Today in my primary music classes we talked about music as a force for peace. In broad, simplified strokes we talked about The Singing Revolution in Estonia and the Prayer of the Mothers associated with the Women Wage Peace movement in the Middle East. We talked about how war is sometimes a function of greed, where one country wants what another country has. And I saw before me a sea of confused and inquisitive faces, posing the most innocent, most poignant questions:
Continue readingTag: teaching (Page 1 of 3)
Here it is… another year of big and small happinesses, collected in a little book each evening and displayed on Thanksgiving Day in an act of public self-reflection. It is a testimony that life’s sweetest and most precious moments are to be savoured and preserved, and that even the most difficult days harbour cause for hope. Read on.
- Honesty
- It is a bedrock
- Baseball in the back yard
- Ten hits in a row
- And the most encouraging coach
- Sleepovers
- When kids say funny things
- Hallowe’en thrifting
- Naan wraps
- Anniversaries
- Back to the gym
- Meetings that aren’t disasters
- Perfect days
- Perfect evenings
- Band practice in the basement
- Progress on the siding
- A minor injury
- Short waits at ER
- Sleeping in his arms
- Success stories
- Summer weather in October
- Open windows
- When I get a ride home from band
- Those hamburgers are so good
- Rapini
- Normal blood sugar levels
- Pillow talk
- Work buddies
- When I don’t think I’ll make the light, but then I do
- Good therapists
- When little ones learn to listen
- When my purse doesn’t get stolen at the gym
- When students play their first melodies, and it’s magical
There is something fragile about the first days of school. There are butterflies everywhere. Butterflies in backpacks, butterflies in lunch boxes, butterflies in the feet of displaced newcomers, butterflies in the eyes of those scanning the schoolyard for familiar faces on that very first fresh morning in the uncharted terrain of new teachers, new classrooms, and new aspirations.
Continue reading
Here’s a little gem from the archives: 2010 to be exact, when I was supply teaching in Peterborough and getting to know my neighbours on Charlotte Street. Happy Hallowe’en!
Today I scored huge points with my skinhead neighbour’s children.
Every year at the end of October I start to think about how I’m going to evade Hallowe’en. I hate the skeletons, gravestones, witches and, yes, even the spiders. I don’t get why the entire continent gets such a charge out of thinking about icky, dark, evil things for a month every fall. Fall is icky enough without the ghosts and the orange and black. Why make it colder, scarier, crueller?
Continue reading
Substitute teaching in a variety of locations has a way of opening one’s eyes to realities we may overlook when we spend much of our professional life in the same building. Sometimes a trip across town is a greater leap than a voyage abroad. This reflection takes a hard look at issues of equality in Canadian schools.
I recently walked into a Grade 3 French immersion classroom in a rural community. The students greeted me with rosy cheeks and cheery smiles as they walked in the doors and peeled off their abundant snowsuits. They immediately went about the serious business of being obedient schoolchildren. They hung on my every word (partly because I spent a good part of the morning impersonating Red Riding Hood in French, and partly because it was their natural habit of mind).
The most challenging students in the room were two boys who were obsessed with measuring things and doing puzzles. I had to confiscate their tape measure at one point because they were estimating and checking when they were supposed to be writing stories. I commented that one of the mathematicians may want to consider being an engineer one day (at this point he was using the springing function of the tape measure to carefully propel objects across his desk). “No,” he said. “I want to be a farmer. My dad wants to take over my grandpa’s farm, and then I’m going to be a farmer, too. I really want to be a farmer.”
The picture of wholesomeness.
The next day I walked into a Grade 3 classroom in an English school in an urban neighbourhood on the literal “wrong side of the tracks.” A little girl in a pink coat was curled up in fetal position on the carpet, and remained there, unmoving, until I left. “Give me back my g**d**m slime!” exclaimed another girl, flopped on a bean bag, grinning feverishly. Little boys ran around in their stocking feet, sugaring themselves with Christmas treats at 9am.
“Is there anything I should know?” I asked the teacher.
Continue reading
The Honourable Doug Ford
Premier of the Province of Ontario
Legislative Building
Queen’s Park
Toronto ON M7A 1A1
May 31, 2019
Dear Mr. Ford,
I am writing in response to your request for feedback regarding your proposed changes to class sizes, as detailed in your “Class Size Consultation Guide” (March, 2019).
To begin, I thank you for providing the information in this guide and for inviting feedback from those you refer to alternately as “stakeholders” and “partners.” I wonder, however, exactly how you define these terms, and what they say about your priorities in this process. Who are your “stakeholders”? Who stands to benefit from the decisions outlined in this document? Whose opinions hold the most weight? Similarly, who are your “partners”? With whom are you demonstrating a cooperative stance in this discussion? We will return to these questions throughout my response to the Consultation Guide, as they are crucial to identifying the intentions underlying this policy.
Continue reading
Natasha here, reporting in on the aftermath of the infamous DELF B2.
I was worried. Let’s find some better descriptors, now that I’m functioning in my mother tongue. Words like chagrined, nausea-ridden, paralyzed. I dreaded that exam. My entire body was stiff with tension for eight solid weeks, from the moment I walked into my first class to the day after the inquisition. My long-awaited summer in France turned out to be, in many ways, a summer of travail and trepidation.
