Entrepreneur

About Keri-Ellen Walcer

Keri-Ellen Walcer has been a professor at Durham College (DC) since 2013. She is currently the Program Coordinator for the Entrepreneurship and Small Business program in the Faculty of Business. Keri-Ellen holds a B.A. in Health Promotion from Brock University and an MHSc.in Kinesiology from Ontario Tech University. Prior to joining DC Keri-Ellen established a global children’s fitness brand working with partners in the community, government and entertainment industries.

Keri-Ellen is passionate about helping students develop their unique brands and innovative business models. She is very active in her community service activities and loves to empower young adults to be changemakers.

Connect with Keri-Ellen: Email | Instagram | Linkedin | Facebook

Listen Now

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Resources Mentioned

YMCA Canada

Steal Like An Artist by Austin Kleon

Musigo Inc

The Transcript

**Please note that all of our transcriptions come from rev.com and are 80% accurate. We’re grateful for the robots that make this possible and realize that it’s not a perfect process.

Sam Demma
Welcome back to another episode of the High Performing Educator Podcast, your source of professional development and connections in the education industry. This is your host, keynote speaker, and author, Sam Demma. Today we are joined by Keri-Ellen Walcer. Keri-Ellen Walcer has been a professor at Durham College since 2013. She is currently the program coordinator for the Entrepreneurship and Small Business program in the Faculty of Business. Carrie Ellen holds a BA in health promotion from Brock University and a master’s in kinesiology from Ontario Tech University. Prior to joining Durham College, Carrie Ellen established a global children’s fitness brand working with partners in the community, government, and entertainment industries. Carrie Ellen is passionate about helping students develop their unique brands and innovative business models. She is very active in her community service activities and loves to empower young adults to be changemakers. I hope you enjoy this impactful conversation and I will see you on the other side. Welcome back to another episode of the High Performing Educator Podcast. This is your host and speaker, Sam Demma. Super excited to have Keri-Ellen Walcer on the show here today. Keri-Ellen Walcer, thanks so much for taking the time to be here.

Keri-Ellen Walcer
Thanks so much for having me, Sam. I’m super excited about our conversation today.

Sam Demma
So I always like to start by asking, like, what made you the person you are today? Where did you come from?

Keri-Ellen Walcer
Wow, that’s a big question. Well, I am the youngest of six kids. I’m from a very active and entrepreneurial family. My mom was from the UK, my dad was from Holland. They met here in Canada and yeah, we’ve always had a full house and lots of activity and lots of fun in our house. So yeah, that’s kind of where I come from.

Sam Demma
Does that inspire the full house you have now?

Keri-Ellen Walcer
Yeah, yeah, I think so. I, I, I’ve created my own full house. Um, yeah, I’ve always loved having people around, um, you know, being the youngest, my siblings all had children before I did. And so even though I didn’t have younger siblings, I always had, you know, nephews around a lot of nephews, a couple of nieces, but a lot of nephews. And so family functions are always a lot of fun, a lot of games, a lot of activity, and just lots of ideas.

Sam Demma
Did your parents’ entrepreneurial aspirations influence your own? Like, tell me more about your parents’ aspirations in entrepreneurship.

Keri-Ellen Walcer
Oh man.

Keri-Ellen Walcer
Yes.

Keri-Ellen Walcer
My dad was very creative. He was all… I think when I was a baby he had an ice cream shop at one point. And my mom says that as a baby, you know, I’d sit on the counter and he’d feed me soft ice cream and whatnot. So, you know, right from the time we were growing up, but he always had different ideas for different businesses. And I remember as a teenager going to him to trade shows, selling some of the stuff that he had invented or different things. There’s always some kind of side hustle going on in our house.

Keri-Ellen Walcer
Yeah.

