GOP should hush the out of touch

The U.S. political pundits are busy this week trying to determine “what we can learn” from the presidential election.  So far they have determined that there is a “new reality” in American politics based on the increased number of new voters: some young, some Hispanic, some Asian and some black. Old-time Republican Party members are using their loss as a lever to try to convince all Republican members of Congress not to let the ultra-right wing, fundamentalist views of the Tea Party control their votes.

What the Republicans should also learn is that it is time to kick a few of their more familiar, influential commentators to the curb.  Carl Rove was a kingpin in the Bush administration and continues to be a far-right mover and shaker in the Republican Party. The sight of him on Fox Network continuing to insist that Ohio could still go for Romney after all the networks and news organizations, bolstered by over seventy percent of the votes being cast and multiple polls, had declared Obama the winner was pathetic.  He blustered and blubbered in such a strange, disjointed way that even the other Fox commentators were incredulous.  Kick him to the curb.

Right wing commentator and broadcaster Bill O’Reilly concluded that the election was lost because the new voters were weak, uninformed, selfish creatures who knew nothing about politics or economic reality and voted for Obama because they were only interested in irresponsible spending and acquiring “things, more and more things.” Apparently the intellectual and moral superiority of millionaire O’Reilly insulates him from the moral deterioration that results from acquiring “things.”  Or perhaps when the things one desires to acquire are very expensive like the things that O’Reilly can afford, one remains untouched by the plague of moral decrepitude that infests the lower classes. Kick him to the curb.

Then of course there is staunch Republican and mega-entrepreneur Donald Trump who announced to the world in several Tweets when Obama took an early lead: “Lets fight like hell and stop this disgusting injustice. He lost the popular vote by a lot and won the election.  We should have a revolution.”  He determined this because Obama at the time was ahead in the Electoral College vote, but behind in the popular vote.  Not only were his Tweets irresponsibly worded (not to mention seditious) but they show a complete lack of understanding of the American electoral process and history. (His buddy George W. Bush won his election over Al Gore though 500,000 popular votes behind) Kick him to the curb.

Until the Republican Party learns to disavow babbling self-promoters like these, the political new reality will forever elude them.

No Zero Earns a Zero

The recent case of the teacher in Edmonton, suspended by his school board for assigning zeroes for assignments that were never completed, is a classic example of education theory clashing with class room reality.  Popular education theory today requires that the public school system assume responsibility for student success.  Student failure is the system’s failure.  Teachers must find ways to “empower” students to achieve, well, something.  The reality is that many students have reaped the benefits of this theory because it has virtually eliminated their own responsibility for choosing to do little or no work.

            While school counsellors and administrators continually talk to students about the consequences of bad choices, the reality is that the system has continually postponed or eliminated the negative consequences of bad choices.   Schools in B.C. for years have been forbidden to put failing grades on report cards, replacing the “F” with an “I” for Incomplete.  The concept of failing was considered too harmful to student self-esteem to be countenanced. The Edmonton school board has expanded the definition of what is harmful to include zeroes for work that was never completed.

The policy came from a basically sound concept: Academic grades should be determined solely on the quality of the students’ work, not other factors.  This grew out of the practice many teachers had of docking marks for assignments that were late, for students being late to class, for missing planned tests or quizzes without a note from home excusing them, etc. Reduction of students’ marks was a form of punishment designed to alter their behaviour.  However, awarding zeroes for assignments not done is not a punishment of student behaviour. These are marks based on the students’ work, or in this case, the absence of it, just as students who leave questions blank on tests are given zeroes for those blanks.

The apologists for the No Zero policy excuse the students who fail to hand in assignments by saying that there are factors in their lives that prevent them from doing the work and that to give them a zero is penalizing or punishing them for those contributing factors.  The apologists conveniently fail to appreciate that those zeroes are in fact in keeping with their own definition of what a grade should be: an appraisal solely of a student’s work. A failing grade indicates that the work was not completed at a satisfactory level.  Not doing it at all falls within the definition of not completing it at a satisfactory level.  Grades are not measurements of potential, student ability, effort, personality, character or anything other than the work itself.  When no work is done, a zero is the only accurate numerical indicator.

Teachers of high school academic courses are already giving students more than ample opportunity to complete their work.  Teachers provide extra help when asked, accept late papers, allow students to rewrite assignments, provide alternate assignments for those with academic challenges, and offer unprecedented numbers of options for special projects and term papers.  Schools offer different levels of difficulty in English and Math courses, and a variety of Science courses and alternate electives.  As well, the requirements for graduation from high school have been made much easier than ever before.  In large part, the many options offered to students have been created to accommodate their varied interests and abilities.  An unintended by-product has been that the responsibility for student success has been shifted more and more away from the student and placed on the school system and on teachers. By prohibiting the use of the zero to indicate that no work at all has been done, the system has finally assumed total responsibility for that success.  The system now refuses to admit that students are capable of doing nothing, but instead will find some way for those students do something.  The nature, importance, seriousness of the work they end up doing, its quantity and quality, its relevance and significance may be questionable, but they will find a way to replace that zero with a real number.  Many high school students will applaud this final surrender of their responsibility.  Unfortunately, it is a corruption of educational theory that will provide only the illusion of success and confirm in the minds of the public that public education has lost its way. 

The No Zero policy truly deserves a zero.

Buying passing grades? Congratulations!

The June 18 Vancouver Sun front page story “Struggling students buying passing grades” should come as no surprise.  Public education in B.C. and indeed in all of Canada has long since adopted the U.S. concept that education is a business that should be managed and regarded like any other commercial enterprise.  School administrators, ministers of education, trustees and even teachers frequently refer to students as clients or customers, learning as the education product and teaching as a service to be delivered. Who then can fault schools that seek the ultimate business goal: profit? Indeed, school districts have used foreign exchange students for years as a source of income. Each exchange student must pay the full cost of his or her education to the district, some $8000+.  Schools with declining enrolment have attracted students by becoming specialty schools, providing hockey instruction or some other extra-curricular attraction.  With each full-time student comes additional government funding, a good business practice.

