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"The regular classroom walls," said Okanagan Mission Secondary teacher Michael Ross. "I'm here to tell you 20 to 30 percent of the kids are not meant to be in that setting."
The Prime Minister's Award for Excellence in Teaching winner said he often sees the best in a student when they're camping on a mountain or sailing on a tall ship.
"And when they come back, they're different people."
"You know the Lake Louise postcard? The beautiful view? We just walked into that postcard and it's there that the learning really begins," he continued.
Ross has embraced a long history at his high school of offering students a memorable camping trip in the Rocky Mountains.
"Getting kids out there where they can see it, feel it, touch it and breath it and they get their curiosities re-engaged."
Ross once dreamed that he would teach kids around a campfire and now, sometimes, he actually gets to do that.
"Belonging is key," he said.
"The campfire metaphor is when you're sitting around a campfire you've got friends and music and that's belonging. So we've just taken that feeling of belonging to something special and we've made a classroom around that."
Ross said that his classroom back at school is actually in a circle.
"The desks are pushed to the side every morning and we get together and we check in with each other."
The idea of the 'field trip' is nothing new, but Ross believes that the importance of getting young people out of the classroom has never been greater.
"When you're out on the mountain for a week and you've got everything on your back. That's real. And you've got to become really responsible."
His approach to teaching comes with the understanding that it's a tough time to be a teenager.
"The hallways of high school can be really mean and social media can be even meaner.
And when you strip that away, you stick them in a new environment and you challenge them with something like 'everyone has to help raise that sail',
this is a big windstorm, we've got to sail through that. They realize that their petty differences are really not that important."
He admits it's not an easy time for teachers either, and things are changing quickly. "So you've got to evolve, you've got to adapt."
Teachers have to embrace a classroom environment that hardly resembles the one they remember from their own school years.
"When you've got the world's information on your palm," he added, "you would be irrelevant if you kept the old ways up."
He admits he has felt burned-out at times. And the question of how to manage the distraction of smartphones in the classroom is always an issue.
He likes to have his students come up with a plan on when they should have access to them. "It's a battle though, and it's not going away, so you have to deal with it."
Born and raised in the Central Okanagan, Ross was nominated for the national teaching award by his own students.
He'll be in Ottawa to receive the award May 28th.
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