I am the son of two teachers. When I think about my own identity in the classroom, who I am proceeds not from ethnicity, class or religion, but from growing up around two people who never thought about their teaching as a "career" but as an exercise in reaching students as individuals.

It is difficult for me to picture myself as belonging to some of the more traditional categories we use to identify ourselves. I am a white male, brought up in a suburban, middle class household. My parents had what probably would have been called a "mixed marriage" at the time; my father came from European Jewish stock and my mother was an Irish Catholic. Both were thoroughly assimilated Canadians and always stressed that our own identity was something we could choose—there were no sacred cows and few family customs that shared links with wider conceptualizations of religion or ethnicity. If anything was stressed, it was the virtue of tolerance and accepting people for who they were. In this, my parents were likely informed by their own experience as a couple as they struggled for acceptance from their own communities, but we were largely protected from any conflict of this nature as children.

What my parents were, however, were teachers. That is how they identified themselves, and how I learned to identify them to others. My father worked in a special education class in a technical school—he ended up with all the problem students that no one else wanted. My mother was a primary school teacher. Neither had a formal post-secondary degree, just a year of teachers college.

I was lucky enough to be invited into their classrooms on a regular basis. There, I saw something quite different from my own school experience. My parents understood that their students wanted to learn. They approached their classes looking to make a connection with their students, searching for ways to engage their interest. They were genuine in wanting to help each person in their classroom. At a basic level, their goal was to identify a student's learning barrier and then help them overcome it. They sought to encourage learning for its own sake. As a guest in my parents' classroom I was always startled by the level of engagement the students had. They wanted to participate—not just one or two, looking for marks, but a consistent majority had a contribution to offer.

More than this though, my parents, who were by the time I was a teenager both members of the Canadian cultural mainstream, brought notions of inclusivity and tolerance to their classrooms that were extremely obvious. My mother taught in a Scarborough elementary school that had a significant proportion of ethnic minorities attending. Rather than trying to impose a culturally dominant narrative on her students, she encouraged them to express their creativity and learning within their own cultural narratives. In other words, she reached them on their own terms, not on hers. Students were encouraged to educate their peers about their own customs and often presented on the customs of their own cultures. And like my Mom, my Dad never judged a student as anything but an individual. Hopeless cases were sent to his classroom, kids that had fallen through the cracks of the school system. I will not pretend that my father reached every one of them. But he was successful far more often than most and the number of near-dropouts who emerged from his tutelage to go on to post-secondary education is simply astonishing.

Watching my parents teach I came to admire them for their dedication and success in the classroom, and there was seldom any doubt in my mind that I would follow in their footsteps one way or the other. Like them, I approached the classroom without much formal education in teaching, only an idealistic desire to reach my class—all of my students were going to do the reading and like it and have great discussions about it. And, of course, like most of us, it did not take very long for my idealism to be challenged.

But fortunately for me, I could look to my parents' example. Faced with a student body no less diverse than theirs, I encourage my students to bring their own identities into the class and use them in understanding the material. This encourages students to see the material as relevant to them, thereby stimulating their interest. And keeping the class open and inclusive has the further benefit of encouraging students to grow beyond binary thinking to understand the legitimacy of different narratives, perspectives and interpretations.

At the same time, I learned from my parents the importance of flexible classroom methodology and an ability to keep the end goal—the students' growth—in sight. They understood that teachers have to communicate their own desire for their students' success. I often wondered, as a child, why students were so open and communicative with my parents both in a formal classroom setting and in asking for help. (I sure wasn't at home!). As a teacher myself, I've come to understand that this happens when you make it clear to students that you are there to help them succeed, not judge them if they fail. I work with students using their own progress as a measurement of their achievement. A student who goes from a D on their first paper to a C+ on their final one IS a success story. That feedback needs to be communicated to them, because it is a sense of accomplishment that will prompt a student's further effort. I learned from my parents to see the growth of each student within its own context, rather than judging it (and myself as a teacher) by an absolute standard of success or failure.

Like my parents, my identity as a teacher proceeds from believing that I do not teach for my own benefit, but for my students' development. When I leave class only to hear students still discussing the material within the frame of their own discourse, that's when I know I've accomplished something. And that sense of achievement stems from remembering my parents in the classroom, recollections that influence the here and now, far beyond the original contexts in which they were first experienced.