Farewell, Ms. Rough

A goodbye to Ms. Rough, the coach of our dreams

Abby Harlow Contributor

Walking into my frst day at North Toronto, I had grade 9 gym as my homeform class, so the frst teacher I met was Ms. Rough. Throughout the next 8 months, gym became the period I looked forward to the most, as I knew I was always going to have fun.

Although she has “had such a fun career [in education]”, Ms. Rough had no intention of becoming a teacher while growing up. After going to Laurier and earning a business degree, she began a career in sales and marketing. This gave her the opportunity to travel around the world, but she ended up deciding to make a career change when she realised that “[she] didn’t feel like she was helping anyone.” This led her to make the choice between becoming a physiotherapist and a teacher. She ended up becoming a teacher because she had some experience teaching swimming, as well as the fact she could play by her own rules and “do [her] own thing” within her teach- ing. She then took the next steps in her teaching career at the University of British Columbia, and got her teachers degree before being placed in a high school in downtown Vancouver, and later a high school in the small town of Dawson Creek, British Columbia. Here, she taught business classes in an enterprise centre where students could create their own businesses with the accessibility to actually have the opportunity to start them. Although these two highschools began her teaching career, in 1995, Ms. Rough moved back to Toronto, got married, and started her frst TDSB job as a geography and keyboarding teacher at North Toronto. Although it’s uncommon for a teacher to remain at the same school for 28 years, through going part-time when her kids were little, having principals on her side, and a little bit of luck, Ms. Rough was never surplussed to another school, and spent her entire teaching career in Ontario at NT. While she has been here, she has done some extraordinary things that have become key aspects of North Toronto. In 1997, Ms. Rough started the coop program at NT. With knowledge of business, she released the amaz-