Of greater importance is that this shoe-horning of public education into a business model has led to the adoption of corporate management strategies.  Decisions are made at the government level without consultation and handed down through the corporate hierarchy to school boards, superintendants, principals and finally teachers.  The only determination of school success is what can be measured: test scores, drop-out rates, dollars spent, percentage of graduates, etc.  These can be graphed, plotted, analysed and then used to develop ways to adapt business practices and develop strategies to improve them.  Individual districts have tried to follow Covey’s sure-fire practices for improvement, have fiddled with the “culture” of the schools, and held hundreds of hours of consultations with “stakeholders;” all of which led to no measureable improvement in anything, or indeed any change at all.   The Province has altered course requirements, refocused the curriculum on career planning, increased emphasis on the accreditation process, and then decreased it (too expensive).  Still the Ministry of Education demanded statistical improvement, requiring schools to develop plans to achieve it and even employing four Super-Superintendents to ensure success.  The result? No real improvement, only more emphasis on those practices designed to give superficial proof of success. Poor statistical achievement at the Grade 10 and 12 level?  No problem. Schools pad classroom marks so that when combined with the government exam marks at those levels, the overall student marks look better.  At the Grade 4 and 7 levels, schools find ways to keep low achieving students from taking government assessment tests so that the school shows improvement, or they simply provide special assistance to those students.  Since drop-out rates can be a problematic statistic, secondary schools all have special programs for students who “can’t handle” regular classroom situations.  These programs all consist of watered down courses that students complete by doing a series of worksheets or computerized courses, the content of which is a fraction of the regular classroom course.  They miraculously achieve B’s and A’s on courses that they previously failed.  And if you can’t complete courses by the time you are nineteen, don’t worry, the adult requirements for graduation are only two-thirds of those for normal graduation; just sit tight and you can graduate without nearly as much work, and the school will use your success as a positive statistic. 

The serious issues facing public education -- issues of relevance, the use of technology, student achievement – are beyond the scope of the current corporate business model to deal with. As long as the policy makers try to impose flawed, business model solutions to public education from the top down, they will continue to be stymied. But since the alternative is a model of collegial cooperation and consensus building with the only people who really understand how to create positive, successful learning environments, the teachers, the likelihood of that changing soon is remote.  Until then, the Ministry of Education should congratulate those private schools making money by fudging marks; isn’t profit the point?

Cowboys know that April is Poetry Month

April is Poetry Month, a sure indication that poetry is in serious need of life support.  Whenever an entire month is devoted to something, one can safely assume it is not a mainstream idea, subject, issue, or movement.  For example, poetry shares April with Irritable Bowel Syndrome Month and National Oral Health Month.

Aficionados of poetry are desperate to create a love of poetry in the multitudes. Unfortunately, the poetry that they love does not appeal to the vast majority of North Americans: it doesn’t rhyme and has no regular rhythm.  North Americans like a beat and at least an occasional rhyme, a tendency perhaps inherited from the Anglo-Saxons a thousand or more years ago who wrote their epics with a heavy beat and lots of alliteration. 

For the last hundred years, poets in North America have drifted away from rhyme and a regular rhythm, relying for impact on other, less discernible poetic devices, the ones that your English teachers in high school tried to get you to memorize (simile, caesura, onomatopoeia, etc.), all of which you quickly forgot.  The last great poet who used regular rhythm (meter) and rhyme was Robert Frost; he was also the last great poet who was admired by the average North American.  Frost famously said that writing free verse, poetry without rhyme or meter, was like playing tennis without a net.

The irony is that the poetry that today’s poets have derided, or at best acknowledged without enthusism, have prospered: rap and cowboy poetry.  While most contemporary poets struggle to find an audience, rap and hip hop artists fill stadiums and cowboy poets perform before enthusiastic audiences at events throughout the West.  The two genres could hardly be farther apart in most ways: rap, along with its variants, is urban, raw, profane and often violent or sexual in content; cowboy poetry is rural, bucolic, nostalgic and a celebration of human virtues.  What they have in common is that both have a very regular beat and rely on rhyme for emphasis, cowboy poetry in particular usually  rhymes at the end of each or every second line.  This is a notable feat since it is difficult to find words that rhyme with “horse.”

No matter what your taste in poetry, however, and no matter whether you prefer, Keats, Frost, Buckshot Dot or LL Cool J, find a little time to dig out a book or CD and read or sing along in celebration of Poetry Month.  Better yet, write your own.  Your old English teachers would be proud.

Falling through the crevasses in Vancouver

The issues surrounding the death of three men in an illegal rooming house in Vancouver in 2010 were all put to rest this week when Vancouver’s City Prosecutor dropped all charges against property owner Choi Leong.  The three men, Stephen Yellowquill,  Dwayne Rasmussen  and Garland McKay died when, according to fire inspectors, a faulty string of Christmas tree lights set the ramshackle house they rented on

Pandora Street

ablaze.  I took an interest in the case when it came to light in 2010 because Garland McKay was once a student of mine. I liked Garland when I taught him in Grades Nine and Ten.   He was quiet and didn’t care much for homework, but he had a sense of humour, and he was clever.  He could draw well too.  Though I liked him, I have to admit that he was responsible for one of the three occasions when I lost my temper at school.  I caught him playing Tarzan on the stage curtains in the gym just before a drama production I was directing.  I blew up, called him an idiot. I saw him in the hall after the production was over, apologized and extended my hand.  He took it and smiled a little. I think that was the last time I spoke to him.

The coroner said Garland and the others had six to eight times the legal limit of alcohol in their bodies when they died.  I don’t know what kind of a person Garland was in the end.  The newspaper stories never commented on that.  Like so many people living in squalor in Vancouver and every other large city, Garland became anonymous, just another cipher, statistic, digit.  The woman who owned the house that he rented didn’t really care what he was like either, as long as he paid the rent.  According to an article by Michael Mui in Canoe.ca, landlord Choi Leong said she collected $1400 to $1600 a month from the five men who lived in the illegal rooming house.  She admitted at the inquest that was held that she had been instructed to make many repairs to the old, decrepit house in order to make it safe and habitable, but she had ignored them. 