Sam Demma
That’s awesome. I think the soft serve ice cream as someone who’s lactose intolerant for me wouldn’t have been the best idea as a baby but that’s a fond memory to think about The did that directly inform your decision to be an entrepreneur yourself like tell me more about your own entrepreneurial journey Yeah

Keri-Ellen Walcer
So so actually I have to say when I was five years old, I had decided I was going to start a jewelry making club. Like I said, my dad worked at a car manufacturer and he would bring home little empty spools of thread and different bits and pieces and I would make jewelry out of these plastic pieces and things that he would bring home from the factory. And so I decided I had like one friend in the neighborhood, there wasn’t really many children in my neighborhood, and I made this little kit. It was like a jewelry making kit and I like dropped it off at her house and said, do you want to be part of my jewelry making club? And you know, so when I really think about it, like I was doing this stuff from the time I was super little. I remember actually even at that time when I was living at that house, so I was again, I think I moved when we were five, like I think I had my fifth birthday at the new house, but so before I’d even moved from the original house I lived in, there was a Dickie D ice cream guy that would drive around on his bike in our neighborhood and, you know, I would be playing out front by myself and I always wanted to get this ice cream. So I decided that I would get Monopoly money and go and order some ice cream from him. Now I knew that the Monopoly money was not real money, but I figured that like $500 in Monopoly dollars must be worth at least 50 cents in like regular dollars. So I went out to the ice cream, I had my pocket full of this Monopoly money. I went out to the ice cream guy and I asked him for the ice cream and he gave me the ice cream and then he asked me for the money and so I pulled the Monopoly money out of my pocket and he goes, oh no, you can’t use that. And I said, listen, no, I know it’s not real money, but I explained to him like it must be worth something, like come on, this is $500 Monopoly, it’s got to be worth at least an ice cream. But no, he wouldn’t take it. But I did make some good sense, I think. Like, I was really trying to wheel and deal, and I felt like I had, you know, a good deal I was willing to make, but that wasn’t successful. So, yeah, those things were happening right back then. Now, fast forward to when I was in my early 20s. I got married young. I married my high school sweetheart, so we had known each other for a long time. But we were, I was 20 years old when I got married and I was just finishing up university. And so when I finished, I was, I just had my first baby. So she was actually at my university graduation. And I had finished a degree in community health and fitness. And I had also been a dancer throughout my life. I love, I love dancing. And so here I was, I just graduated, I have a baby and I was not eager to leave her alone. And so I started developing little, little knee bounces and dances and things like that, that I could do with her with, and my intention from that was twofold. One was for myself to keep active and to develop a program that could help me to keep up my own fitness level while also helping her reach her developmental milestones. So I started reading a lot of books about children and their developmental milestones and things. I started developing this program. At the time, we bought a house, so again, we were very young, and we had bought this house that was a little bit outside of our price range since we had no money at all. Did you use the Monopoly money? Yeah. So we bought… Yeah, they didn’t take Monopoly money for the house either. So we’re stuck a little bit. But we bought this house because it had a second entrance and we were going to rent out part of the house. And that was how we were going to be able to maintain this house. Luckily, we were living in a university town at the time, so we had no problem renting it out. But by the time she was born, I kind of thought, well, it would be nice for us to have the whole house to ourselves. And so I figured if I could start a little business in my house and make the same amount of money that we had been earning in rent, that I could justify just having our own house. So I started a little dance studio in the house, in the apartment. We converted the apartment to a dance studio and put mirrors and everything up and started dance classes there. So my classes, what started as dance, became this fitness movement class that I created, which like I said, was not only to entertain kids, but to also maintain my own fitness and to kind of morph that. So that actually grew quite quickly and I was also doing birthday parties at the same time, but really all of this was just to justify myself being able to stay home and to be able to take over our own home and have our own home. And it worked very well. Eventually I was renting space in other dance studios and offering my programs both in my own home as well as in dance studios. And my husband was working as a teacher at a private school. And then we got the inkling to move. We wanted to be, at the time we were living about two and a half hours away from both of our families, and both of our original families, and we were having more and more kids. So by this point I was pregnant with my third child and we felt like maybe it was time to move back closer to our families of origin. And by that time I had about 200 students. So it had been two years and between my dance classes and what became known as Wee Wigglers, the Wee Wigglers programs that I had developed starting at age six months up to five years old, I realized that I had actually sort of created something worth something. And really actually what it was is that the families that were, right, like I didn’t teach children over the age of five. All of my students were between six months and five years old. And at the time, this was 20 years ago, nobody else was doing anything like that, certainly not in our town. And I don’t really think anywhere else. I don’t think anywhere else anybody was really doing like that. And so the families came to me and said, well, what are we going to do when you leave? Like, look at all of us. We were doing recitals and like, it was a very unique thing. And so that’s when I got the idea to license the program. So there was a colleague, well, another, a fellow business owner that I, that I, her student, actually her daughter was one of my first students and one of the inspirations for me developing these Wigglers programs. So she was teaching mom and baby fitness up to six months and then I was starting them at six months. So we had developed a friendship and we had developed sort of a business camaraderie and I said to her, you know, a lot of her students she was sending to me when they were too old for her programs and so she was really feeding my business. And I said, well listen, you know, a lot of my students are starting with you anyway. Why don’t you license these programs? I’ll set you up and you can keep running them here. And when I move, I still deserve the right to keep running them wherever I go. So she thought that was a great idea. And then there was another studio owner who also thought it was a great idea. So that was my first two licensees. And again, it was not that I specifically set out to do this from the beginning, it was just to fill a gap and to fill a need and to fill some demand that was generated. So that was kind of my first four-way. I ran that, I developed those programs and licensed it across North America. We even had a licensee in the UK. And by the time I sold it, I think I had been running it for about 15 years and growing it and developing it. And I was also growing and developing my own family. So by that point I had four children who were all in various ages and stages and things like that. And it was getting to be a lot. Everything was growing. My business was growing, my family was growing, there’s a lot of responsibility. And I also started developing some curiosity around other types of programs and how these programs could be used in other settings besides just a regular dance setting and so I decided to pursue more education and The rest is history. But yeah, that was my that was my entrepreneurial start

