School NEWS
Brad Moffat retires after 45 years build a robot. My secondary job was to instill intellectual honesty, good sportsmanship and a love of learning. My most important job was to demonstrate why these were important.
Veritas: What is the most important thing you have learned from students at Selwyn House? Moffat: That students need: • guidance, not rules, •.motivation, not energy, (they have energy in abundance,) • hard work, not easy shortcuts. •.mountains. “Challenge” is the wrong word. Mountains aren’t there to beat you. When you run to the top, they are not conquered. My guiding principle for running mountains: if it’s not fun, why do it? My advice to all racing teams: Go out there and give 90 per cent. Save 10 per cent for thinking and strategizing. Be strong and smart. Technical efficiency is worth more than brute force. Students taught me what works and what doesn’t. I ran pedagogical experiments on them all the time. Sometimes I would tell them so, sometimes not. Sometimes the new ideas worked, often they did not. Either way it was fun. (I found out about the Hawthorne effect many years later.) Veritas: What is your proudest achievement at Selwyn House? Moffat: Achievements were what the boys did. I was privileged to be able to provide support and some opportunities for their hard work. I was proud to be associated with many other fine teachers like wild Bill Kershaw, Monty Krindle, Bruce Glasspoole, Rob Wearing, Byron Harker, Mike and Tom Downey, Colin Boyle and too many others to name.... We took pride in: • cross-country ski races, loppets and marathons •.winning rowing races, especially against a McGill novices crew •.the science fair team that built a computer from nand gates • teamwork at robotics competitions • .thousands of inventive ideas explored in student-designed labs •.thousands of runs to Mount Royal Park in all kinds of weather A few other memories: • playing tennis-ball soccer at lunch. •.rafting the Riviere Rouge and surviving a dozen recyclers. •.my brother-in-law riding his motorcycle into the lab to demonstrate small motors •.a student testing water pressure with a 32-foot straw up the back stairwell. •.a student testing car tire pressure in an unconventional manner •.rockets, rifles, explosives, steam engines, slingshots, bows and arrows, gamma rays, linear accelerators, potato guns, stuff dropped from the roof (including fish tanks and sledgehammers). •.congenial visits from the fire department and SWAT team following some of the above •.computer sorting and TSP algorithm competitions with
students, which forced me to learn machine language • electric US Postal vehicles with a speedometer designed at Selwyn House. I tried to make the Physics Lab a safe place for students, intellectually. Physically, maybe not so much. There were times when my classes felt more like the photo above. Veritas: What do you know now that you wish you had known when you started here? Moffat: I know now how lucky I was to be hired by Selwyn House. I’d like to thank all the headmasters who supported me through the years: Troubetzkoy, Manion, Mitchel and Hannaford. I owe them and the school more than I can say. As for teaching, I wish I had realized that teachers don’t need to have all the answers. I’ve learned that each student will tell us what he needs in some way. I can pass on some advice that came from my favourite education professor, Peter Landry, at McGill. For the first four or five years of your career throw out all of your notes at the end of each year! Lesson plans, homework ideas, everything. Toss it all. Today that means wiping your computer files. Start over from scratch each year. Yes, learning is hard. To learn anything new, an organism will be in disequilibrium (read “discomfort.”) Expect it, plan for it. My job was to push students out of their comfort zones and watch them fight their way back. Veritas: What are your retirement plans? Moffat: I presented a list of my retirement plans to my wife, Barbara, 14 years ago. They included academic projects, sports and some teaching on the web. She reminded me that Selwyn House was paying me to do all of those things. So, I stayed, maybe longer than I should have. It was just so much fun.
Veritas, page 35
