Before you get all patriotic and fly your little Canadian flags in celebration of Canada Day and, presumably, of being Canadian, think about it. Are you really proud to be:
Category: education
Jun 11 2013
Air Bands and Power Point
I still remember the feeling I had when I saw my first air band performance. It was a sick kind of feeling. I hadn’t known what an air band was. The announcement came over the p.a. at my school-for-the-day, and I dutifully shepherded the class to the gym. Then I watched, incredulous, as group after …
Apr 25 2013
Dr. Frankenstein, meet Dr. Spock
Thanks to genetic research, we may soon see people with the money to do so making sure their kids are born-to-succeed – parents paying to guarantee their kids have the right stuff. I’m not talking about a straightened spine or a functional optic nerve. I’m talking about designer kids: those made with healthy bodies, intelligent …
Jan 11 2013
Poor Little Kids
So I heard on the news the other day about the poor little kids whose school backpacks are so full of books they’re developing debilitating back pain… Oh please. If they’d worked on their homework during the time allotted for just that purpose, instead of text messaging the person next to them, one painstaking letter …
Apr 25 2012
Being There
I recently read a lament about work attitudes, about how more and more people seem to think that just being there is enough, that their paycheque is for putting in time rather than for actually doing anything, let alone for doing a good anything, that people feel no guilt about the mistakes they make, nor …
Mar 09 2012
Government Grants for Grad School
So – this was quite a while ago – a colleague at work, another part-timer, who was also going to grad school, got a government grant. She’d be getting $675/month to cover her living expenses. I’d spent five years saving $10,000 to cover my living expenses (hopefully it wouldn’t take more than ten months to …
Feb 19 2012
Boy Books
Boy books. You’re thinking The Boys’ Book of Trains and The Hardy Boys, right? I’m thinking most of the books I took in high school English. Consider Knowles’ A Separate Peace. Separate indeed. It’s set at a boys’ boarding school. The boys are obsessed with jumping out of a tree. This involves considerable risk of …
Oct 14 2011
Useless Humanities
That a humanities degree is useless for the workforce says more about our workforce than the degree. It says that we value, that we’ll pay for, someone to provide cars, electric toothbrushes, and running shoes. But not beauty and insight. It doesn’t have to be that way.
Sep 26 2011
To Connect
At first, I noticed incomplete sentences in their conversation and in their writing. But I thought hey, it’s a fragmented world: videos with their bits and pieces of images, radio and tv with their sound bites, even entire degree programs at university present their courses as if they’re unrelated. But then I wondered, is it …
Aug 31 2011
From Romeo and Juliet to “Ass” and “Hole”
I filled in for a high school English teacher one day who had left the following instructions: “Have the students rewrite one of the two scenes from Romeo and Juliet – either the balcony scene or the fight scene – into contemporary English.” “Okay,” I said to the class, “this can be lots of fun, …
fiction
