When one of his students seems bored with school, James Lindsay doesn’t get frustrated – he gets creative.
Lindsay remembers what it’s like to feel disengaged from learning. More importantly, he knows how to overcome that detachment and build a better life through education.
From high school dropout and heavy partier to respected teacher and northern Manitoba mayor, Lindsay, 45, has charted a compelling life journey.
And it all began in Flin Flon. Well, almost.
Lindsay was born in Victoria, BC, before moving to his mother’s hometown of Flin Flon as an infant. He grew up in the Willowvale area, on Queen Street.
“I was just a typical kid running around the neighbourhood,” he recalls. “I wasn’t much into sports at all, until junior high.”
Getting in trouble
In school, Lindsay often found himself in the principal’s office. Unable to see the point of what he was being taught, or why, he defused his boredom by getting into trouble.
By the time he was in Grade 9, Lindsay was playing a lot of hooky.
“There was always better things to do,” he says. “Go fishing, go swimming, just hang out at home. I wasn’t all that interested in going.”
After repeating Grade 9, Lindsay, then 15, quit school altogether. He was rough around the edges, a long-haired rebel in a leather jacket. Textbooks and exams just weren’t his thing.
Though he admits to excessive revelry, Lindsay was no slacker. After leaving school, he found full-time work making pies at the now-defunct Best Pizza on Flin Flon’s Main Street.
He spent years in other menial jobs before filing for unemployment benefits. In reviewing his file, a caseworker noticed Lindsay was missing his high school diploma.
Unemployment sent Lindsay back to class at the newly established Many Faces Education Centre, an alternative high school with a large adult population.
Progressing at a breakneck pace, he completed his Grade 12 in about eight months. At 24, he finally had his diploma.
Along the way, Lindsay made a strong impression on his teachers, one of whom suggested he stay at Many Faces for July and August, this time as a summer school tutor.
Having pondered a teaching career as a pre-teen, Lindsay was intrigued. He loved helping people “turn a light bulb on,” as he puts it.
He tutored at Many Faces for the summer and decided to enroll in the Buntep teacher education program in Cranberry Portage that winter.
Four and a half years later, in 1999, Lindsay was a certified teacher ready to make his mark on society.
Began career
That fall, having just turned 30, he began his career on the challenged northern Manitoba reserve of Nelson House.
Lindsay still remembers the first day he helmed his own classroom, the safeguards of professors and practicums no longer there to rescue him.
“Absolutely horrifying,” he recalls. “Any first-year teacher will tell you the same thing.
“We’re supposed to know everything. We’re supposed to be perfect and everything is supposed to run smoothly and the kids are going to show up every day and they’re going to take homework home and they’re going to bring it back and it’s going to be perfect. In the real world, that just doesn’t happen.”
Despite the warts, Lindsay fell in love with teaching. He spent a handful of years in Nelson House and a handful of months in Cranberry Portage before accepting a position in Lynn Lake in 2004.
In northern Manitoba, a region replete with middle-of-nowhere dots on the map, Lynn Lake is particularly isolated more than 300 km northwest of Thompson.
A former mining town with just 675 residents today, Lynn Lake is often viewed as desolate, if not hopeless, by outsiders.
But Lindsay felt right at home. In time he would be joined by his future wife, buy a home and cross the threshold into a whole new foray – politics.
In early 2012, Lynn Lake called a by-election for mayor after the town’s former chief magistrate resigned and moved out of province.
Lindsay, who is candid about his complete lack of political experience up to that point, put his name on the ballot.
“Somebody needed to,” he says. “We’d been in a pretty precarious position since the last mine closures [in the 1990s], and it was time where some really key leadership was required and there really wasn’t a whole lot of interest from anybody else in the community. A number of long-term residents suggested that I would be an ideal candidate for the position.”
Election day
The ring into which Lindsay tossed his hat wasn’t much of a ring at all. Come election day, he was acclaimed as the only candidate.
Re-elected last fall, this time against a challenger, Lindsay leads a new wave of Lynn Lakers who sense a much brighter future for their community.
“I see it as an entire town full of potential,” he says.
With an affable, straightforward demeanour, Lindsay has been pegged by some as a future MP or MLA, but he’s having none of it.
“Honest truth of the matter, I don’t mind visiting Winnipeg for a couple of days. I have no interest in living there,” he says. “It’s just too busy.”
For now, Lindsay’s heart remains with his family, his adopted community and, of course, his teaching career.
In the classroom, when he encounters students who are just like he used to be, Lindsay knows how to adapt his approach.
“I make a conscious effort to keep them as engaged as much as possible because for a lot of these kids, I’ve been in their position,” he says. “They’re not sure what it is they don’t know and what they need to know, so I try my best to keep them engaged.”
If Lindsay ever has trouble reaching those disinterested students, he can always hold up himself as a beacon of possibility. He was once like them – and look at him now.
