Krondl, Magdalena: Teaching As a Twist of Fate

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MEMOIR:

Memoir pages are intended to provide a personal recollection of life at the University of Toronto or events in the author's life which he or she deemed significant. For this reason, these entries are entirely the work of the authors and are not subject to the normal fact-checking or editing of Encyclopedia entries. The editors request that the pages be approached accordingly.

Teaching as a Twist of Fate


Magdalena Krondl
(Excerpted from Magdalena Krondl, “Faith and Hope”: My Odyssey from Czechoslovakia to Canada, MSK Press 2006, pp. 157-162.)


If I had been asked when I was young what I wanted to be when I grew up, becoming a teacher would not have been my answer. Having had the opportunity to learn to fly at an early age, I wanted to become a pilot. In my teens I would have chosen to be a social worker, after having witnessed my mother’s involvement in many charitable organizations. I did gain a taste of social work working in the docks area of London during the Second World [War]. However, there I soon discovered that beyond immediate relief, little can be done to help the needy on an individual, long-term basis, and there was not the reward of witnessing the effect of “helping one’s neighbour”. It seemed to me that social workers were just cogs in large social and political organisations.

My first experience of teaching was in a kindergarten during the Second World War. I remember how touched I was by a very timid boy who always sat apart from the rest of the children. Once, after the class, he handed me a drawing on the back of a used envelope. From his action, I came to understand how he yearned for love.

After the war, one of my odd jobs in Prague was teaching nine-year-olds English at an elementary school. I remember clearly when a shy boy brought me a new edition of an Agatha Christie mystery novel. On questioning where he got it, I learned that his father, a customs officer, had confiscated it from a Western visitor. Such “unhealthy” books, from the communist point of view, were not allowed to enter the country. The father was supposed to destroy the book, not keep it. The boy brought me the book to please me, without his father’s knowledge; I found teaching the very young was primarily an act of love.

I discovered another aspect of teaching when I taught youngsters aged 15 to 19 at the School of Nutrition in Prague. I taught basic science, as well as food and nutrition courses. I had a Ph.D., but I was specialized in research and lacked teaching qualifications. Soon, I became painfully aware of this deficiency. Teachers of teenagers clearly require special skills – and most of these in the gentle art of disciplining.

My first “real” teaching experience, that is to say, the opening up of minds to different fields of knowledge, was at the Faculty of Food Science, University of Toronto. The years 1971-1974 saw the beginnings of serious concern about the environment and I participated in teaching an undergraduate course, “Man and His Environment”, with architect Martha Leitch-Crase and textile designer Betty-Ann Crosbie. At the advance level, I shared teaching “Food Quality” with Professor Pat Coleman and Dr. Lilian Thompson, and “Food Service Administration”, together with architect Mr. Keenlyside. In addition to the regular daytime schedule, most of the courses were offered at night and in the summer time. For three years, as a service course, I taught medical students in the gastroenterology section.

My main teaching responsibility was the course “World Nutrition”. In the early 1970s, with the memory of wartime food shortages still fresh, the idea of under-nourishment was universally understood. Severe food deprivation, leading to starvation and malformation in children, was much less well-known about.

In teaching this course, the task was to bring the concept of the function of food energy out of the metabolic laboratory into the real world; to explain how food energy affects the health, life and performance of human beings. I emphasized the fact that our very existence depends on the nutritional link we have to the earth, the oceans and the sun, and the transformation of this energy from Mother Earth to simple glucose molecules and the priority of the brain as an energy recipient. Mechanisms in our brain maintain the hunger/satiety balance while, at the same time, processing signals of food preferences related to innate taste sensitivity, culturally acquired cues and an individual’s beliefs in the health effects of different foods. I stressed the fact that the lack of food energy in the early stage of a child’s development stunts both the brain and the body and compromises the immune system, thus facilitating the spread of infection.

Several international charity organizations, such as the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations, tried to alleviate situations of hunger around the world by supplying food to afflicted regions. They soon learned that issues of hunger are often greatly complicated by local social and political conditions. Unfortunately, these have not been resolved, and continue to grow worse to this day. Nevertheless, it was gratifying that some of my students took the issues of food misdistribution to heart and went to work in hunger-afflicted regions overseas. Gradually, I began to appreciate the role of the teacher.

This teaching environment changed drastically at the end of the 1970s when to our sadness, the University of Toronto sold the Lillian Massey Building and discontinued the Faculty of Food Science. Some of the staff, including myself, were transferred to a newly-formed Department of Nutritional Sciences at the Faculty of Medicine. We were no longer a part of an independent academic unit designing its own integrated teaching program leading to professions in food and nutrition. Instead, the new Department offered courses to the huge student body of the Faculty of Arts and Science. From these, only some would choose to major in food and nutrition.

Although my course had to be more general, topics other than malnutrition were covered, such as the rapid development of technology as it affected lifestyle, legislation, and the impact of the food and pharmaceutical industries on nutrition. One area I particularly enjoyed teaching related to food choices at the individual level, including matters of taste and cultural food preferences.

Post-secondary academic institutions give instructors much freedom to design the content and the process of teaching, and allow them to integrate their area of research into course content. This keeps instructors on their toes, by encouraging them to keep up with developments in their field.

One incident left a frustrating memory. After the end of the Cold War in 1992, there was an effort on the part of the international agencies to speed the awareness of the advancement in some disciplines in the countries emerging from behind the Iron Curtain. CIDA (Canadian International Development Agency) invited a French professor from Montréal and myself to go to Prague to design a nutrition course for medical students there. For 14 days and evenings we worked so hard I hardly had time to contact members of my family living in Prague. The understanding was that the generous CIDA grant would be used to bring our work to fruition for the students. It did not happen, and I learned first-hand some of the frustrations connected with foreign aid. Fortunately, this frustration had little to do with the role of a teacher.

The extent of a teacher’s responsibility occurred to me when my former student Daisy Lau suggested that I might have “pearls of wisdom” to share. I realized that a teacher, like a parent, not only provides students with specific knowledge, but also offers them a lens through which to observe the world around them and with which to contribute to the development of their own personal value system. This helps students to better understand the ways of the world and this can be both stimulating and enriching for them. As a reward, teachers at the post-secondary level learn about students’ systems of values and ways of thinking that may often differ sharply from their own, especially in multicultural environments.

Just like in the parable of the seeds in the Bible, I have seen, over the years, some of my teaching fall on fertile ground. To me, this has been further confirmation that there is no such thing in life as chance, and that if we listen to our inner guiding voice, we can apply our lives in ways that are useful in the world at large.