The city didn’t seem to really care much about McKay or the others either.  The laws, by-laws, rules, policies and procedures that are supposed to prevent landlords like Leong from taking advantage of indigent tenants are rarely enforced.  Conflicting jurisdictions, levels of authority, agencies and bureaucrats cite all kinds of transgressions and infractions, but men and women like Garland are never really served.  The expression is that they “fall through the cracks” which implies that only a very few, particularly thin individuals apparently end up being taken advantage of.   In truth, the cracks are crevasses and as usual those with lots of money and power, and no conscience or character, find the weak and vulnerable easy and profitable targets.  For the last couple of years, whenever I have heard politicians talk about how much better life would be if only government at all levels would just “get out of the way” so that free enterprise could make the nation prosper, I have thought of Garland and people like Choi Leong.

Garland and his friends no doubt had their reasons for drinking themselves into oblivion one last time, but no matter how dark and troubling those reasons may have been, the darkness wasn’t total: they had hung a string of Christmas lights.  The irony that those faint lights caused their deaths is perhaps the saddest part of the story.

I wonder if Ms. Leong had any Christmas lights hanging in her house.

Flakcheck Offers Hope

All right, I admit to being snidely critical of the world of Twitter Text and the cult of Face Tweet.  I continue to search for that glimmer of hope, however, that the techno-revolution will have a positive effect on society beyond enabling our youth to instantly communicate to hundreds of “friends” where they ate lunch.

The use of cell phones and the Internet during the Arab Spring is encouraging, of course, but on Sunday I saw a glimmer of hope that was a little closer to home. On Bill Moyer’s weekly show on the U.S. Public Broadcasting System he interviewed  Kathleen Hall Jamieson about the website www.flackcheck.com created by the Annenberg Public Policy Center (APPC) at the University of Pennsylvania. Fed up with the hostile, negative and factually wrong political campaign ads being run during the current presidential campaign, the APPC created Flackcheck to point out exactly where the campaign ads were factually incorrect.  Not only that, but they encouraged viewers to e-mail and Tweet the candidates responsible demanding that the incorrect ads be taken off the air.  In effect they are doing in a systematic and serious way what Jon Stewart on The Daily Show does for comic effect on late-night TV. It is actually working; they have forced the removal of several ads across the country.

Canadian politics has not yet sunk to the depths of American political bad taste, but the success of attack ads down south has infiltrated our campaign processes. A Canadian website like Flackcheck would go a long way to halting that slow erosion of public discourse and would force politicians to argue policy differences on the basis of real facts and authentic issues instead of absurd exaggerations like those of Conservative MP Vic Toews.  You remember his blustery tirade, don’t you?  He stood in the House accusing the NDP, and by implication anyone else who was against his legislation, of “making things easier for child pornographers.” To the credit of Canadian observers, Toews was castigated for his comments, whereas I doubt that such remarks made in the U.S. House or Senate would have even been reported down there, unless it was to praise the politician making them for putting those godless, elitist, left-leaning so-and-so’s in their place.

If a Canadian Flackcheck website were to be created, then who knows, maybe it will lead to real political debate and a time when anyone who dares try to bamboozle voters with negative ads will be handsomely defeated in an election, not rewarded with victory.  If so, our youth will have to be commended for rescuing the political process.

Or maybe the lackadaisical Twitterfacers will be too busy texting about their lunch to care.  Time will tell. Meanwhile, the glimmer abides.

Of Oscars and Cheeseballs

I always watch the Oscars.  My wife and I joined two other couples for a night of ogling the great and near great while dining sumptuously on a variety of appetizers.  It is as close to Royal watching as we get in North America; we even dress up for the occasion, modelling the finest in Grand Forks chic.  I was nattily attired in my best blue jeans, black turtle neck and twenty year-old tweed sport coat (real English lambs’ wool).  My wife focussed on bling, donning a pair of four inch, dangling, faux ruby and cubic zirconium earrings.  Brad and Angelina looked downright dowdy in comparison.

The Oscars went according to the usual script: Billy Crystal told jokes, the winners cried or squealed sincerely, the losers looked happy for the winners, and the various husbands, wives, girlfriends and relatives beamed proudly or looked annoyed.  The only variation from the script was the absence of Jack Nicholson who was missing from the front row.

Actually there was another variation.  For the first time that I can recall, we were given a glimpse into an aspect of acting that we normally do not think about. Brad Pitt, Robert Deniro, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, and the chunky kid from Moneyball whose name I can never remember all related how disquieting it is to put everything you have in a role, without having a clue whether the movie you are making will be a hit or a flop. 

As the Oscar awards point out, the audio, the cinematography, the costuming, the make-up, the directing, the editing, all are vital to the success of a film. Of course, all the performing arts are collaborative, but in all the others the performers have an idea of the quality of the finished product because the performances are done live, as a complete unit.  Movie actors shoot scenes out of sequence, with multiple camera angles often shot for each scene.  They don’t know what shots will be chosen or if the original script will even be followed; they certainly don’t know what the finished product will look like. The movie won’t appear on the screen for months, and sometimes never makes it to theatres at all. The finished product isn’t their job.  Their job is to play the role convincingly.  That is why some actors, like Johnny Depp, never watch their own movies.  Their work, the part that is of interest and importance to them, was over months ago and now they are involved in creating different characters in new projects. 

After that part of the broadcast, I actually felt some sympathy for the over-paid, over-indulged actors who all received Oscar goody bags worth an estimated $50,000.  Then Tom Cruise came on, reality returned, and as I turned back to the table of appetizers, I felt both foolish for having felt sympathy and at the same time delighted in the delightful aroma arising from the platter of chicken wings and the delicate flavour of  my wife’s handcrafted cheese ball.

