I have come to the conclusion that I make a lousy supermom.
I’m in the midst of a full-on panic right now. I have a full-time teaching load, which means teaching three courses, with just over 100 students, 75 of whom handed in essays this week, which I have promised to return next week.
I am also working on accumulating sources for my next literature review, which in turn sets me up for the first couple of chapters of my research paper for my M.Ed.
And then there’s the distance learning course I’m developing.
Oh, and I seem to have accidentally been targeted as the next chairperson for the Governing Board of the boys’ school.
The distance learning course is the one that is really freaking me out at the moment. I signed on for this course almost a year ago – after a few months of cajoling from the project manager – and at the time it seemed like a perfect opportunity. The proposed schedule looked like it dovetailed nicely with my teaching at Vanier, particularly since, at the time, I wasn’t sure what my workload would be for the winter semester. As it turned out, I had a full-time load last winter, albeit at the last minute, but it didn’t matter since the distance learning people met delay after delay, and I didn’t have much work to do. I did a little (really little) bit over the summer, but there was not much demand at all for my time.
At my first meeting with them after the summer, I was introduced to my new project manager. It seems that one person had left the company, so everyone was shifting around, and my new PM was completely new, to the company as well as the project. This meant more delays, which means that now – just as I’m getting into week six of my semester at my actual job – this PM is expecting me to spend, in her words, “two full days, on average,” every week, on the distance learning course.
I sent her a letter today, with a copy for my former PM, who is now her supervisor, explaining that I was more than a little concerned with the new schedule (and the pressure from the new PM), given that the delays were not mine, and that the revised schedule still expected delivery before next summer, which means no more dovetailing with my full-time teaching schedule.
I’m not sure what to expect from this – my guess is that there will be some attempt to negotiate a mutually agreeable timetable. I’m a little worried that I’ll cave – I really do want to do this course, and I have already invested a lot of time and thought – but I have no time left. There’s also the issue of the money. This is a nice contract, which essentially pays for the upstairs bathroom renovation. But, as I said to a friend yesterday, having a beautiful new bathroom is pointless if I’ve worked myself to death before it’s finished.
OK, back to the essays.
tada!
Way back in June we made the momentous decision to have our basement finished. A few years ago, the world’s greatest mother-in-law helped me turn the basement from this:
to this:
…which was fine, for a while. But Robert has asthma, so a dusty, damp basement is not ideal. Also, we are four in the house, with one bathroom, so a second bathroom is a nice addition – not to mention that the first bathroom desperately needs work, but with four of us in the house, having no bathroom is a truly bad idea.
So we sat down with our contractor, who has already done our kitchen and backyard projects, and came up with a new basement: second bathroom, including a fancy shower; a bright, clean laundry room; lots of storage space, built around the furnace and water heater, thus hiding those industrial thingies aways; a new front door, with a closet; heating and lighting; and loads of other little luxurious details.
Check out the end result on my flickr page.
On ‘Teacher expectations for the disadvantaged’
Yes, it’s that time again – I am now into the research cycle of the M.Ed., which includes the course I’m taking this semester. Our first assignment was to reflect on the ethics of a case study conducted in the USA in the 1960s.
Robert Rosenthal and Lenore F. Jacobson’s experiment on self-fulfilling prophesies, in the late 1960s, led educators to reflect on their “attitudes and behaviour towards students,” and inspired further research into the impact of teacher attitude and the concept of the self-fulfilling prophesy. Four decades later, however, such an experiment might not get past an academic ethics committee, despite what appear to be significant and desirable effects in the field.
Continue reading “On ‘Teacher expectations for the disadvantaged’”
Not buying it
So I’ve been tuning in the Olympics every once in a while, in the midst of our basement project, just to see how we Canadians are faring (better this week). Since the Atlanta games, I have a real aversion to American coverage – for all I know, it’s significantly better than then, but I’m not taking any chances. So I’m watching CBC’s coverage, and I have some questions.
1. How come Ron McLean is tolerable as a foil to Don Cherry but gratingly irksome as an Olympic anchor? Or is it just me?