Sam Demma
You mentioned a phrase that stuck in my mind the moment you said it and it was back to the monopoly money at the ice cream truck you said it’s got to be worth something and again, you said, this is I built something that was actually worth something, which is so cool. But it takes so much self belief to take an idea that you have, it’s just in your head, believe in yourself enough and in the idea that it’s got to be worth something to take the actions to bring it to life. Where did your self belief come from?

Keri-Ellen Walcer
Oh, wow. You know, I heard a phrase at some point in time, I came across this phrase that says confidence is not feeling sure that you can’t lose, it’s being not afraid to lose. And I look at my siblings, like I said, I’m the youngest of six, and all of us have displayed and manifest entrepreneurial things in various ways. And we kind of laugh about it. We have a really good sense of humor about ourselves. And I think we really aren’t afraid of failure because we have made fools of ourselves a lot of times. Like the whole ice cream. That was kind of foolish, but it did set me back because it was like, that wasn’t a big deal. It’s fine. I didn’t get the ice cream, move on, you know? Yeah. So I don’t think, again, I don’t really feel confident that everything I do is always going to be amazing. In fact, nothing I’ve ever done has ever turned out the way I thought it would. And I think it’s just getting used to the fact that, you know, yeah, you can have a vision in mind, but, you know, I paint as well, I create art. My art never looks the way that I think it’s going to look or the way I want it to look. And at first, I go through this process, and a lot of artists go through this process where it looks awful to you and you’re like, oh, you’re so frustrated and you’re so done with it. And then for me, by the time I’m finished a piece, I’m not finished because I love it. I’m finished because I’m so sick of it. But then I walk away from it and, you know, maybe a month later, maybe two months later, I look at it again and I go, oh, that was actually pretty

Keri-Ellen Walcer
good.

Sam Demma
You know what I mean? That’s a common trend for artists. I just finished reading a book called Steal Like an Artist by a gentleman named Austin Cleon and he shared a story of a young man who grew up drawing and sketching and every day his garbage can at the end of the day would be filled with all the drawings that he didn’t think were good enough and he’d crumple them up and throw them in the trash. But his dad would go into his bedroom when he fell asleep as a little kid and take the garbage can, uncrumple the pages and kept them in a drawer in his bedroom. When his dad passed away, one of the things he left for his son was like an 800-page scrapbook of all the drawings he made that he didn’t think were worthy. And I thought it was such a powerful story. Like just hearing you say that brought me back to that moment and it gives me a little bit of goosebumps. Like art sometimes takes you on a journey of disgust and excitement, but at the end, there’s a cool thing that happens. Like you bring an idea to life, even if it’s different than the one you had in your mind. I think we’re living in a time right now where a lot of young people want to bring ideas to life. They want to create something worth something. And sometimes that desire takes them on a different path. And I know that Durham College and the work that you do at the school is providing cool opportunities for entrepreneurs or people who have that spirit while also earning their educational certificates and diplomas. Tell me about how you started your work at Durham College and some of the projects that you’re unfolding and building now?

