The unlikely educator

Dr Mark Smith’s story of overcoming a tough upbringing is built on resilience and a drive to succeed in order to do good, not just for himself and his family, but for the wider community.

For him, lessons were learnt the hard way. And he learnt those lessons well.

From living on his own as a teenager, to earning his PhD, to being entrusted to lead the 25,000-strong Jamaica Teachers’ Association (JTA) as president, the Munro College principal’s journey has been nothing short of remarkable.

As a child, Smith was adamant that he would never, ever follow in his mother’s footsteps and become a teacher because of the economic struggles he witnessed her go through. But – life, oh life! – today, Smith would be the first one to tell you that there is nothing else he would rather do.

“In a nutshell, I consider myself a career educator, a fun-loving guy, easy-going. I have a true passion for education,” he told The Sunday Gleaner in an interview.

But things might have been different.

Said he: “A burden, I think, has been placed on my heart by God because I never initially wanted to pursue education. My mom was a teacher, and seeing her experiences, I thought to myself, ‘I don’t want to do this job’. My mom was a Miconian. Teaching in the ‘80s and ‘90s, she sometimes made lunch for her students. I would see her begging boxes to make flashcards for students who couldn’t read, and with very few resources, she had to be resourceful.

“It didn’t seem like something I wanted to do. It was a very hard job, seems like you’re giving a lot more than you receive, isn’t very glamorous, and so, [I was, like,] I’ll take a pass. But sometimes you don’t choose your profession, your profession chooses you, and I feel that is kind of how my whole life unfolded.”

Smith used to enjoy sketching buildings as a child, and later, he developed a passion for designing houses. His mind was set on becoming an architect.

His mother would eventually leave Jamaica to teach in the United States, leaving both of her sons, Mark and the younger Warren.

“My mom would have left and I had to grow up pretty quickly. By about 13, I was on my own. She had left us boarding with a friend; it didn’t work out. I convinced her that I could manage on my own with my younger brother, and she put us in a house next to our grandfather to oversee us.

“We pretty much experimented. We burnt a lot of food. The money would come to me through Western Union. I would pay the light bill, pay water rate, and everything like that. Then I realised I could spend the money because nobody was there to supervise. Then by half the month, we finished all the money. That taught me [that] I had to learn to manage my money.”

He later convinced a restaurateur to credit them food, and he would pay monthly when his mother sent money.

“That’s a skill set I developed, paying my bills. It also taught me integrity.”

Eventually, though, his younger brother decided he didn’t like that rough life and went to live with his father.

Smith’s father and mother didn’t agree much, he shared. As a result, he went to several schools as the parents played tug-of-war with their children.

He attended St Catherine Basic, St Jago Prep, York Town Primary, then back to St Jago Prep, then Emmanuel Prep, before heading to Ensom City All-Age.

“Almost every year, I was in a new school. It’s part of life as a child. You adjust as best as possible. We didn’t think much of it. But it taught me something, and I always tell my students, everything in life happens for a reason. The important thing is if you understand the reason, it oftentimes helps us to navigate the types of changes that come. It taught me to be resilient and that change was inevitable in life, and so I learnt never to get too attached to anything.

“Fortunately, for me and my brother, we don’t seem to have any long-term emotional issues coming out of the instability in our childhood,” Smith told The Sunday Gleaner.

“The truth is, my parents loved us dearly, and they had different ways of manifesting it. My father was a real disciplinarian, and he believed that being a father meant being a provider, which he was. My mother was the glue that held the family together, a teacher, and an awesome storyteller, and she really demonstrated a lot of love, especially in those formative years. Our house was always filled with laughter despite the instability with the parents coming and going. My childhood, to be honest, was really happy.”

A date with destiny

That instability shuffling from one school to another reared its head once more after Smith passed his examination to attend St Catherine High. He did not remain long as he was eventually transferred to Lennon High in Clarendon as his mother took up a new teaching post in that parish before migrating.

He later became head boy at Lennon, and after graduating at 17 years old, he taught at Brixton Hill Primary in Clarendon for a few months. Then he taught for another few months at Lennon High.

Then it was decision time: Should he go to sixth form or college? He chose college.

“I had an idea of becoming an architect, so I applied to UTech (the former College of Arts, Science and Technology and now The University of Technology, Jamaica) to do architecture. But when I looked at it, [the tuition fee for] UTech was over $100,000, and Mico’s was just over $40,000. So I said, ‘Well, I guess I’m gonna be a teacher!”

