When a person is doing just what they were meant to do, it's no longer a job - it becomes a passion that doesn't burn out or diminish but grows with time.
For 81-year-old June Wilson, that passion was teaching - and after 48 years in the classroom, her love for education and children is as strong now as it was more than half a century ago, when she began teaching as a young woman in England.
Between then and now, Wilson has taught more than 10,000 students, most of them at Elphinstone Secondary in Gibsons, B.C., where she spent the bulk of her career.
Now a resident at a Burnaby care home, Wilson has come up with a way to ensure that the support she once gave to students face-to-face will continue when she's gone.
She recently set up a legacy fund with the Vancouver Foundation, a charitable organization that pools charitable gifts to create endowment funds to help people throughout the province.
The money she's planning to give to the foundation will fund, fittingly enough, scholarships and bursaries.
"Why the Vancouver Foundation? Because they believe exactly what I believe, and they'll do a proper job of it," she said. "I have no children of my own, I'm not married, and I have been working for a long time and inherited some money myself. And I thought, this is dreadful keeping this money doing nothing."
"All the money I have left when I die is for the foundation to use - it's in my will," she said.
Wilson was born in 1930 in Ipswich, England. She spent some time teaching in Wales, after getting her teacher's education; then, after the Second World War, she came to Canada as an exchange teacher.
"I came to Vancouver, and I taught at Laura Secord (Elementary)," she recalls. "They thought I talked funny - they'd say 'Miss Wilson, what language are you speaking?'"
Then someone suggested she should "go into the country" to see how she liked it. She transferred to the Sunshine Coast and ended up staying for more than 40 years.
"In some cases, I taught three generations - I'd teach one student, and then they'd grow up and send their children to school, and then they'd grow up too and have children, so I'd had the grandparents, the parents and the kids."
She got her bus driver's licence so she could bring the students down to Vancouver for field trips and, as an English teacher, opened the door to the classics for thousands of teenagers.
"They loved when I read to them - it was all the classics," she said.
She still has dozens of photos of her students from over those many years, and is still regularly recognized on the street.
"It's really lovely. I have no children of my own, and when somebody comes running across the street calling 'Miss Wilson, Miss Wilson, remember me?' - yes, that's nice."
She says she does, in fact, remember them all and she routinely gets updates from former students and their parents, particularly at milestone events like university graduations. One family named their son "Wilson" after her.
Though no longer in Gibsons, she contributes directly to registered education savings plans for a handful of children on the Sunshine Coast, and keeps their photos displayed in her home. Over the years, she's donated money to create bursaries and scholarships but says that her fund with the Vancouver Foundation will be a way to keep helping kids for many years to come.
"They've got the organization. They're experts at this. What am I going to do with this money? Why not make it do some real good?"
Kids today, she said, may be a little wiser, but deep down she says they're still the same as the ones she used to help tutor over a cup of tea after-hours at the kitchen table - ready to learn and needing a little support along the way.
To learn more about the Vancouver Foundation, see www.vancouverfoundation.ca.