Keri-Ellen Walcer
Yeah, so I was doing this training program and I decided to approach Durham College to see if they wanted me to do these one-day trainings. And as serendipity would have it, it turned out that they weren’t just looking for the one-day certification program, they were actually launching a whole new program that I was a good fit for. So I started working part-time teaching that program and found, just found a love for working with these young adults, which I had never really worked with before. I mean in my business I was working with, like I said, only up to five years old. Yeah. All my only had up to five-year-old kids. So at first again I was a little bit nervous. It was out of my element, I thought, but it did not take long for me to just find joy in meeting with these young adults and helping them on their path. So that was my start at Durham College, and I did find that as my children grew, as I was saying, with my business, so I was still running my business and working at the college and having babies.

Sam Demma
You had a family.

Keri-Ellen Walcer
Five.

Sam Demma
Wow.

Keri-Ellen Walcer
I did get to a point as I got older and a little bit more mature that I needed to maybe pare down the demands on me because I felt like I wanted to have a little bit more control of my time and my scheduling. So I found that the college life really afforded me a little more work-life balance, which is when I decided to sell the business and then pursue teaching full-time. So that puts me here in the entrepreneurship program.

Sam Demma
You went back to school to follow the new curiosity to get into teaching. Some people think at a certain time in their life, it’s too late. They’ve made their path. One of my good friends is a guy named Sean Canugo and he has a phrase, he says, you know, everyone always talks about going from zero to a hundred from the bottom of the mountain to the top of the mountain. And he says, well, innovation happens when you go from a hundred to zero, when you scale down the mountain and start from scratch, start from zero. And, you know, you didn’t start from zero. You started from experience, and everyone does in life, but metaphorically, you went back down a mountain and started climbing a new one. For people listening to this who want to make a big shift in their life or pursue a new path but they’re struggling with the idea of letting go of the mountain they’ve already climbed, what encouragement would you share?

Keri-Ellen Walcer
Well, you know, it’s funny because I think that process is exactly the same as the art process. And I think what I would wrap up that art process discussion in this little bow, where, like I said, what I discovered was nothing ever really turns out the way that I had planned. And yet I’ve been able to find the beauty in how it did turn out, that there is beauty in how it turned out. And I think you could say the same for my career, you could say the same for my business, things aren’t the way that I had anticipated. And so you can kind of, you know, get caught up in that and go, oh, you know, what if it doesn’t turn out? Well, guess what? It never does. So find beauty in what it is, and not just in the one preconceived idea that you had about it. And so if somebody is afraid to quote unquote, quote-unquote restart from the bottom or change paths because they’re afraid it’s not going to turn out. Well, it’s not. Learn how to be okay with it not being easy. Learn how to be okay with it being harder than you anticipated. And when you get used to that and when you get used to being able to see the beauty in what it is, then it doesn’t feel as much of a risk and it doesn’t feel like a failure. I remember a student, one of my entrepreneurship students, he’s a funny guy, he was very bold and he is very bold. And he walked into class, this was like one of the first days of class, I’m introducing myself, I’m talking about my business, whatever. And he says, I said, does anybody have any questions? And he goes, yeah, I’ve got a question. Have you ever failed? Like, tell us about one of your business failures. And I was like, huh. And I thought about it. And my first instinct was to say, well, no, I’ve never failed. But then I also was like, but I don’t feel like I’ve ever really succeeded. Well, you know, so I really, it made me think. And I think at the time I said to him, well, I said, I guess it just depends on how you How you define failure and how you define success That’s kind of what I said But it did make me think and actually just recently I had a thought and I and I’m reading a book by Adam Grant called Think again. Hmm, and He talks about thinking like a scientist that and and the way a scientist thinks is we have hypotheses But whatever we learn from that experiment is what we learn. Maybe our hypothesis was wrong, maybe it was right. Either way it’s learning, so it’s not a failure if your hypothesis was wrong. And I think that’s the way I’ve approached my life, that’s the way I’ve approached my business. It’s like a scientist, it’s like let’s try this and see what happens. Oh, that’s what happens when you do that. I’m gonna do more of that, or I’m not going to do that again, right? And so I think I’ve just approached things that way. So it doesn’t feel like a failure. It really always does feel like, oh, I learned something there and let’s do more of that or let’s do less of that.

