was sitting with some of the girls looking at the orangutans when one of the female orangutans decided that it would be a good time to teach a little male orangutan the facts of life, up close and personal...

Then there was the time - and I'm pretty sure nobody knows about this one, when final marks were due. This was back in the day when you wrote numbers in for marks and absences. I must have read absences and marks, because when the computer sheets came back for editing, I seemed to have a huge number of students with marks like 4 % and with 76 absences... So guess how I spent the last day of school?