Not so Xtreme

I suspected as much! During the Super Bowl halftime show my neighbour and I got into an argument over sports injuries. It isn’t that we dislike Madonna, but when you’ve seen one glitzy, over-the-top, mega-musical, song and dance, laser light extravaganza…well, you know. I’d just as soon watch Leonard Cohen croak out a handful of ballads. Anyway, my neighbour convinced me to turn the channel to watch a snowboard competition, and that’s when the argument started. He maintained that the number of extreme sports injuries was decimating the ranks of the young, and I said that there was no danger of that since the vast majority of the young stayed safely indoors engaged in life or death struggles with aliens on their Xboxes. I could see where he might get the idea of impending sports doom. The media are full of pictures and stories of spectacular crashes involving extreme sports activity, despite the fact that the number of adventurous young people who actually attempt high amplitude jumps, spins, and flips is actually very small. Oh, sure, every town has a skate board park and every ski hill a half pipe, but only a few kids can accomplish even basic tricks. Most of the participants’ time is spent watching others do tricks and then trying to copy them, or in the case of skateboarding, falling down repeatedly on concrete surfaces while trying to copy them. I maintained that the old, traditional sports were responsible for the most injuries and after the game I did a little research. Sure enough, according to statistics compiled by American pediatricians, the greatest number of injuries requiring hospital attention occurred to the young while they were playing basketball: over 500,000. Skateboarding was down the list with 112,000, after football, hockey, soccer and baseball. Snowboarding, skiing and motorcycle racing didn’t even make the top 15; golf was more dangerous, injuring 47,000 Of course, the statistics are skewed a little because pediatricians don’t classify those injuries that occur while people are doing the most extreme activities, things like jumping snowmobiles over garages or riding mountain bikes off rock ledges, as “sports injuries.” They use a variety of other descriptive terms, along with head shaking and eye rolling. I am glad that the statistics favoured my side of the argument, but more than that, I am pleased to note that many parents are not content to let their children remain couch potatoes. No, instead they continue to enroll their children in those traditional sporting activities that most effectively teach young people life’s most valuable lessons: Don’t be a baby; suck it up; it could be worse; no pain, no gain; in a couple months you’ll be as good as new! Extreme sports have a long way to go to match that.

The Tweets Did It

I uttered an oath at the television screen yesterday. I’m not proud of my behaviour; however, I maintain that I have a valid excuse. My wife disagrees. She maintains that I am showing signs of “the early onset of….” Something. I forget what. Anyway, my abuse of the small screen was brought about by two more indications that we are all being overwhelmed by a deluge of drivel. The Global evening news had a story about a formula that predicted the year’s most depressing day, which happened to be January 16. The formula, we were told, was phony, a fake, a concoction of a PR company to stimulate January shopping. That didn’t matter. The News Hour spent three minutes covering it anyway. The story featured interviews with shoppers, commentary from psychologists and Tweets from viewers. I began to squirm in my overstuffed chair when the interviews began, and by the time the newscaster started reading Tweets, I was ready to explode. I did explode. There are hundreds of thousands of Haitians without shelter, gang shootings, protesters, rebellions in the Middle East, typhoons, shark attacks, looney Republicans vying for the U.S. presidency and the News Hour, the most highly regarded evening news program in the country (we are told) is spending valuable minutes covering a phoney predictor of middle class melancholy. It was the Tweets that did it. I won’t tell you what I said, but I will gladly own up to the outburst and in fact tell you that I am likely to reoffend. I don’t care that Megaboy thinks “January really sucks” or that Phyllis21 believes “shoppings good Jan 16 cuz no crowds.” I don’t watch the evening news to hear the inane rambling of people who have nothing better to do than Tweet. I want the news to provide an intelligent summary of important events throughout Canada, B.C. and the world. I want to hear what people have to say who are more intelligent than I am with greater background in current affairs. Why news programs all over, from CNN to Global are beginning to read randomly over the airways the erratic reactions of viewers is absolutely beyond me. My wife, as usual, added an appropriate word of caution, suggesting that I should reconsider writing this column. If people, in fact, stop being interested in “inane rambling,” she mused, no one would read my column.

Castles in trees

The day of the Obama inauguration, CBC radio asked for reactions from listeners. In addition to the many who expressed great joy and enthusiasm, several were appalled at the amount of time, money and effort spent on the event, and others were disgusted by the outpouring of emotion for "just another politician." Recent events make their cynicism understandable. They see no hope in the efforts of a single man; they feel no optimism for a world weighted down by war, ruined economies and environmental degradation. Nothing positive can trump the awful hand they believe fate has dealt them and all of us. They lack perspective, perhaps, those nay-sayers. Or maybe they never developed the imagination to visualize the improbable, or build a marvellous fort out of a cardboard box, or create an impregnable castle in a tree.
Most people felt joy during the inauguration, and on the faces of many of the older American observers, the joy was expressed in tears. For once the symbolic significance of this particular African-American's election to America's highest office far outweighed the concrete realities he faces. The memories and lingering images of Selma and Birmingham, Alabama, of burning churches and police dogs, of three great leaders and three assassinations, of napalm and chaos in Viet Nam, and smart bombs and chaos in Iraq, all those memories and countless others bubbled to the surface in the minds of those older observers, who hoped that, though he could not make the memories disappear, he could show once and for all that they represented merely painful steps on the road that led to the fulfilment of all the lofty promises of the American constitution.
The more significant aspect of Obama's inauguration might be that so many people the world over could find such joy and hope in a symbolic event, that our capacity for dreaming and imagining, speculating and envisioning has not been diminished by world crises. It is after all what led us to create constitutions in the first place. And castles in trees.

Have a fearless Christmas

A parliamentary crisis, a looming recession, 100,000 stranded tourists in Thailand, terrorist attacks in Mumbai, and Britney Spears is making a comback. There is so much depressing news to comment on.
I listened to a CBC radio debate the other day about whether or not it was one's patriotic duty to go out and spend money to support the collapsing economy. Arguments were made on both sides. Opinions varied from "I owe it to my family not to spend and make our situation worse" to "You might as well spend the money and have something concrete in your hand when the whole country goes down the tube." I eventually formed my own opinion based not so much on any particular view that I had just heard, but the fact that the opinions were so diverse. No one knows what is going to happen in the world economy. The pundits don't have a clue, the politicians are all dithering, we know the financial movers and shakers who started it are obviously devoid of any reliable insight. So without anyone having the slightest idea of how things will turn out, what is it that forms our opinions on what course of action we should take? Fear, of course. Old Franklin Delano Roosevelt was right.
After that occurred to me, I started to become annoyed. Here I was, worried about my income, my property values, my pension, all because that gang of myopic, money grubbing, Wall Street mega-crooks had allowed their own swollen greed to displace not only all moral and ethical values but even all rational thought. They had made me fearful, and I resented it. In the past I have commented on the Americans use of fear as a motivator in elections, in the marketplace and in foreign affairs. The idea that their financial incompetence was now making me fearful, made me angry.
I have decided not to restrict my spending habits. It isn't that I have a particularly rosie view of the future, but I've decided that I 'm not going to be afraid. The idiots who invented the financial instruments that allowed the unrestricted packaging and trading of sub-prime mortgages, they can have my fear of financial loss instead. And while their lifestyles will no doubt hardly suffer at all, one can always hope.
Meanwhile, I will buy my Christmas presents in stores around town, go to the pub a couple of times a month as usual, and accompany my wife to the Christmas craft fairs. It is a good time of year to not be afraid.

