A Knock at the Sanctuary Door

 Moot Points

A knock at the sanctuary door

Marty Rempel

Waterloo Collegiate Institute in Ontario was a three-storey brown brick building with a student population of about 1,400 when I graduated from Grade 13. "Let It Be" by the Beatles had just left the pop charts. It was a simpler time. A staff room was a sacred place, taboo to students, a sanctuary to teachers. Students were not permitted entry. I doubt if many parents ever attained the security level needed to gain access.

As a student, I recall accidentally catching a brief glimpse of the inner sanctum through a cloud of blue haze. As a teacher, I would later learn to associate that experience with fundraising bingo hall duty in the 1990s. However, during the 1960s, the staff room, I hypothesized, was a bastion of teacher privacy—a sieve that separated wheat from chaff. The staff room was a pedagogical Maginot Line.

Men with dark suits, white shirts and narrow ties carrying real leather briefcases, and women with flowered dresses, beehive hairstyles, with large dark purses, converged on the staff room door between classes and during lunch (which was actually 60 minutes long!). As a naive student, I would pass the staff room door with a feeling of reverence, vainly attempting to contemplate the deep and, likely, animated, esoteric conversations going on just beyond. I was as likely to knock on that door as I was to touch an electric fence in a rainstorm. Teachers were distant and they were safe.

Today, a staff room is not always the decompression chamber that it was once ordained to be. In the politically correct atmosphere of the present decade one must be more wary. The sanctuary-bunkered mentality has been lost. A redneck joke here, a Victoria Secret's catalogue there, a careless word about a student or parent, and a teacher's career could take a nasty tailspin. Esoteric conversations . . . not usually. The staff room today is less sanctuary and more bubble.

A knock at the door.

We all freeze like deer caught in the headlights of an oncoming truck—a perpetual moment. "Is Mr. Rempel in the staff room?" The rest of the staff resume their positions as I push back my chair.

Martin Rempel is a teacher at Westwood Community High School in Fort McMurray.