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Teacher Spotlight: Ms. Gorski
By Akshay Pall and Kenny Rozario
Let’s start simple: what’s your full name?
Amanda Jane Gorski.
Why isn’t it Amanda Swagorski?
Um, well, I’m thankful to my parents to name me all names instead of adjectives, so I’m actually quite grateful.
Seriously now, how many years have you been teaching for? At Turner? How has the experience been compared to other schools (If there are any)?
I’ve been teaching since 2001 at Turner Fenton, I started teaching the week that 9/11 happened; the week when the towers fell is exactly when I started teaching. It was the very first week so it was a crazy first week because, as you know, [being a] brand new teacher trying to get my classes organized and there was this chaos. Before, I started here, I was at the University of Waterloo. I was in a weird position as a tutor; I supervised the teaching assistants, but I wasn’t a professor. I was in between.
Why did you leave your position at Waterloo?
Teaching high school is radically different than university. At university, you don’t have the same level of contact with your students, but in high school you really have the opportunity to work with students, teach them some really complicated things in a way that you can’t at university. Many of the times, I’ll teach a student 2 or 3 times before they graduate, get to teach them more complicated coding stuff, and see their level grow. You don’t get to do that at university; there’s just a sea of 500 kids in a room for 2 hours.
How was your student life? What was your experience like at university? High School?
I was a very academic student. I studied very hard and worked very hard; that means I did less of the crazy things some people got up to. I have some learning disabilities as well, that made a lot of school challenging. I had to work harder for grades than other people, but learning how to work hard isn’t a big problem. When I was in high school, it may surprise you to know that I probably didn’t even touch a computer. I was in history and I took art all the way through, so I spent a lot of time in the art room painting, sculpting, and things like that, those were the kinds of kids I also hung out with, we used to paint during lunch. When I went to university, I was a history major, so I actually have very little formal computer training.
How do you feel about present-day students? Are they more or less hard-working than those from 5, 10, 15 years ago?
If we take grade 10 programming for example, they’ve steadily gotten better over the years. Now I can expect the bonus assignments to be completed, like almost everyone in the class will do a couple of bonuses and kids are getting their work done so fast that now I have to be careful when I post things because you guys will come back with the whole unit finished. In ITGS, where we’re doing things like essay writing, that doesn’t work quite as well. It doesn’t mean they can’t be done, it just means we have to work on those a bit harder. Kids are kids, everyone doesn’t want to do their homework; yes you’d rather want to be with your friends, no kidding.It’s certainly popular to say things like kids these days aren’t what they used to be, but there’s hard and great work from kids now as there was then.
Finally, what’s one piece of advice that you’d like to give to students?
It’s this hard work business. Just because it’s “hard,” doesn’t mean it isn’t worth doing. And almost if it’s hard, it’s more than worth doing. The power of hard work is that it will make a massive difference if you accept it and embrace it.
That concludes this month’s teacher spotlight!
How has the mainstream crowd changed? What had “swag” while you were in high school?
Well, it’s a lot of the same thing actually, lots of music and movies. All about discovering the new artist right when they come out [and] not following the mainstream music. That kind of stuff has always been cool even though it was different music. There were always the kids with the cool haircuts, they were just different haircuts. It’s all remarkably similar in that regard. It’s never been cool to sit at home and only do your work. It’s never been cool to extensively study.
Have you seen any drastic difference in high school life?
There’s always been the cool crowd and there’s the hair and music focused crowd, those differences were there and are still there. The changes take place through technology, the cell phones . There have been major changes in the way students study, for example, it’s harder to get students to memorize things, or convince them that they even need to. I still think it’s really useful to know things by heart as it really helps with saving time. We don’t teach you how to memorize anymore and we don’t teach you the value behind it either. You guys also read much less, there are exceptions to that, obviously. You guys read 3 -4 books in English now, you see in my English class in grade 9, we read around 10 books, there’s a substantial decrease in how much you guys read. Although nowadays, the way students use the internet to supplement their knowledge is really strong. The collaboration in between students and how quickly you do so is radically different. Also, your problem solving skills, how when you have a difficult problem and how you can decompose that, is a lot stronger now.
If you weren't a teacher, what would you want to be? An actress, astronaut, street thug, etc.?
Oh no, none of those. I’d probably be working in history more, when I was doing my training I was looking into archeology or working in a museum, and things like that were something I’d consider doing. My absolute dream job would be to work at Google, but I’d have to go back to school and learn a lot of stuff. If I had to go to University again and major in something else, I’d do computer science this time around. I considered it at the time, but it’s just that in high school I was so into the arts and I loved it, but I didn’t realize the algorithms and how cool the data structures were, and I didn’t get to experience them until third or fourth year, and by that time it was too late.