Remembrance Day

Remembrance Day makes you think.
Of all human endeavours, war is the most troubling, and the most paradoxical. We despise the death and destruction that are caused by it; we celebrate the heroism and self-sacrifice that arise out of it.
Pundits often say that the victors get to write the history books, and there is some truth in that. The terrible actions of the Axis powers: the invasion of Poland, the bombardment of civilians in Britain, the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, the Long March, the Holocaust, all are the stuff of countless documentaries, books and films with which Canadians, at least of a certain age, are familiar. The fire bombing of Dresden, Germany, however, in February of 1945 which incinerated an estimated 40,000 civilians in three days, is generally ignored by most citizens of the formerly Allied nations or recorded as a justifiable act by Allied historians, and the atomic bomb attacks on the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which caused the death of 200,000 more, are commonly excused as being "necessary." After all, they started it.
I had four uncles who flew in World War II as either bomber pilots or navigators. All miraculously survived countless sorties over Germany. They flew repeated missions into ground and fighter aircraft fire that tore apart their planes and killed their crew members. Their bravery was extraordinary; none actually expected to live through it. Their superiors told them they were targeting military installations, industrial complexes, and suppliers of the German war machine, not people, not women, not children. They tried to believe it.
I came to Canada 40 years ago from Illinois to avoid fighting in a war started for vague reasons by men with little understanding of the people I was supposed to travel 10,000 miles to kill. I was bothered however by the efficiency of my draft board; I knew that they would fill the quota of Rock Island County draftees that month, with me or without me. There is a song called "Veterans' Day" by Tom Russell. It's about Jimmy McGrew, a soldier missing in action in Viet Nam. The chorus goes: "It's Veterans' Day, and the skies are grey/ Leave your uniforms home 'cause there ain't gonna be a parade/But we'll lift up a glass to the ones who didn't make it through/ And put a light in the window tonight for Jimmy McGrew."
I didn't sleep all that well a week ago Tuesday. At about 1:30 in the morning I got up without waking my wife and put a light in one of our windows, not for a fictitious Jimmy McGrew, but for some guy from Rock Island County whose name I will never know.
Remembrance Day makes you think.

A Silver Lining?

I really don't like writing about "silver linings." I much prefer to write a lengthy diatribe describing in overly ripe language one or more of the dark, weighty, rain-filled clouds hanging over us: economic collapse, corporate greed, George Bush or any one of the numerous human frailties that we can so readily observe in society. So many things exist that can provoke me into a lengthy rant.
So when I say that there may be a silver lining to the economic disaster generated by greedy corporate gamblers on Wall Street, I do it reluctantly, especially since the avarice displayed by those soulless sociopaths will indubitably result in the suffering and death of thousands of people in the Third World who as part of the "New World Order" either have come to rely on foreign aid or have been forced to turn their meager self-sustaining farms into producers of cash crops which now no one will buy.
The silver lining may be, however, that we will see an end to the kind of thinking that has manipulated the lives of millions of the poor world-wide. Perhaps as well we will see the end of the idea that those in the G7 countries know what is best, that their vision of a world united under some sort of free-trade, unregulated, corporate hegemony is not in fact the way to universal prosperity, but only another attempt by a few to control and profit from the majority.
In addition, North Americans may be forced to think on a smaller, more local, more affordable, more sustainable scale. Smaller cars, smaller houses, more careful choices and greater appreciation for what we have may be the result of many people losing their big cars, big houses and high paying jobs, though as always the people hurt the most will in fact not be the very wealthy but those who can least afford it.
In the mean time, I would encourage everyone to join me in a rant of your own choice. Your displeasure may have an effect if it is loud enough to be heard by the movers and shakers of society, and if not, well, at least it feels good.

Beware the Green Police

I was speaking with Kalyeena Makortoff, the Grand Forks Gazette's youngest reporter, the other day about her experiences during and after a protest she was involved in on the UBC campus a few weeks ago. She discovered the difficulties one can have when confronting "the Man." That's my expression not hers; she would never use a Sixties term like "the Man."
Of course, whenever one confronts the prevailing authority of the day, one can expect to be received with less than kindness. In her case, she was arrested and thrown in the clink over night. In the Sixties in Illinois where I grew up, protesters were hit with clubs, bitten by dogs and then thrown in the clink over night. At least neither Kalyeena nor I were Tasered.
Prevailing authority doesn't have to be the police or government of course. It can consist merely of commonly held beliefs or opinions.
The problem is that when large numbers of people hold similar strong beliefs they reinforce one another's certainty that those beliefs are correct and absolute. The fervor with which those beliefs are held can be astonishing. I am not just referring to the obvious fanatics who blow themselves up for holy causes; one doesn't have to belong to an extreme religious sect to exhibit fervor.
An acquaintance of mine who drives a large diesel pick-up was confronted at a gas station by a young mother in a Smart Car who loudly proclaimed her disgust at his disregard for the planet.
While glancing at a fish display in Overwaitea, I was myself told by a woman in her thirties: "Don't you dare buy farmed salmon; they're killing all the real salmon."
Environmental issues have become rallying points for millions who may or may not really understand the issues but are certain that whatever changes might be taking place are bad and must be stopped because the consequences will be... well, no one is really sure, but they are bound to be disastrous. Terms like "extinction," "extermination," "death of the planet" are used to make sure the significance of potential ecological change is taken seriously.
I don't presume to know any more about the speed or direction of climate change than anyone else. Neither do I object in any way to the measures proposed by those who wish to keep earth as close to its present state as possible. I just hope that the environmentally concerned will not turn into some form of Green Police. I don't want to be beaten with a loaf of locally grown, organic nine-grain bread any more than I did a police baton.