2. Who was the machiavellian genius who decided to air half the events on bold, the new CBC digital channel?
3. What the heck is the point of that Bombardier ad in which various people in various languages sing ‘O Canada’?
4. What the heck is with the “er” in all the Bell ads?
5. Is it just me, or does the Air Canada “what the games mean to me” ad campaign drive everyone else nuts, too? They should at least air a response ad in which pilots discuss what they do have in common with the athletes: they both have to get good height, go the distance, and stick the landing.
6. Does the fact that 2/3 of these questions involve ads reflect the fact that there is way too much time devoted to advertising in the CBC coverage? And that most of that time is devoted to the same five or six ads?
Any insight is appreciated!
Impressions
I spent the last five weeks in the UK with my boys, visiting the in-laws in the idyllic Cotswolds and my grandmother in Glasgow. My brother-outlaw, who has a long-held fascination with warfare, took Colin and me to France for three days of exploring war sites.
Over those three days, we visited Vimy ridge twice, and went to Ypres in Belgium, and stopped at countless small sites en route. I took many pictures, which I’ve posted to my flickr page; although the pictures were taken and the impressions formed two weeks ago, I’ve been trying to find a way to package them to best express the emotion and atmosphere. I’ve come to the conclusion that maybe there isn’t a perfect, or even necessarily good, way to do this. After all, if there were, we wouldn’t need to maintain these sites, because we could all just read someone else’s impressions. Now that I’ve been there, all I can really say is that if you haven’t been, go. Here’s why.
~ The Canadian Memorial at Vimy, which seems somehow unCanadian, stands starkly against the crystal blue French sky, piercing the horizon, visible from miles away.
~ The memorial is covered with names. Name after name after name. So many. We counted 37 Moores. We found a few Goldings. I touched M. McDonnell. The names stretch all along the wall, around the side, down the stairs, along the next wall, and up, and around…
~ The memorial is the least moving element of the site. More moving:
– The Canadian flag quietly fluttering in the breeze
– The Canadian accents of all the students who are spending their summer teaching us about the battle and the site
– The Canadian accents of many of the visitors – and all the visitors who aren’t Canadian, coming to pay their respects.
~ The most moving aspect of the site is the very earth itself. Trees have been planted to prevent further erosion of the site, and aside from the parking lot and the ground around the memorial itself, the ground has been left as it was after the war. The earth is surreal – nothing in nature should look like this. The ground has been ripped apart by shells and mines and shovels and barbed wire, and 90 years later the weirdly undulating fields are a better testament to the unnatural destruction than any white marble could ever be.
~ The site includes a preserved tunnel which you can tour with a guide and walk safely through – the tunnels are well-lit, dry, and structurally sound. But you can still, somehow, imagine what they must have been like for hundreds of young men, carrying 70 lb backpacks through unlit tunnels, kicking over the unseen toilet buckets, ignoring the rats that brushed past their legs, hoping that the canister they were drinking from held water, not gasoline, feeling the endless earthquake of shells hitting the ground above, and finally, scrambling up a steep, muddy incline into the open air, hoping they’d live to see the next morning.
***
We went to France on the Eurostar, which was fast and convenient (and after some web research of different booking sites, not too expensive). We based ourselves in Lille, which is about half an hour north of Vimy, and about an hour from Ypres. On our second day, we went to Belgium, with the Menen gate in Ypres as our primary destination. Along the way, we stopped at several other sites, including half a dozen tiny cemeteries in farmers’ fields, with the graves of soldiers from Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Scotland, England, all maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves commission. When you look at a map of the Nord-Pas-de-Calais, you can see that there are almost two hundred Commonwealth cemeteries in the area. Some are tiny and others are massive. The tiny ones are devastating because they’re in tranquil fields miles from anywhere, and you can read each stone – so you can see how far from home the men were, and how young… and sometimes, all the stone says is “A Soldier of the Great War”.