Sam Demma
I guess approaching it like an experiment gives less pressure on the end result because you’re just testing things as opposed to making it like a test. You know, you fail or you succeed. It’s like, no, this is gonna be, I have my educated guests, this is gonna be an experiment, we’re gonna put some inputs and see what outputs. And if it’s really great, we’ll do more of it. And I think the beautiful thing is that it doesn’t only apply to entrepreneurship, that applies to teachers in the classroom. You know, you try things with the students you’re mentoring and teaching. This applies to relationships with your partner. This applies to raising kids. Like this applies to all the choices you can make in your life, which is really unique and cool. I have a inspiration in the music industry named Russ. He’s an independent rapper and I’ve really looked up to him in many different ways. And he has this phrase, he says, you know, I had to teach myself that it wasn’t broken success when the things I expected didn’t happen. That just was the version of success that unfolded at that point in my life. It’s not broken, it just is what it is. And that’s kind of reminded me when things didn’t fulfill my expectations that the journey and the path is the success and what happens at the end is kind of not up to your choice. It’s like by chance a little bit sometimes. Yeah. So let’s talk about the weekend program. Again, a lot of students are, they’re wanting to take different pathways, me being one of them. And sometimes it’s very difficult because when you make a big shift or you make a choice different from everyone else around you the first thing you get is pushback from all the people in your life that love you and care about you. What I think is so amazing about the program at Durham College is it marries two things together. The ability to pursue that entrepreneurial itch while also still fulfilling and obtaining some of your education.

Keri-Ellen Walcer
Absolutely. I honestly, people say this, but I really mean it. I really wish that there was a program like this when I was going through what I was going through in my business. It’s kind of like starting a business with training wheels on. So, the weekend program is unique, it’s innovative because I don’t know of any other program like it. It is a full-time program, so our students are considered full-time students at the college, which means that that they can receive OSAP if needed or whatever, but it also is condensed, the learning or the class time is condensed to Friday evening, Saturdays and Sundays, and we try to have it so that there is still enough time. If people are really motivated, they can get their homework and study done on the weekend as well. So that they can be freed up through the week to pursue whatever their work week responsibilities are. Some of them are already starting their own business, and so they’re working, they’re literally doing their business, running their business through the week, and then coming on the weekends. Some of them are like what I was when I was 20 years old. Maybe they have family commitments at home and whatnot. So, it really is very flexible for our learners to be able to, yeah, hit the ground running. I mean, there is an opportunity cost to going to school. Because you’re not just paying for school, but you, in many cases, if you’re in a regular weekday program, in many cases, you’re giving up full-time employment or you’re giving up the opportunity to have full-time employment. So it’s the cost of losing that wage as well as what you’re paying for your education, which can be difficult for some people and can really limit people in what their options are. So this kind of takes that away. And it also, I love that, like I learned a lot of things the hard way in my business and I think you know there’s always going to be those types of lessons you know you can never just you can never prevent it but what I love about our program is that people can be starting their business and we have professors who are experts in their fields and who are you know you’ll have a professional accountant teaching you accounting you have a professional lawyer teaching you business law. You have entrepreneurs who have run their own businesses, run their own franchises, different things like this that can help you and answer some of those questions for you and guide you through those processes so that it’s your learning experience. I mean, running a business, being an entrepreneur, there are some expensive lessons. You know, you make investments and I think that this is a very safe investment. To be able to start that business and have those professionals, you know, at your disposal for that two years, I think is just incredible. So that’s what we aim to do. We aim to kind of be there, be your sounding boards, give you some guidance on those foundational principles of business, accounting, law, marketing. We have some amazing digital marketer, professional digital marketers that are teaching in the program right now. They’re just some incredible people who are all entrepreneurs in their own right and who are just ready to support our students in their journey.