Savng the planet through guilt

The Green Movement, the 100 Mile Diet, Save The Planet, Carbon Credits: it turns out that determining the best way to go about putting environmental concerns into action just isn't that clear or easy. Take shopping at the grocery store for example. Do you want to help the impoverished grape pickers of Chile eke out a meager existence and have the bunker fuel burning cargo ship's pollution on your conscience, or do you want to buy those somewhat more local Fraser Valley blueberries and subsidize the destruction of valuable disappearing wetlands? Do you want corn on the cob in January brought in the tens of tons by train from California, or are you willing to wait until August when Jerome drives three bushels over from Midway in his rusting out '73 Ford pick-up? Which is more eco friendly? And then of course we still have to bag it. Paper or plastic? Do you want to pillage the green treed slopes of Beaverdell, or ravage the oil sands of Alberta? Normally I'd say Alberta, but you can't even joke about this anymore; it's become just too serious.
Power generation is another area that poses a dilemma for the environmentally concerned. Recently in the Vancouver Sun, former Socred minister Dr. Pat McGeer ranted against the move to small privately-funded power projects. Instead he wished for a return to mega-dams, the Site C project south of Fort St. John in particular. If built, such a dam would indeed provide great amounts of power, 900 megawatts, but flood 80 km. of the Peace River Valley. The small run-of-river power generating projects on the other hand flood nothing. Instead they divert water around waterfalls and rapids that are enjoyed by outdoor enthusiasts and require the construction of access roads and power lines through often environmentally-sensitive areas.
When I was growing up, the issues people faced were local or perhaps just family related. Now we are expected to think regionally, nationally, and globally.
The guilt we are supposed to feel about our actions or inaction has now expanded to embrace the rapidly expanding deserts of Africa to the dwindling ice caps of both Poles.
I can't allow myself to become depressed, however; the medication I would then have to purchase would merely support the irresponsible policies of the avaricious multinational drug monopolies. At my age, any more guilt might kill me.

Celebrating Christmas

For some reason, memories of Christmas seem particularly clear and unusually plentiful. I can’t remember what I ate for breakfast, but I can tell you what I got for Christmas when I was 11: a World Book encyclopedia in twenty four volumes. I had wanted a set of swim fins, a mask and snorkel and a rubber band powered spear gun. Okay, I knew my parents wouldn’t get me the spear gun, but an encyclopedia? What a let down. That’s the other thing about Christmas: our memories of the holiday cover such a wide range of feeling. Joy and sadness, elation and disappointment, togetherness and loneliness, Christmas has a way of heightening every emotion and magnifying every perception.
I missed Christmas entirely when I was eight, brought low by a bout with some bug that rendered me comatose from Christmas Eve Day until Boxing Day. Actually, my mother might have knocked me out with one of her Scottish Highland medications designed to stop coughing, clear sinuses and aid sleep, and which as an adult, I began to suspect contained some quantity of whiskey. At any rate, I missed everything: the playing with my cousins, my Uncle Pete’s fabulous animated outdoor Christmas displays, my grandfather’s sweet smelling Swedish “glüg” distilling slowly on the kitchen stove, and the laughter. Everyone’s laughter. It wasn’t that my own family didn’t laugh, but it was different at Christmas. The petty concerns of being a kid were momentarily forgotten. You didn’t have to worry if your parents were still mad at you for breaking your glasses – again, or be jealous of your older brother’s 26 inch bicycle, or plot how you were going to catch your younger brother stealing from your piggy bank. You could just be happy and laugh. When I was eight, I missed all that laughter: the tittering of the other kids at silly knock-knock jokes and comic books, my grandmother’s warm, quiet chuckle, the sudden grinning outburst from my father, my Aunt Betty’s ironic comments muttered out of the side of her mouth, and most of all, the laughter that welled up and resounded from my Uncle Ray. Uncle Ray wasn’t a big man, but he had a deep, warm laugh that filled the room and enveloped everyone in it. The laughter that came from him was slow and rich and conveyed a sense of pleasant well-being that I don’t believe I have experienced since. I loved to hear Uncle Ray laugh.
We opened our presents with my cousins at their house on Christmas Eve, in the Swedish tradition, the tradition of my father’s family. After a few years, a clever child could predict what the presents would probably be: clothes mostly. A sweater from my grandparents, a shirt from each of my aunts, practical things, with a box of chocolates thrown in for fun. The main presents from Santa, the bikes or trains (or encyclopedias) would be delivered the next morning at home. I welcomed the clothes though, mainly because my other relatives had different taste than my mother and I could expect to receive something that had a little flair, a little chic, a little colour, and that didn’t always itch. Like the paisley shirt my Aunt Betty once bought for me, or the cowboy belt with imitation silver buckle and end tip that my Grandmother gave me. My grandmother’s sense of humour carried over into her gifts. When I was in my early teens she began a tradition of bringing a box of neckties to the Christmas Eve celebrations to be given away to all the men. The ties came from the closet of a wealthy friend who had passed away without any heirs, leaving a multitude of clothing items behind. The eight males in the family would draw numbers that determined the order of tie selection and then pick their favorites until all the ties were gone. Then we would offer a Christmas toast to the late Mr. Forsinger. For years the most valuable clothing items I owned were a half dozen of those Italian silk neckties; I still have one.
The memories of Christmas that Canadians have differ significantly one from another; our families are so very different. Our traditions are wonderfully varied as well, garnered from the many lands and cultures around the world where the Christmas story is celebrated. They shift and refocus over time, as families change and grow and new memories are added.
My Uncle Ray died last week. He was 89. I hadn’t seen him in 10 years, or more than four times in the last 40. Circumstances and geography got in the way. But as I celebrate Christmas this year with my own children and grandchildren I will think of him and my other relatives who are no longer with us. Those memories will make the holiday even richer. And at some point, in the midst of the celebration, above the sound of children and Christmas music, I know that I will smile to hear in the background a certain familiar, deep, resonant laugh. I always do. I always will.