The massive cemeteries, like Tyne Cot and Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, are devastating because they are, well, massive. Stones as far as you can see. At Tyne Cot, the largest Commonwealth cemetery, there are over 12,000 graves – and another 33,000 names on the back wall, commemorating the soldiers whose bodies were never found. We also stopped in Neuville-Saint-Vaast, at the largest German cemetery in France. Here, the graves are marked with crosses – except for the Stars of David marking the graves of Jewish German soldiers – and the crosses seem to go on forever. You can’t see the back of the cemetery. Each cross has a name on the left arm and another on the right arm, and two more on the reverse. In all, there are over 44,000 men buried there.
I could go on and on – the Menen gate is terrifying in its enormity; more than 54,000 names covering every available surface. The Irish memorial, where I found four pages of McDonnells in the registry, has a truly Irish sense of poetry in the stones. At the other end of the spectrum are the weird museums and “preserved” battlefields, where during the day tourists walk the trenches and during the night sheep graze in No Man’s Land. Pictures of all of the above are on my flickr site (or will be ASAP), but as I said, these are sites that should really be experienced first-hand.
***
The trip was like nothing I’ve done before. We had a great time, really, which seems disrespectful to say, except that I think in some way, us having a great time is perhaps a fitting tribute. I was genuinely proud of Colin for enduring three days of history lessons, and for being daring and eating his first (and I think last) escargot.
And finally, in a discussion of modern French architecture as represented in Lille and Lens, I taught Adam the very useful word “fugly.”
Robert’s instructions for taking care of your cat
Please note, spelling has been preserved to reflect the sheer genius of my offspring.
What you need:
two bowls
some cat food
a sink
liter
a liter box
a colar
some tuna
When yor cat does something bad, give it an agry tone. When it does the opisote, pet it and/or give it some tuna or fish. Let it go out when it please. It will come back. When one of the bowls is emty, fill it up with either water or food. When the liter box no longer has liter, throw the poo out.
Awkward adj.:
We’re having a fantastic time on our second annual UK holiday, although it would be nice if Dr. T were able to spend more than a week with us. He’s already been and gone, and I won’t see him again until the 4th of August. In the meantime, I’ve been quite happy to completely ignore my computer for most of the trip so far, but I did want to share the following, lest I forget* the incident in the coming weeks.
My lovely sister-in-law and brother-outlaw have been living in this idyllic Cotswolds location for ten years now, and this coming week, their son Marley will be a year old. To celebrate these two landmarks, we had a very nice open house-style party on Saturday, with people popping in and out over the course of the day to have a drink and a chat. One of these visitors was a nice man named Colin, who came with his two-year-old, Joey, and no one else.
Colin and Joey stayed for a few hours, and during that time Colin and I chatted as we watched my sons entertain his son. When he and Joey finally set off, it was quite late, and Joey had developed an attachment to one of Marley’s toys. Rather than get into a tug of war and subsequent screaming fit, Colin very intelligently pretended that the toy was leaving, too. I went with them to the car so I could retrieve the toy when Colin “put it in the trunk.”
My own Colin came along, and as he and I were waiting for the grown-up Colin to strap Joey into his seat, ten-year-old Colin asked me whether or not the other Colin was married. I said that I didn’t know…
…so Colin went around to the other side of the car to ask Colin if he was married…
…while his apparently unescorted mum, who had followed them to the car under what now seemed like the flimsiest of pretexts, died of embarrassment.
What is the etiquette in this situation? Do I say “I know this sounds unlikely, but I did not get my kid to ask about your marital status.”?
Furthermore, as it turns out, small Colin had already asked big Colin this question earlier, making it look even more like a set-up.
“Look, I don’t really care whether or not you’re married”?
Personally, I dealt with the situation by quietly deserting my post as toy catcher, returning to the house, and finding the nearest bottle of wine. My next step will be to leave the country.
*not bloody likely
Unclear on the concept?
Some of you may recall that my grandmother passed away this past January. Because she died in the winter, her casket was stored in a crypt to await burial in the spring. The interment took place last Monday.
More or less.
My grandmother’s grave is next to my grandfather’s, naturally. In fact, her name and date of birth were carved into the stone in 1993, when my grandfather died. I realize this is standard practice, but it still seems a little creepy to me to have your gravestone, four numbers shy of completion, sitting there, waiting for you for 15 years. But I digress.