And then, just like that, I passed. Not just by the skin of my teeth. Not just with a satisfactory margin of breathing room. Not quite with the flying colours I secretly dreamed of. But almost. Almost.
At one point, I re-coined the DELF acronym (“Diplome d’Etudes en Langue Française”) as “Dumb, Enigmatic Lists of Faults.” I still kind of think that. The test-makers are simply méchants, in my well-studied opinion. They rub their hands in delight as they formulate one trick question after another, in a sinister attempt to separate the dumb from the dumber. I know. I met one of them. And she was mean.
But do you know what it was that bumped my score down two points from the 80% I’d hoped for? Continue reading
I want to talk to you about The Big Life (or La Grande Vie, as I called it in my first work of French pseudo-fiction, which I may or may not share with you at a later date, if you promise not to judge me by my grammar).
The Big Life: what is it? What makes a life small, restricted, or ingrown, and what makes it expansive, possibility-ridden, unencumbered? Is it where you live? Is it the people with whom you surround yourself? Is it finances, or family, or a sense of independence?
I remember doing a family history project with a bunch of six-year-olds a few years ago for social studies. One of the things I asked the students to do was to talk to their parents about their origins. Paper after paper came back to me, saying, “I was born in Lindsay. My parents were born in Lindsay. My grandparents were born in Lindsay.”
Now, Lindsay is not Toronto, or Montreal, or New York, or Paris. Lindsay is a small, rural community in the middle of (pretty much) nowhere. It has its charms, to be sure, but there is nothing particularly distinguishing about it. Even Bobcaygeon, a small rural community even deeper in the middle of nowhere, has a massive shoe store to commend itself to the wider world. But Lindsay? It’s just a little Canadian town, surrounded by lakes, trees, and farmland.
“What small lives these people lead,” I thought to myself, as I imagined generation after generation living, marrying, and dying on one little speck of this great earth. “I don’t want a small life. I want The Big Life. I want to Go.”
Going is a form of enlargement, I’m sure of it. In the last three years, I’ve visited a dozen countries scattered across four continents. I’ve lost track of the cities and airports I’ve passed through, the mountains I’ve climbed, the seas I’ve sailed, the terrain I’ve trekked. And I live now in a foreign land that is about as far removed from little Lindsay, both geographically and culturally, as it could possibly be.
Is this The Big Life? It sure feels like it, when I’m scuba diving in the Mediterranean or camping out in the Sahara. One does not ride camels in Lindsay. One does not barter for one’s daily necessities. One does not wonder how to say “thank-you” in Polish or “please” in Hungarian. One certainly does not climb the Great Wall of China. These are Big Life things. They are things that cannot be done in any alternative form of “elsewhere.” They are unique, defining, unreplicable experiences. That’s what The Big Life is all about, right? It’s about Doing Big Things and posting them on Facebook for all the world to see. Look at me and my gigantic, interesting life!
The Great Wall of China
The Bavarian Alps
The Eiffel Tower
Surfing in Dar Bouazza
Tiananmen Square, under the watchful eye of Chairman Mao
The Greek Acropolis
Berber bridal wear
The Sahara Desert
Camel trekking
Venice, Italy
The Atlas Mountains
Nice, France
Scuba diving in Greece
Buying oranges at the medina
You should know, though, that taking selfies with Chairman Mao is not representative of the real, everyday, Standard-Sized Life that I live in Casablanca. If anything, my Moroccan life has been one of shrinkage and thinning (not in body-size, unfortunately, but that’s another story).
Let me tell you what I mean.
Have you ever received a message like this?
It’s a little surreal. It feels quite final. I’ve made the leap.
I’ve made leaps before. Big leaps. Resigning, house-selling, relocating leaps. Blind leaps, for the most part. Great, optimistic, terrifying leaps into a new unknown. Leaps I’ve later questioned. And here I go again.
The most delightful thing just happened.
I was late for lunch, because it’s the week before concert week, and I’ve been making up the classes that I missed last week when I was sick. Like, really sick. Vomiting sick. The only kind of sick that would keep a music teacher from her students two weeks before the first big concert of the year. So I forfeited the dearest part of my day (lunch, of course) to rehearse with the students who missed their classes while I was busy vomiting.
Therefore, when I finally had a few minutes to breathe, the cafeteria was closed. I was devastated. Yes, I had vaguely suspected such an atrocity might occur, but it was a chance I had been willing to take. I knew I had to risk missing those tantalizing beef kabobs for the sake of the concert cause. And the children, of course. The children.
So there I was at the cafeteria counter, gushing with gratitude when the kitchen staff agreed to prepare a plate for me (bless them bless them bless them), and I saw a whole pile of kids sitting around the picnic tables outside, with nary a teacher in sight.
“This is perfect!” I thought. “I have someone to sit with while I eat my lunch!” And so I did.
I sat down, right in the middle of all the little ducklings. They were stunned, but pleased. I heard some of the children calling out each other’s names in a rhythmic sort of way, and I mused out loud, “Hmm! Sounds like someone wants to bake a cake!” And I started to sing.