New Year's Resolutions

Everyone at lest considers making New Year’s resolutions, and some actually do – about 30%. Of those, only 10 % really keep them. In a town the size of Grand Forks, that amounts to about 17 people. Those 17 are easily identifiable. They are the high profile, Type A personalities that are constantly busy achieving things. That’s why they are able to keep their New Year’s resolutions while the rest of us fail miserably; they are used to reaching their goals. Formerly, they all had multi-paged, leather bound Day Planners; now they have little hand held computer/phone devices that they constantly type their schedules into. That’s another thing the lucky 17 have in common: schedules that they actually adhere to, broken down into fifteen minute parcels of time. The rest of us are somewhat vague about time. We usually have four parcels: morning, afternoon, evening and night. Some only have two: day and night, or awake and asleep.
I count myself among the 30% that make but rarely keep their New Year’s resolutions. It isn’t that I don’t have good intentions, but after all these years I am realistic. I have tried to trick myself into keeping the resolutions by offering myself rewards: a new table saw for losing 20 pounds, a big flat screen TV for going regularly to yoga class, etc. For some reason, however, I end up double-tricking (sort of like double-daring) myself into collecting the rewards without actually keeping the resolution. (I lost five pounds so I will get the table saw and lose the other fifteen before the VISA bill has to be paid, or yesterday I signed up for the yoga class and therefore will immediately buy the big screen TV which will allow me to practice in the comfort of my living room)
I am not really fooling myself, of course, and as a result I have lately altered my approach. This year as last year I am making my resolutions in three categories: Sure To Keep, Likely To Keep, and Are You Kidding? Last year the third category was more optimistically labeled: Might Possibly Keep. Of the four resolutions in that category, I almost came close to keeping one. I never really had a chance at the other three (Learn to SCUBA dive, write a novel and bench press my body weight). I blame that in part on my brother’s failed retirement plans. He was going to move to a property on the beach in Costa Rica – he had pictures – and was going to allow me to live there in a cozy cabana for three months. The real estate promoter absconded with his down payment, however – no pictures of him – and in disappointment my brother and I started eating pastry. My body weight soared to the point that Hulk Hogan in his prime couldn’t have bench pressed it. The last Might Possibly Keep resolution was to bungy jump. I was all set to go to Nanaimo and jump off the famous bungy jumping bridge there when my father reminded me of the family history of detached retinas. Suddenly the thought of deceleraing upside down at the end of a giant elastic lost whatever slight appeal it had in the first place and I gave up on keeping that resolution as well.
My lack of success has caused me this year to place only one preposterous resolution in the third category: I resolve to eat no red meat. I can tell you right now that at the first whiff of any roasting/broiling/grilling beef I will abandon that resolution faster than the Conservatives ditched Reform, but that is okay, because I have some very achievable resolutions in my other two categories. In the Likely To Keep category I have 1) will compose a haiku, 2) will learn Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star on the harmonica, and 3) will stride manfully to the mailbox at least once a month. Just in case those prove too difficult I have included a couple of sure-fire resolutions in the Sure To Keep category: 1) will avoid using Brylcreem on my hair, 2) will not greet any woman over fifty by calling out “Yo, Momma,” and 3) will gratefully accept a seat on a bus from a teenager, if one is ever offered, if I ever take a bus.
I have a good feeling about keeping my resolutions this year. At least a couple of them.

Conrad Black and Nature Boy

Conrad Black was in the news again at the end of the year, this time for being one of the Big Events of 2007. Lord Black’s conviction on fraud charges in a United States court was the Big Event. It seems as though every Canadian radio and television news personality has offered an opinion on Conrad’s state of affairs and a judgement on his misdeeds. Countless comparisons have been drawn between him and other convicted fraudsters who headed major corporations and were caught misusing company funds. Every scandal from Bre-X to Enron has been dredged up repeatedly, and, if that weren’t enough the proud Lord of Crossharbour has been personally compared to not only gangsters, con men, mountebanks and extravagant ne’er-do-wells, but compared as well to the idle potentates and arrogant aristocrats of Europe and the Middle East, a Canadian born cross between Louis XV and King Farouk with a hint of Czar Nicholas thrown in.
I believe those comparisons miss the mark. Instead, I would compare Lord Black to the late Paul Desnoyers, formerly of Winfield, B.C. I wrote about Paul twenty years ago, the week he passed away, in a column for the Winfield Calander. I am not sure that Lord Black wouldn’t prefer to be compared to King Farouk than to Paul, who in the ‘70s and ‘80s was known locally as Nature Boy. Both Paul and Conrad came from wealthy, Eastern establishment families. Both were intelligent and well educated and valued the fine arts. I don’t know how well Conrad plays the piano, but I interrupted Paul late one afternoon at the keys of the old upright that stood back stage in the auditorium of the high school where I taught. He was playing Chopin dressed in his usual attire: baggy cut off khaki shorts, a tattered wool sweater, wool socks and running shoes overlaid with rubber galoshes tied on with twine. I suppose his clothing is an indication that here were a few differences between himself and Lord Black.
Like Conrad, Paul marched to his own drummer. He didn’t care what anyone thought of him; he chose to follow principles that he believed were correct; he was his own man. I admired him for that. When he died, I wrote that the world was a better place because of men like Paul who provided proof that it is possible to live a life free of the constraints of day to day life that often seem oppressive to all of us. Conrad in his own way demonstrated the same proof. Others may live lives of monotonous drudgery and repetition, but Conrad existed in world of dazzling extravagance and brilliant wit, a rarified atmosphere where the great and mighty wielded fortunes and power in an unending display of ego and will.
Now, found guilty by a jury of his peers in Chicago (unfortunately it wasn’t a jury of his Peers in London), it will be interesting to see how Conrad reacts to his incarceration. I believe it will be with the same elan as the French count at the time of the Revolution who tidied himself fastidiously as he was being carted off to the guillotine by a screaming mob. What difference, another, younger nobleman asked, did he think any of those pathetic efforts of grooming made in the face of certain death? “Ah, my friend,” he replied, “when death is all there is, how one dies makes all the difference.” Conrad will manage to serve his time like the self-made nobleman he is, barely bothering to acknowledge the rabble who trundle him off to his prison cell. He has crafted his life to his own design and will see it through to the end, just like Paul did.
When the RCMP found Paul one November morning he was wrapped up in his sleeping bag beneath his favorite grove of trees. They said he had a smile on his face. I will be curious to see if Lord Black will be able to maintain his smile.