When my grandfather died, it was summertime, and the funeral included the interment. The family gathered at the graveside, and watched as the casket was lowered into the ground. So although there was a four-and-a-half-month interval this time, we were expecting the interment to be pretty much the same thing – casket gets lowered into the ground. In-terre.
So my sister and I arrive at the cemetery – much earlier than anyone else, despite my dad’s conviction that we would be late – and settle in to wait for my parents and aunt and uncle, not to mention the guest of honour. I decide that I’ll visit the site, just to have a quiet moment alone with my grandfather before the ceremony. Now, the last time I was at the grave, I have to admit, was 1993. I was confident I would find it, though, since I clearly remembered standing in front of the grave, looking out onto the lake, with a tree swaying in the gentle breeze.
Of course, I conveniently forgot that the entire cemetery is basically lakeviews with gently swaying trees. (It’s very lovely, really.)
Thankfully, at the far end of the cemetery, there are two men, one of whom is clearly the operator of a small earthmover, which is parked nearby. I walk over and tell them I am there for my grandmother’s burial, and could they help my find her grave. The earthmover guy physically turns me and points to a green box a few rows over, and says “that’s her over there.”
See? I knew I could find it.
So I get to the grave, with the new numbers freshly carved into the stone, and find a small open box, plywood covered with astroturf, positioned directly over my grandmother’s final resting place. What I do not find is a big hole. Nor is there a mound of earth.
I consider whether it’s possible that the green box is like a tiger trap…
As I am walking back to my sister’s car to continue waiting for the rest of the family, the earthmover guy drives past, then stops, dismounts, and retrieves an old bouquet from another grave. As he walks past me, he winks and says “I need a monkey.”
Unfamiliar with etiquette in this situation, I am speechless. Then he explains that if he had a monkey, he could train it to retrieve the old flowers. Classy.
Ok, so everyone else arrives, including the pallbearers, the casket, the minister and the funeral director. We all make our way over to the grave, where there is still no big, traditional, you’ve-seen-it-in-all-the-movies hole. I can see my dad going through the same mental process – isn’t there supposed to be a hole? In-terre?
Anyway, the pallbearers bring the casket from the hearse and place it on the green box, which, as it turns out, is not a tiger trap, but rather a platform. The minister does his usual schtick, then the funeral director pulls a flask from his breast pocket. This was not as promising as it sounds – the flask is filled with sand, which he pours on the casket to symbolize the whole dust-to-dust thing. Amens are said, the minister shakes everyone’s hand…
…and we’re apparently done.
Except no one’s in the terre.
So my dad beckons the funeral director over and asks the obvious question – isn’t there supposed to be a hole and a lowering into said hole, etc., etc.?
Which is when we all learn two new terms: the funeral director explains that this is what they [presumably “in the business”] call a “dry set.” Apparently this is a growing trend; because the ground is frequently unstable, there is a risk of the sides of the grave collapsing [there’s a lovely image] and posing a risk to the pallbearers [again, lovely image – pallbearers, arms pinwheeling, sliding in with the casket]. Instead, more and more cemeteries have a graveside “dry set” interment, and after the family and funeral party leaves, the “cemeterians will take care of her.” Cemetarian, presumably, is a fancy word for monkey-lovin’ earthmover guy.
So, as my dad observed, we walked away, leaving her in the casket, still on the green box, in the bright sunshine. Not in the terre.
Fortunately, my sister returned later that afternoon, and confirmed that my grandmother had clearly been interred, for real.
All of which is to say, perhaps cremation is a better option?
Hiccup-date
Dr. T and I are trying to get into the habit of recording our impressions of the wines we try – mainly because we keep forgetting whether or not we like Wine X. Also, since the official tasting notes typically ignore us non-meat eaters, we figured we needed way to keep track of the vegetarian pairing possibilities.
All of which is to say that I’ve updated The Communal Kitchen, and I’ll try to do so more regularly. Since we’re doing the whole wine thing, I have created a new category, Wining & Dining, in which our “reviews” will be posted (I can’t help the quotation marks – let’s face it, most of these “reviews” will be written halfway into the bottle, so remarks may be occasionally incoherent).
