Teaching Mr. Cutler

M. Wayne Cunningham is a past executive director of the Saskatchewan
Arts Board and the former director of Academic and Career Programs at
East Kootenay Community College.

In his debut novel, Saskatchewan author Robert Currie has drawn on his
years as an award-winning English teacher and his skills as a
short-story craftsman to produce this first-class tale of a novice
teacher’s coming of age as both an educator and an adult.

Teaching Mr. Cutler combines comedy and drama in its portrayal of
teachers, administrators, parents, and students. The common-room
bickering, backstabbing, and cynicism of some faculty members are offset
by the commitment, optimism, and humour of others. For the youthful
Cutler, there is political correctness and a sour, hard-bitten principal
to deal with, and a gay colleague to understand. At Moose Jaw’s T.E.
Lawrence Collegiate where Cutler teaches his often-unorthodox brand of
English literature, stories abound about a long-gone legendary character
who turned the administration on its ear, corralled unruly students, and
eagerly confronted their parents.

Cutler has sexual dalliances with the principal’s curvaceous
red-headed secretary, and he has a love interest on the faculty, too.
The students he deals with are as individualistic as his colleagues. One
is a natural-born actor with an obsessively controlling doctor-father
who is determined to direct his son away from the stage and into medical
school. Cutler excites some students with his passion for teaching,
loses others such as the young girl who commits suicide, and turns still
others off completely. By the end of his first year, he has successfully
endured a Christmas turkey prank, fulfilled his dance duty tour,
survived a raucous, student-driven presentation of Hamlet and a student
brawl in his basement classroom, reconciled his love life, and gotten
the principal to grudgingly admit, “I guess you get another
chance—one more year and maybe then we’ll let you go.”

A highly enjoyable read from an extremely talented Saskatchewan writer,
with perhaps a sequel in the offing.