His guidance and influence are his legacy

The article below was published in Veritas in June 2006, when Rob Wearing retired from Selwyn House.

 

 

By Richard Wills, Publications Editor

 

On the day in 1973 when Rob Wearing first came chugging down Argyle Street in his van, the Selwyn House boys were not sure what to make of their new phys-ed teacher.

“I had an open-neck shirt and very long hair,” Rob recalls. “Of course the kids were all immaculately dressed and with short hair. So I didn’t meet the dress code, and I felt quite awkward.”

 

Rob had just come from a five-year stint teaching and coaching at an inner-city Toronto school where there was a huge sports program. “I was coming from a school where there were a lot of pretty fast guys,” he recalls. “Coming to Selwyn House, the calibre of athletics wasn’t the same. It was then that I wondered what I’d gotten myself into.”

 

In those days Selwyn House was a much different place. The male teachers had their own, smoke-filled staff room. The school had only 350 students and George Dewland cooked all the meals and did all the cleaning.

 

“At that time, the school had a very academic nature,” Rob says. “Dr. Speirs was still here teaching linguistics, and Jack Martin was teaching Latin. Everybody participated in intramural sports. There may have been some athletic competition against other private schools, but certainly not against public schools.”

 

“Time was a bit of a problem. When I taught in Toronto you naturally practiced five days a week. When I came here the teams were only practicing three days. I could hardly believe it.”

 

“We had a lot of gymnastics, as a holdover from the British tradition, and there were some kids who were doing some incredible things. There were injuries but parents seemed to think that was part of being a boy and going to school and taking part in gym class.”

 

Through sheer dedication Rob was soon wringing championship performances out of football, rugby and wrestling teams that didn’t even exist when he came here. “As Alexis Troubetskoy allowed us to increase the number of phys-ed teachers, we began to have more instructional phys-ed along with the team sports. So it was just a matter of time before the teams got better and better, and they began to play against more different schools and had reasonable amounts of success.”

 

Thirty-three years later, he has not only transformed Selwyn House into a force to be reckoned with athletically, but, as Senior School Director, has guided hundreds of young men through  years of growth and challenge, for which they will always be grateful.

Born in London, Ontario Rob received his BA from Western University. The only thing he knew about private schools was that, “In London at that time they used to send all the kids who were bad to Ridley.”

 

Rob and his wife, Esther, who teaches elementary school, moved to Montreal the same summer they were married. He didn’t plan to stay long. “Times became tough due to high inflation and so on, so movement wasn’t very easy. And then, of course, you start raising children and movement is no longer as attractive as it once was.” Rob’s children, Ben and Alison, are both excellent athletes in their own right, Ben having played football in the CFL and Alison coaching hockey at LCC.

 

Before long, Rob was expanding his duties at Selwyn House, becoming Director of Athletics, then Director of Secondary School in the early 80s, interim co-headmaster for six months in 1984, and then Director of Senior School when a separate Middle School was established in 1994.

 

Along the way, he has also taught student awareness classes for years, helping pupils deal with sensitive issues like sex, drugs and alcohol, and teenage depression.

 

“Even though I’ve been here 33 years, I’ve done three or four different things. So it hasn’t been like being in the same school,” he says. “At one time I was here while Ben was here, so I enjoyed that part of it. It gives you a different perspective on things.”

 

Saying he always felt more like an older brother than a father figure to his students, Rob admits his greatest regret over the years has been the students who “you want to keep in school but you don’t know how you’re going to do it. It always seemed to me that the school took a student in, so there was some obligation to make sure he got through, come hell or high water,” he says, “and sometimes the water was pretty high. I always took it very personally when a kid was asked to leave or failed or decided to go elsewhere."

 

“I always enjoyed kids. If you keep your eyes and ears open they can teach you an awful lot. I’m sure I learned as much from them as I imparted to them. Hopefully you never make the same mistake twice. Once you learn a lesson you learn it well.”

 

One of the reasons Rob was initially enticed to come to Selwyn House was because he thought it would be something completely different.

 

Has it lived up to that expectation? “It has, indeed,” he says with a smile.