Vance says that not having a good education bothered him at times. He says, "I put in applications at places but a lot of it I didn't fill out. When I marked down schooling, I kind of lied about that a few times. There were lots of things to fill out _ like signing up for unemployment. A nice few things I couldn't do and I did need help for. I had a job to take a book and read it. I'd get some words. I'd have to spell some words, probably miss some words. By the time I'd get to the end of the story, I didn't know what they were talking about anyway." When it came to filling out an application form, Vance says, "I couldn't get it all. I mainly put down social insurance number, my name, where I live and probably 8 or 9 for schooling. When it got down to where did you work last and people's names and stuff like that, well I didn't do that." Vance says, "You can do it without an education, but you're not up there where you would like to be. After I finished school I had a real struggle. I went to Manpower and I wanted to come back and upgrade. "She asked me, 'What grade do you have?' I said, 'I quit in Grade 7.' She said, 'You got to have Grade 8 to upgrade.' I said, 'You mean to say I haven't got enough education to upgrade.' So I said, 'I'm shagged.' " "A couple of years after that I found out about night school, so I started going to that. I was enjoying that. I wouldn't miss a night. That was two or three years ago. I'd been going a nice bit and I picked up a lot. When I came here I still needed lots of help, but it started to come a lot better. Going to night school really helped." Vance says he came back to school, "because I wanted my carpentry papers, so I could go to a unionized job, probably get a bit more work and live better. All I could ever go for was labour work. I could do carpenter work on the side, if they weren't unionized. If they were unionized, that left me out the door." |
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