In 2004, uWaterloo English alumnus Tim Westhead received uWaterloo’s prestigious Faculty of Arts Alumni Achievement Award. He describes winning this award as a “terrific honour.” The award recognizes Tim for his contributions to his profession, community, and public service. His two proudest achievements, however, are his children, Jessica and Cameron.
Tim has pursued a successful part-time career as a motivational speaker for a number of years, but has recently made it fulltime since his retirement from teaching. Just last year he was a feature speaker at 70 shows across Canada and the United States. The majority of Tim’s engagements focus on health and wellness; his most popular presentation is entitled “Survive & Thrive with Humour.”
A favourite English class of Tim’s at Waterloo was the Anglo Saxon course taught by Dr. Doug Letson at St. Jerome’s. After finishing his BA at Waterloo Lutheran (now Wilfrid Laurier University), he took Dr. Letson’s course and several others in his qualifying year to upgrade from a general to an honours degree before deciding to pursue an MA at Waterloo. Dr. Letson “singlehandedly pushed me on for grad work,” says Tim, who describes this professor as a great teacher and role model. Another professor Tim greatly admired was Dr. Gordon Slethaug. He took two of Dr. Slethaug’s graduate courses before asking him to be the second reader on his thesis in 1970. Like Dr. Letson, Dr. Slethaug was very influential in Tim’s academic career as a “very kind, thoughtful, organized, thorough, and scholarly” representative of the profession.
One of Tim’s fondest memories from uWaterloo is of living with five to six other students in an old farmhouse north of campus, on what is now Bearinger Road. “We could play our music and have parties with no neighbours to bother,” Tim recalls. Their landlord, Dr. Don Grierson, was a professor of Civil Engineering at the time and is remembered as a major influence on all of the tenants, even though none of them were from Engineering.
In the Spring term of 1971, Tim completed his Master’s degree and moved to Toronto, where he enrolled in the Bachelor of Education program at the University of Toronto. In 1972, he began his career as a teacher by taking on his first full-time job in Scarborough at Stephen Leacock Collegiate. He spent nearly 30 years of teaching there, 18 of them as the Head of the English Department. Tim “really enjoyed his students, his department, and the work, but wasn’t too fond of the commute” from his home in Whitby, and retired from the Toronto District School Board in June 2002. In 2003 he received the Ontario Public School Boards’ Association award for “outstanding contribution to education throughout Ontario,” and was acknowledged by former student Mike Myers (aka “Austin Powers” and “Shrek”) at Myers’ induction at Canada’s Walk of Fame. Earlier in 2000 Tim began teaching at the post-secondary level and took at position with the Faculty of Education at Queen’s University. As an instructor, he taught the summer Honour Specialist course for upgrading English teachers for 10 years before retiring and transitioning to his post-retirement speaking career.
To read more about Tim, you can visit his website: www.timwesthead.com
This profile was originally published in November, 2010, as part of the English at 50 celebrations.