Today's Neighbourhood Hero is Chris Tamm, head of the math department at Dover Bay Secondary School. Chris has nurtured an ember of an idea brought to the school in the mid nineties by, John Miller, one of his students, and fanned that ember into a blaze.

John Miller was an exceptional student and adventurer who died tragically at the age of 24 in an avalanche in 2003.

While studying at Dover, John volunteered at the Salvation Army Soup Kitchen. It was that experience that led him to ask his fellow students to start collecting food for the food bank and Chris Tamm was quick to lend support.

From that small beginning the Christmas food drive has turned into a huge annual event that helps to feed hundreds of people every year.

It's wonderful to know that John Miller was able to see his small initial project grow into a major annual contribution to the community before his untimely accident.

Tamm, who says he is, "quite competitive" has won the canned food "competition" at least six times over the years including last Christmas. His strongest competitors are teachers Scott Christianson and Dale Nicks who are former students of his.

Until this year Dale Nick's students held the record of 3,800 cans but Tamm's class obliterated that record this year when they collected the equivalent of 5,400 cans -- One dollar equals two cans for this event and of course the money can be used to buy turkeys and other goodies at Christmas.

"I don't know if we will ever be able to beat that record," Tamm told me, "but every year we seem to come up with some new wrinkles." Then he confessed that he still has one or two secret ideas up his sleeve.

For years his students have known from the first class day of school that if they are late for class or late turning in an assignment, they can expect to pay for it in cans of food and it's obvious they support the idea. This year on his birthday, Tamm found his desk covered with cans of food, a special gift from his students to support the food drive.

I would definitely be doing Chris Tamm a disservice if I only wrote about this annual event.

He is an outstanding teacher, the kind of teacher who is likely to turn up at school before seven o'clock in the morning, as he did last Thursday, so he could be available as soon as the provincial exam results came in. This is a guy who is totally committed to supporting his students, all of them, not just the outstanding ones.

"It doesn't matter whether you are an A, B, or C student," he enthused, "if you do your best, you've succeeded. If you are a C student who gets a C+, that's a huge success."

Then he continued, "When I hear people say, 'Kids are not the same as they used to be,' I say, 'You're right ... They're better!'

"Kids are better prepared today, they know what's happening in the world way more than we did in the past, they have much better time management skills, they know where they are going, and they know what they have to do to get there. When we were going to school we could get into university with a C+ and we didn't give a damn. Now you need an A to get into a good university."

The bad news is that Chris Tamm is retiring in five or six years. The good news is that he says he has his brightest students ever in his classes this year.

I wonder if they would have been that "bright" if they hadn't had him as a teacher.