I feel incredibly lucky to have been raised in Montney. Living at the store meant that there were always people around. While people shopped, or drank coffee afterwards, their kids and I would get to play. We would play “catch”, shoot pucks in the garage or pound a few nails into the tree fort. We also spent hours imagining ourselves in all kinds of roles while exploring the wonderful maze of trees and bushes along the creek bank.

My friends envied parts of my life at the store (especially my access to the pop machine and candy counter), and I envied the things their farm homes allowed them to do.

I’ve often told people that my Montney friends thought I was a city-slicker because I lived “up-town”, while my Fort St. John friends thought I was a country-bumpkin for living “way out there”. It’s probably why I’ve needed so much counselling (just kidding!).

Looking back, my identity crisis aside, an advantage of growing up in a community like Montney was how authentic everything was. I didn’t pretend to wait on customers, to stock shelves or fill propane bottles. My friends did not pretend to cultivate fields, drive combines or milk cows. Although I don’t think dad was overly impressed that we used up all of his good lumber, the tree fort we built involved real nails, hammers, saws, black finger nails and blood. It didn’t matter that our two-room school was somewhat traditional (straight rows and text books) because we all had ample opportunity to create, build, and fix things with our hands on our own time.

I know this next part will sound like one of those old man stories (“I walked 5 miles to school… up-hill both ways”), but the truth is that kids today don’t generally have the same opportunities we had. A statistic from 4 years ago indicated that one in nine kids in British Columbia lives in a condominium. How many tree forts do they get to build? Schools should feel the pressure to provide more authentic, hands-on and collaborative learning experiences for kids at all levels. Universities should too.

The good news is that more and more teams of teachers are starting to work together, often outside of their comfort zones, to co-create interdisciplinary experiences that turn knowledge into understanding.