What inspired me to get my hunting licence at age sixty?
Actually, it was a "who".
I taught English in Scarborough, Ontario for thirty-three years. (And the stories that came out of that experience would make a best-selling novel.)
After goofing around for about a year after I retired, I found a dream job. WSIB pays me to upgrade the reading, writing, listening and speaking skills of injured workers unable to resume their previous jobs.
One injured worker in the program was a hazardous-materials truck driver who had a brutal winter accident. As a result of his physical injuries and the resultant PTSD, he needed a new career.
Unfortunately, though, he was learning disabled: his writing skills were at around the grade two level. When he was a kid, no one knew how to teach LD students. School was not a happy place for him. He was not looking forward to being a student at age forty-two.
The universe works in strange ways. On his first day at the learning centre, I saw his "Remington" hat. I asked him, "Do you shoot?" I told him that I shot "target".
I created a curriculum that enabled him, initially, to read, write and speak about something he loved. He had been hunting since he was eight. He began telling me about hunt camp with his dad and his dad's friends. He learned how to move from the oral from the written, how to pre-write, how to write for an audience. We worked for hours on this assignment.
As he was learning English, he was teaching me some stuff about hunting.
He had trouble reading. I said to him, "When you're stalking game, you can see the animal through the bush, right? You can see details to tell you whether to shoot or not, right?" You're eyes are very, very sensitive to details in the bush, right?" Well, you're using the same skills to be print-sensitive. His reading got much better "real fast."
A year-and-a half later, after working his ass off, he was reading Donne, Keats and Shakespeare, and loving it. He was writing essays on marketing and reading and criticising Grade 12+ level articles from The Wall Street Journal. He was explaining the symbolism in "Paul's Case" and "Rocking Horse Winner." He was composing business letters and learning how to use a computer. I didn't think that he'd be studying Shakespeare and other great writers in his college business program, but he love the stuff, so, why not? If you can evaluate a character in Hamlet, you can evaluate someone you might want to hire. Same skills.
He just finished his first year of Business Management at a local community college and got a 3.2 average.
He will be taking me hunting for the first time.
I could not have found a better hunting teacher.