Smith said when he left Clarendon to attend Mico Teachers’ College (now The Mico University College), he took everything he owned. And with no home to return to, he lived in the dormitory even during the holiday breaks until he graduated as a trained teacher three years later.

“When everybody would go home at the end of each semester, I would actually be there on campus. I didn’t really have a home to go to,” he told The Sunday Gleaner. “The lesson? I no longer feel things like self-pity. I found the power of solitude; I found the value of being by myself.”

To earn money to cover his living expenses, he would work at the Golden Dragon restaurant as a waiter, starting after classes ended midafternoon until night. He would then focus on his academics for a few hours and then head to bed at around 3 a.m. He also did some part-time work at the Cross Roads Police Station under the Values and Attitudes Programme.

But even with the decision to attend a teachers’ college, Smith still hadn’t given up on his childhood passion.

“The plan was to go into teaching, spend one or two years, save my money and go and do architecture, but I fell helplessly in love with my profession, and I can’t imagine doing anything else. I have realised that my contribution to my country will be through education. I’m very excited about helping kids realise their potential. It has been the great honour of my life to be an educator.”

Looking back, while Smith has a great deal of admiration and respect for St Catherine High, he was happy that he was forced to switch to Lennon. According to him, St Catherine had well over 2,000 students at the time, and while there, he never met the principal or even knew for sure who it was.

“When I went to Lennon, they had a population of around 500 students, and the principal met you at the gate every day, and that changed my perception that a principal is a person who is inaccessible and it also influenced my role as principal,” he added.

As principal of the all-boys’ high school Munro College for nearly a decade now, Smith has been credited with steadying operations at the school, which, over the previous 10 years, had a turnover of seven principals.

“What we’ve been able to achieve has been through building what I call the coalition of the willing,” he shared.

The road ahead

Smith was installed JTA president on August 19, kicking off his one-year term at the association’s 60 annual conference in Trelawny.

He was installed as president-elect in last year after several delegates, district associations and parish associations put forward their preferred choice for the 2024-2025 presidency. They all nominated Smith, nullifying the need for a campaign or election.

In his inaugural address last month, he called for a review of the Primary Exit Profile (PEP) examinations, which replaced the Grade Six Achievement Test as the island’s high-school placement standard in 2019.

He said many teachers viewed PEP as “nothing more than GSAT on steroids”, noting that it was failing to achieve the goal of easing the burden and stress GSAT placed on students with its high-stakes tests in grade six.

“The reality is we have now stretched over three years and we are seeing burnout among our children,” Smith said, calling on the ministry to conduct a review.

“While we embrace the idea and the concept behind the PEP of promoting a greater level of creativity, diverging thinking, and critical thinking, we believe some of the challenges lie in the age-appropriateness and complexity of some of the tasks the children are asked to do,” he argued.

“I yearn for a day when our education system will not just create pockets of excellence and a sea of mediocrity but move towards embracing every child having that sense and that opportunity to be everything and everything they can imagine. An inclusive education that does not seek to pick some winners and [designate] others as losers, but understand that as human beings, our trajectory to success takes different paths,” he added.

He has also advocated for increased resources and investment in education to modernise the system and reshape teaching and learning practices to better prepare students for the Digital Age. He acknowledged that too many students are struggling within the current system.

Speaking at a scholarship awards ceremony recently, he noted: “It can’t happen when our schools are under-resourced. It can’t happen when we have so many of our children in classrooms that look identical to the classroom that their parents, grandparents and great-grandparents sat in decades ago.”

While acknowledging the need for upgrades to facilities and classroom resources, he emphasised that investments in education should extend beyond just physical infrastructure. It may also require a revisiting of the budgetary allocation to the sector, he added.

“It can’t just be that we are going to build new roads. I love new roads, … but we have to understand that those physical infrastructure are great, but far more important is the investment in our human capital,” the JTA president said.

Added he: “We have sold a lie to our children to believe that the only way to be successful is to pass this bag of subjects and I expect you to pass a bag of subjects, but it is not the only way.”

Smith told The Sunday Gleaner that as JTA president, one of his chief missions is to improve the lot of teachers.

“My mom would often make many trips to TIP Friendly Society and JTA to get additional little loans, and such, to tide over, and that was the reality of a teacher. That is the reality, unfortunately, of many teachers to this day. The salary, oftentimes, is only enough to eke out an existence, and I think for many of our teachers, it is a crying shame that that is how they have to live for a profession that is so important to national development. I think that we owe teachers a debt of gratitude, and the country needs to do better when it comes to their remuneration. We need to show them that we appreciate what they do. It can’t be just empty platitudes.”

editorial@gleanerjm.com