GJ: Did you always know that you would be a teacher? How long have you been teaching?

AL: Though I did play school with my teddy bears and stuffed animals when I was really little, and both my parents were teachers. I resisted following in my parents' footsteps of becoming a teacher. I was an archeologist for a long time, but my favorite bit of archeology was touring people around archeological sites, and eventually, I realized I was a teacher whether I liked it or not. I started my training in 2007, so I have been teaching for about fifteen years.

GJ: What was the most frustrating day of your teaching career?

AL: It is so extremely rare that I get frustrated with my students, so the frustrations that I have ever experienced in a class have generally only been to do with technology. Technology is great, but only when it works reliably and consistently, and when the internet goes out, whether it's just in my classroom or all over the school, the computer starts to die, or do an update when I'm in the middle of teaching, I want to throw the technology out the window. I love technology, but only when it works, and it should work, considering how much time and money and effort is spent supporting it by our lovely institutions here.

GJ: What are your hobbies?

AL: I love to knit. I could knit, all day and every day. I also have knit during class, in the past, once or twice. I also like to walk and bike. My favorite hobby after knitting is reading. I love audiobooks, so I try to combine my repetitive movement hobbies, like knitting or walking, with audiobooks. I feel very fulfilled like I'm not wasting my time, and I don't get bored, and I'm also listening to wonderful literature and learning about the world without much effort.

GL: What was your biggest AHA! in all the years you have spent teaching?

AL: I know when those AHA! moments happen because the hair on my arms rises. That's when Professor Bialosky gets very excited and starts pooping out candy. I've had so many of them, and they tend to be when my students ask me questions I've never thought about before, not randomly, but to do with the topic. I've changed my teaching, and I've been teaching for a long time, but I have never taught the same thing twice, even from class to class. It's when a student asks a question and I didn't clarify it well enough, and I love those moments, because I'm so glad that I get a chance to do it better next time. I also love those moments when a student asks just the most amazing questions about the topic. I might not know the answer to a question, but I'm so old that I'm okay not knowing the answer to a question, and we look up the answer together, or I come back later on and I find out. Those are some really great AHA! moments when my hair stands on end and Professor Bialosky poops out candy.

GJ: What is your favorite book?

AL: Well, my favorite Shakespeare play is Romeo and Juliet. I feel like it taps into what it's like to be a teenage girl, in particular. When you're a young teenager, you have the hormones, and it's very real. You fall in love when you meet someone that you think is attractive, and that's very real. Shakespeare knew that. Also at the time, noble people got married young, so Juliet's dad was trying to marry her off at the same time that she fell in love with Romeo. Bringing that to life, to classes, to people, and being able to identify with it, and some dead old white man from 400 years ago who able to tap into the psyche of a young teenage girl so incredibly and insightfully, and beautifully, is really fun. I'm not trying to sound fancy by saying I like Shakespeare, but I'm thinking about what the books I've gone back to over and over and over again in my life are. I'm not a big fan of classics, to be honest with you. I find most of them really boring! Some of the books that I love are not really PC anymore, like I loved The Help, but because a White woman wrote Black people's stories, I've learned that's not a cool thing to admire, even though I learned a lot from reading that book. My favorite book is probably The Hunger Games. I love The Hunger Games; I think there's so much there. I have reread The Hunger Games four or five times. If I had to pick a modern classic, it would be The Hunger Games. And by classic, I mean a book everybody should read.

GJ: What are some of your successes?

AL: I am really proud of my Ph.D. that's why I am not shy of calling myself Dr. Lesk, but I would never correct someone. I'll answer to Mom, which I do get sometimes. I worked really hard on it, I learned a lot about the writing process that I didn't know going in, and it was really fun to live and work in Greece for a few years to get to do that, so I'm proud of that. I'm also really proud of my children. I have two sons, a fifteen-year-old and a seventeen-year-old. My goal is to get them both through high school with their mental health intact, and one's almost finished high school, and his mental health is intact, and I'm really proud of him and he's a really nice person, and I think that he's going to make the world a better place, and I feel like I was a part of making him into the young man that he is today. My younger son is getting there and doing okay, and his mental health is pretty good too. He's really proud of himself, he might be too proud of himself. His mental health might be too good, but that's a whole other story.

GJ: When did you start teaching at York House?

AL: I started in 2018, so my first TAG was a Grade 8 TAG, and now they're in Grade 12, so this is my first cycle of many, I hope. I can see myself staying here until I retire.

GJ: What places have you lived in the past?

AL: I've been really lucky to have been able to have lived in a lot of places. I grew up here in Vancouver, and then I went to live in France for a year, spending my final year of high school in the south of France. Then I lived in New Hampshire, where I went to university for four years, and then I lived in England, where I went to Oxford for a year, and that's where I met my husband. Then, I moved back to the states to work on my Ph.D., where I lived in both Cincinnati and Chicago, traveling back and forth because that's where my husband landed when he came to North America. After 9/11 in 2001, I moved to Greece for a couple of years, and my husband lost his job and he came to live with me in Greece. We had a really good time. Then we went to England and lived in Nottingham for ten years, and I finished my Ph.D. there, and had babies. I really missed my parents, they were starting to get older, they needed some support, and I'm an only child, so I came back to Vancouver. Most of the changes have been for really nice reasons, and I haven't really had to run anywhere, for an emergency, and I'm really grateful about that.

GJ: If you could spend a day with anyone in the world, alive or dead, who would you spend a day with? What would you do?

AL: I would like to spend the day talking to the people who built the building I wrote my Ph.D. on because there are so many mysteries surrounding who the sculptural figures are, and why they built this crazy building on the Acropolis. If I could just ask them, that would be wonderful. They left behind some records, but they were unspecific and not very helpful and created more questions than answers. To be able to definitively ask what things meant would be a dream. So, basically going back to fifth-century Athens and chatting with the people who built the building