Sam Demma
I guess you could consider this weekend program your sixth baby.

Keri-Ellen Walcer
Oh my goodness.

Keri-Ellen Walcer
Is that so obvious to you?

Keri-Ellen Walcer
Oh my gosh.

Sam Demma
I just, I can’t feel the passion when you talk about it. I wish this was around when I was making my decision to decide to go to university or college or start building my business. It would have been a option I wish I knew more about, which is why educators listening to this right now, if you have students who you recognize have this entrepreneurial spirit and wanna build things and might not know exactly what they want to do. Guidance counselors listening to this, if that student walks into your office and tells you they want to start a company, instead of trying to redirect them back on a very formal path, consider looking into this and maybe reaching out to Carrie Ellen or someone from the college to learn more about this opportunity because I think it’s so important that more young people know about it. It would have been super helpful for me. Tell me a little bit more about how you connect with the students in your class. A lot of educators listening want to have an impact on the young people in front of them, and that’s why they got into education in the first place, to not only teach, but to pour self-belief in another human being’s backpack so that they can take the choices or make the choices required to bring the versions of themselves to life. How do you connect with students in a classroom and put that belief in their backpacks?

Keri-Ellen Walcer
Yeah, well, again, going back to that notion before, it’s that, you know, when you’re an artist or when you take a risk on something and it doesn’t turn out exactly how you envisioned and you’re having a hard time yourself seeing the beauty in it, to be able to have a professor who knows you, who looks at your effort and looks at your work and shows you that there is beauty in it when you have a hard time seeing it yourself, is exactly what we aim to do. It’s to help expand their vision, expand a student’s vision, not just for their business, but for who they are as an individual. I think the important thing, you know, I’ve talked about how really nothing I’ve ever really done has turned out how I had envisioned it. But the vision is so important because the vision drives you. So it’s the difference between running towards something that you want so bad and running away from something you’re afraid of. Either way you’re running, but I prefer to run towards things that I want as opposed to the feelings that I have when I’m running away from something I’m afraid of. And so it’s really important to have vision and it’s really important to think big and to be idealistic about it. And that will really drive you in the struggles or the challenges that you have to overcome. If you keep an eye on that vision that you have, it can motivate you through the tough times. But then when you kind of get to the quote-unquote end goal, and it isn’t what you had envisioned, that can be a bit of a letdown. And when you’ve been so focused for so long, as an individual, you may have a really hard time recognizing the beauty in what you produced. And so having been there, and all of our professors on our We’ve all had those experiences and we are able to guide our students and to sort of be, I guess, a calming influence and to be a reassurance to say, you know what, it’s okay. This doesn’t make you a failure. This isn’t, you know, this is a normal part of progression and we are here with you and we know that you can do this. And you know, that’s something you can take online courses and you can read magazines and you can find all kinds of information all over the place, but to have somebody who’s been there, who knows the path, and who knows you and is able to reassure you on that path, it can’t be replaced.

Sam Demma
I think back to the teachers in my self-belief, in my journey, in taking the next step. Sometimes the self-doubt that I had would freeze me. And it’s like, you know, with the analogy of being frozen in a block of ice, the self-belief from someone else like melts the block and allows you to keep walking forward. So I even think back to my coaches in sport that had a similar impact on me. My parents had a big impact, but sometimes we believe the people that love us are biased, and no matter what, they’re gonna tell us that they love us and believe in us. But when you hear it from another adult or human in your life who’s not connected to you that closely at the beginning, it really makes a difference and an impact. Can you think of an example where a professor had an impact on your life like that or when you had an impact like that on a student?