Comments and suggestions more than welcome!
Reflections on Interdisciplinarity
Constructing Knowledge Across the Disciplines, Journal 3
Constructing Knowledge Across the Disciplines is the last full course before I begin preparing my research project next fall. The ideas to which we’ve been exposed in this course have implications, for me, not only in terms of interdisciplinary studies, but also as fundamental precepts upon which we can build a stronger system. From the beginning of this course, I have felt at home with the idea of interdisciplinarity, not least because general education courses, such as English, fit so neatly into an interdisciplinary Cegep. In fact, in many ways, the best part of the course is the fresh ammunition (to expand on Klein’s geopolitical metaphor) I bring to the fight for general education courses. I sometimes feel that the powers that be have forgotten the importance of general education courses, despite the essential role of such courses in the epistemological framework within which the Cegep system operates. Every once in a while, a new ominous rumour circulates that “they” are toying with the idea of eliminating some or all general education requirements; naturally, such speculation worries me for personal job security reasons, but beyond that, I genuinely believe in the value of general education courses at the college level, and it concerns me that students may one day be without them.
A few semesters ago, when reflecting on the Assessment as Learning course, I realized I had been fundamentally changed as a teacher by the experience. That course made me rethink my approach not only to individual assessments, but to course design, program planning, and departmental alignment. The effect has been longstanding; in fact, I have convinced my department that rather than focusing on whether or not we give the same mark for an essay, we should be examining how consistent we are, as a group, when it comes to feedback. I sense the same profound change with this course. I have embraced the idea of interdisciplinarity, and in particular, the idea of collaborative curriculum planning.
Generally speaking, general education teachers in the English Cegep system are accustomed to a great degree of autonomy. Unlike our counterparts in the French system, or our colleagues in certain other departments, we have a great deal of freedom when it comes to course content and planning. Our MELS objectives and standards are relatively vague and flexible, so we can essentially do what we want as individual teachers. There are, obviously, certain parameters determined by our colleges and departments within which we develop our courses, but as long as our course outlines fulfil the given criteria, we are left to our own devices. As a result, students have many options when it comes to choosing their genre (102) and theme (103) courses – for example, according to the 2007-2008 course catalogue at Vanier, students could choose from 26 theme courses, and 31 genre courses. In short, there’s not a lot of collaborative course design happening.
As a direct result of my work in this course, I am now deliberately seeking out collaborations with teachers both within the English department and in other areas. For instance, next fall I will teach the third-semester Liberal Arts English course, and in preparing the course, I have been working with my departmental colleague who teaches the fourth-semester course. Not only has this teamwork helped me immensely in planning my course, but I feel that we have defined a coherent whole, so that our students will see connections between the work they do in the fall semester and new material in the winter. My colleague and I are planning assessment projects that span the two semesters, and are looking for ways to share on-line interactive resources, and we’re planning course material that reflects the connections we’ve identified. Although our courses might be considered quite different, once we thought about it in terms of Beane’s organizing centre, we realized that both courses share a desire to consider literature from unconventional perspectives. Now that we’ve had our “great idea,” things are falling into place, and we both feel very confident that in the next few years we’ll refine this package, and may even be able to engage in some team teaching in the classroom – and in the meantime, we can at least make it clear to our students that we’re working together to make two courses more rewarding for them.
I am also hoping to take the preliminary course design that I developed with my simulation teammates and develop a complete course that can be offered at Vanier. I will be proposing this idea to our dean in the coming weeks, and if I get the green light, I’ll solicit input from teachers in our healthcare departments and computer programs. I don’t know that team teaching is likely at this stage, but perhaps if the course goes ahead and is well-received, the next logical step will be taken, and teachers from the disciplines will participate in the classroom. Ultimately, this course can indeed be a model for other Block B English courses, and perhaps be adapted for Humanities courses as well.
The CKAD course has been a very rewarding one for me. Now I need to take this new interdisciplinary perspective and change the system – after summer vacation, obviously 
.