copywrite Grand Forks Gazette 2008

Foundations Skills Assessment tests: a useless exercise

The Boundary District and British Columbia Teachers Associations’ opposition to the Fundamental Skills Assessment (FSA) scheduled to test all Grade 4 and Grade 7 students in February may seem puzzling. What, after all is wrong with testing children to determine the level of their basic literacy and numeracy skills.
The problem many teachers see with the FSA is not the test itself, but how the test results are used. The FSA is a typical standardized test, that is a test administered to a large number of students that compares their individual performances to a pre-established standard. Important information about individual students can be ascertained from such a test by comparing a particular student’s achievement to the entire target group, in this case, about 40,000 students in each of the two grades.
The FSA test results, however, are not primarily used in that way. Instead, conclusions are being drawn from those results, not about individual students, but about subgroups, the 15 or 50 or 100 students that form a particular class or attend a particular school. Such a use of test results is not valid. That is because no small group possesses the same full range of ability that the target group of 40,000 does. Small groups are always anomalies, containing a higher percentage of low achieving or high achieving students than the target group. Therefore, when the statistical analysis of the small group’s performance is generated, the numbers rarely match those of the huge target population. Yet the assumption made by those who do the small group analyses is that the small group numbers should mirror the target population. If they don’t, if the average success rate of a small group are lower, then the assumption is that the teacher or the school must be doing something wrong. If they are higher, the assumption is that the programs of practices of the school or teacher must be unusually good. Neither is necessarily true.
Making those assumptions is analogous to a teacher who analyzes a class’s test results row by row expecting each row to contain the same mix of students and therefore have the same rate of success as every other row. Then having determined which rows have the lowest rates, the teacher berates them for not working as hard or paying as much attention as the other rows, or better yet, blames him/herself for not teaching that row as well as the others.
Our schools, like those rows, reflect subgroups that vary greatly from one another based on socio-economic factors like wealth and poverty, ethnic background and immigrant status, family educational background and so on. From one part of the province to another, or one part of Metro Vancouver to another, those great variations in socio-economic factors have an impact on achievement in schools and on standardized tests. The differences are particularly evident when private schools, which admit only high achieving students in the first place, are compared to public schools that, of course, welcome students of all abilities.
Teachers and administrators are completely aware of the level of achievement of their students without being reminded by a standardized test. The irony is that after spending vast sums of money on these tests and their marking and analysis and hiring expensive Superintendents of Achievement to oversee the process, the Ministry will eventually realize that it is a fruitless exercise. Most jurisdictions in North America already have realized it (Google standardized testing for more information). The average scores generated by individual classes and schools will fluctuate from year to year by a couple of percentage points depending on the abilities of the student population for that year. For example in the last five years, the Boundary District success rate (percentage of students “meeting or exceeding expectations”) on the Grade 7 Reading Comprehension portion of the FSA has varied considerably: 79% in 2003, to 80% in 2004, 76% in 2005, 85% in 2006 and back to 79% in 2007. If one were to accept the Ministry’s rationale for the validity of these tests, those results would point to a serious failure of teachers and schools in 2005 and a remarkable improvement in the same schools and teachers in 2006. Such conclusions are obviously illogical and point out the clear weaknesses in using test results like these as a basis for evaluating school performance. The average scores for the entire province also vary because try as they might, the people making up the tests can never make them of equal difficulty.
Meanwhile the Ministry requires principals and teachers to chase after additional percentage points on their schools’ average FSA scores in order to create the illusion that steady progress is being made. Teachers know that this takes time away from the many other tasks that they are required to perform, most of which are of far greater importance.
That’s why teachers all over the province are opposed to the FSA.

Copywrite Grand Forks Gazette 2008

Cognitive Dissonance

Occasionally, a relationship between seemingly unrelated things makes itself known. In the course of a few hours the other day just such a relationship popped up. I was drinking my morning coffee watching Global News and getting an ear full of the latest blood and gore in metro Toronto and Vancouver: two innocent by-standers gunned down over the course of the week in the former city, and two gangsters dispatched to their just reward in the latter. Following the news brief about the actual murders came the chorus of condemnation by an assortment of politicians and social activists. Calls for a total ban on hand guns were repeated and blame was heaped on the court system, lax laws and even laxer judges. I have to admit that, despite being a life-long left leaning liberal (also occasionally characterized as a bleeding heart liberal or socialist sympathizer), I do find myself favouring the law and order posture of the conservative crowd whenever my morning coffee experience is tainted by these stories of gangland violence. At such moments strange musings about vigilante justice even occur to me. Like most people, however, I merely fume for a few moments until the next news story comes on the screen about a cuddly new polar bear cub or charity fund-raiser and let the dark thoughts fade away.
On this particular day, I picked up yesterdays unopened mail and discovered something that changed my mood completely, that annual mailbox miracle, one of the world’s most blessed time-passers, the Vesey Spring Seed Catalogue! Is there anything better than idling away the hours envisioning what fabulous abundance of vegetables one is going to nurture in the coming year? Or picturing the amazing blanket of colour that will blossom around the back porch, by the front steps, or beyond the tiny footbridge and fountain that surely one will have time to build this year in the back yard? The Vesey Catalogue! There may be a foot of snow still on the ground but with that precious book in hand spring has to be just around the corner.
The problem was that for once not even the volume from Vesey could completely eliminate the miserable echoes of violence brought on by the morning news. Then CBC radio came to the rescue. Not that the program I tuned to made me feel that much better, but at least it explained my problem. I was experiencing cognitive dissonance I learned, a condition in which the brain is forced to consider two ideas that are mutually exclusive.
The brain doesn’t like that. It wrestles with the ideas until one becomes dominant. A con artist knows stealing is wrong, but wants to steal so he convinces himself that anyone dumb enough to fall for the con deserves to lose his money. The cognitive dissonance is resolved and he can steal the money without feeling guilty.
In my case, it was hard that morning to reconcile a world in which some people feel comfortable shooting others to death in the street while most would prefer to grow plants from seeds and watch them either blossom or bear fruit. But that annoying cognitive dissonance insisted that I resolve the conflict one way or another. I thought of adding my voice to the many who express their dismay continually with the legal and law enforcement systems, but in the end decided on a greener approach to the problem.
I sent an e-mail to the Attorney General encouraging the prison system to allow inmates to plant window gardens and suggested that he ask Vesey to send a thousand seed catalogues. Then I placed my own order. It was even larger than last year, and though I know that I will have seeds left over and will end up begging neighbours to take some of my pole beans and squash, I can see the corn stalks sprouting and taste the tomatoes already.

Copywrite Grand Forks Gazette 2008