Keri-Ellen Walcer
Yeah, a professor that’s had an impact, oh my goodness. It’s funny because, you know, it’s in the little things and I think sometimes, I know in the professors and the teachers that really had, that I’m thinking of right off the bat, they probably don’t even realize. Yeah. Oh it was maybe just something they said at the right time and the right moment or just the look or just a feeling that you get or that I got. But yeah I had, yeah I’ve had, I don’t know it’s hard for me to. It’s tough to bring yourself back. Yeah, yeah I’ve had some, I had a professor who I just adored. And at that point in time, I had changed schools. I got married. I had been going to school in the US. And then I got married and came back to Canada and transferred my credits here. And so I was just there for one year. And I felt a little like a duck out of water because I was married and I was 20 and most of the people around me were not in that place in their life. And so I kind of felt a little bit like I didn’t belong. But this professor had a real impact on me. She had a warmth, she had a vision. She just, you know, I don’t know, it was just the way she was. And so years later, and so I did a lot with her, she was running some special programs that I ended up helping with and having some really beautiful experiences helping with those programs in recreation. And later on in my schooling, as I said, I went back to school and I was at this conference with all of these different recreation professionals and kinesiologists, because that’s what I was doing. And this woman, there’s hundreds of people there, and this woman walks past me, and I just felt this warmth. And I looked at her as she walked past and I went, I know her. I just felt this love. And it turned out it was her from my undergrad. And I didn’t really remember her name. I didn’t remember anything specific that she had, any specific time that the two of us had had together. But just all those feelings came back. You know, they say that you might forget what somebody says, you forget what they do, but you never forget how they make you feel. And that was that moment for me. So here I had come full circle 20 years later, 18 years later, and this woman, all she had to do was walk by me and all of those feelings came back. for my, for my, my defense, when I defended my thesis. And again, she was just such a light. So yeah, so that was, that was somebody who had a big impact on me and it was kind of beautiful that it came full circle that way. And it’s wild to think that sometimes the educators

Sam Demma
that have the biggest impact have no idea that they’re making that significant impact. I recently did a speech for the YMCA in Burlington and Brantford and Hamilton area, and there was 300 early childhood educators. And I was thinking about, like, what could I share with them to help them realize that they’re making such a big difference? And I told this story of a gentleman I met in Medicine Hat, Alberta, at 6 a.m. in the middle of the winter, who was outside with a leaf blower.

Sam Demma
And I was thinking to myself,

Sam Demma
What is this guy doing with a leaf blower in the middle of the winter? And I was getting up, I was getting up early to go to a conference. And then I realized he was using the leaf blower to blow snow off of every single car in the drive, in the parking lot. And that was a part of his job at the hotel. And I couldn’t help but think that this guy was gonna clear every single person’s car while they all slept and everyone’s going to wake up with a clear dash and have no idea that this man spent a couple hours blowing the snow off of their windshield. And it made me think of people in education who make so many choices to impact other human beings but sometimes have no idea the impact they’re creating. Same way that your professor had no idea the impact she had on you, and you might not have an idea of the impact that you have on the students in your classroom. So thank you for the work that you do in education. And if there’s an educator listening who wants to connect with you and ask questions or collaborate on a cool idea, what would be the best way for them to get in touch with you?

Keri-Ellen Walcer
Well, they can email me, and usually check my email two times a day. So do you want me to say what my email address is or you just put it in the show notes?

Sam Demma
I’ll put it in the show notes for all the people. (keri-ellen.walcer@durhamcollege.ca). And I highly recommend everyone, please check out the weekend program. It’s super impactful, especially for the students in your school who may be looking to take a slightly different path. Keri-Ellen Walcer, this was such an amazing conversation. I feel refreshed. Thank you for taking the time to chat and I look forward to connecting again sometime soon.

Keri-Ellen Walcer
All right. All right. Thank you so much.

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The High Performing Educator Podcast was brought to life during the outbreak of COVID-19 to provide you with inspirational stories and practical advice from your colleagues in education.  By tuning in, you will hear the stories and ideas of the world’s brightest and most ambitious educators.  You can expect interviews with Principals, Teachers, Guidance Counsellors, National Student Association, Directors and anybody that works with youth. You can find and listen to all the episodes for free here.