What makes a great teacher

What’s perhaps most astonishing about Mount’s success as a teacher is how that success interrupted his own narrative. Two decades ago, Mount was a division manager with Woolco, the now-defunct discount department store, where he oversaw a budget of $10 million and had 30 people reporting to him. Not bad for a guy who was still in his 20s and never finished high school (he blames the gap in his resumé on a misspent youth). Then he met a teacher who changed his life.

Mount’s parents owned a bookstore in working-class Kamloops, B.C., and he grew up reading genre fiction—Louis L’Amour’s frontier novels, the fantasies of J.R.R. Tolkien. In his late 20s, when he grew dissatisfied with his job and began looking for something else, it made sense that one thing he’d try would be a night-school English class at Cariboo College, as the Kamloops community college was then called. After his instructor, the noted children’s writer Joan Weir, read his paper on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, she suggested he consider full-time school. Mount left Woolco and enrolled at the University of Victoria.

He soon determined that teaching would also be his calling. “I kept a little teaching notebook. I was a little weird that way,” he says. “I kept notes of the little things I thought worked and the things that didn’t.” Don’t try to be 18 became a Mount adage after one prof took to borrowing jokes from The Simpsons to explain the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. “I already have young, hip friends, I don’t want another one,” he says. “I want a professor, somebody who’s spent a lot of time thinking seriously about this stuff.” Ask students questions you genuinely don’t know the answers to became another. “It has to be discovery,” he says. “As long as that discovery can remain sincere for you, it will remain sincere for the students and real for the students.”

Two decades later, Mount is associate chair of the English department at U of T. He cuts a romantic figure. He walks campus in a fedora and, in winter months, a black trench coat. Outside, his students gather around him in knots for informal discussions. When he feels an oft-repeated lecture is getting stale, he rips up his notes to face his students sans net. “He’s sort of the ideal prof,” says 23-yearold David Topping, a former student who went on to become the long-time editor-in-chief of the well-regarded blog Torontoist and is now with the collaborative local news site OpenFile. “He’s got a way with students, he’s friendly, but he’s not a pushover either.”

In fact, his grit, too, is well known. Somehow, at a university with little tradition of graduate-student-led tutorials, Mount has wrangled money each year to hire 11 Ph.D. students to guide his first-year students through small satellite discussions around the readings. “The only reason I agreed to teach the course is that they were done in conjunction with the tutorials—you need the balance,” says Mount. “I cannot do this on my own.”

Nick Morwood, a former TA who earned his doctorate last year, says Mount’s feat of procurement has everything to do with the way he uses his status at the university to leverage resources. As a popular, award-winning, tenured prof with an administrative position with the department, Mount can shake the money tree. To help pay stipends for the authors that he invites to speak with his first-year students—writers like Pico Iyer, the graphic novelists Chris Ware and Seth, and more recently Newfoundland writer Lisa Moore—he’s applied for funding from the Canada Council and other agencies. It’s exactly the type of weight Canada’s growing class of sessional professors could never muster. “If you don’t fund excellence in teaching, you’re not going to get it,” says Morwood.

But Mount may have identified something else you need for making great teachers. Each Friday, after lecturing, he guides his TAs to a different kind of school—the Bedford Academy, a pub just blocks away—to talk shop. Teacher’s shop. The TAs say few other profs invite that kind of informal discussion. A beer, exchanging ideas. Mount’s still teaching.

Photo: By Andrew Tolson