Mr. Kamiya: The Interview
Mr. Kamiya may in fact not be Beyoncé. The pop star, who makes it clear that no one is “irreplaceable”, feels differently than Mr. Kamiya, who believes “everyone is replaceable”. It’s hard to believe Kamiya, who does so many things that make himself important at Central, considers himself as disposable as Windows 97. When he started teaching, he thought he was essential, but later came to realize that “other people can do what [he does]”.
Now in his thirteenth year of teaching, exclusively at Central, Mr. Kamiya can look back at his business experience and say it was “all over the place”. In high school, he was told that people have up to seven careers in their lives; he thinks he is on his eighth. Straight out of university, he worked for a company called Placerdome, once the second largest gold mining company in the world, now non-existent. He later enjoyed the freedom of his own “moderately successful” business. Prior to teaching, he worked at a non-profit organisation that helped build and run the Japanese centre on Kingsway.
You might be surprised to know that Mr. Kamiya has been deceived during his life. When asked about what inspired him to coach track, he said that he “was conned into it”. A student asked him to be the track coach and sponsor, promising that it would take no time at all and that the students would do everything. Mr. Kamiya did do track in high school, but has no “formal training” for it.
Teaching teenagers is a stressful job, but Mr. Kamiya has a “fairly laid back personality” and finds ways to cope when he gets overwhelmed. One of his releases is “having two children” and another is “just doing something different”. When asked what he does to break from his routine, Mr. Kamiya says that, if anything, his “routine is chaos”. Mr. Kamiya tries to do different things in his classes and after school, and thinks that having “a routine that never changed” would cause him more “pain”. Adults aren’t supposed to pick favourites, but that doesn't stop them from remembering noteworthy students. He remembers Chris from his first year of teaching, CJ as a very well-rounded person, and Eric who is now at UBC Okanagan and is “another wonderful young man”among numerous others. When asked if any of his students have changed him, he said there isn’t one particular student, but students in general that change his “outlook on life”.
Mr. Kamiya was very open and profound about the one thing he hopes his student take away from his classes. He believes that when students leave high school they won’t remember the details of what they learned; “the dates, the steps to use a computer program”. Instead, they will remember the life lessons. Mr. Kamiya probably talks about life more than other people, “whether that bores students or not”. He hopes people remember this teaching “when they’re facing difficulties in their lives” or as they grow older. Mr. Kamiya is a person who wants others to have successful and happy lives.
Our final controversial question for Mr. Kamiya, probably the one that has been burning under the skin of hundreds of students for many years, was whether he gets reimbursed for Hi-Chews. Pausing for a moment to give the question meaningful thought, he replied with “no comment”.