How Best to Show Our Respect

I am extremely supportive of Remembrance Day, but in this support, I am in the camp of people that do not wish it to become a statutory holiday in Ontario. While most of the reporting around this issue has mentioned the concern that it will be, one day, just another holiday, most of this reporting (including Minister Harris' interview with CBC Ottawa today) has addressed only the adult context. Yes, lots of adults would love to be able to commemorate this day by attending ceremonies, but where is this desire to participate fostered? It comes from the attention paid to this holiday within our schools. It comes from years of dedicated teachers, of annual assemblies, of learning to be quiet and to commit one's thoughts to reflection and gratitude for those two minutes every year.

If children are no longer able to experience this in the school setting, will this same desire to participate continue twenty or thirty years from now, as they become adults in the workforce? Certainly, those dedicated teachers can use the day before to prepare activities and share the importance of the day, but what happens on the actual day, if there is no school?

Some parents who share this passion will be able to take their children to community ceremonies, but will this become the norm? I think we would like to believe that youth throughout Ontario will seek out or be taken to community ceremonies that will instill them with gravitas year after year, until they themselves become parents and role models who continue to pass on the tradition of remembrance. However, I am deeply concerned that, instead, children will stay at home, that busy parents will choose not to take their children to a ceremony, and slowly the solemnity of this day will dissipate until it is, as many have already posited, just another holiday.

This Bill has been created out of respect and honour for everyone who fought to give us such sought-after freedom, but I feel that respect and honour are demonstrated not through holiday designation but from teaching our youth. As with language, religion, culture and identity, our ideologies are fostered and rooted in our youth, and it is youth that should be considered in this issue.

I love my job....

I love my job, I love my job, I love my job......

And so goes my mantra which I chant every year at this time when the Sunshine List is published.

I might work at a college; I might be a respectable instructor in the fine world of academia. And yet, my partner and my combined income would never get us on that list. I will probably never make it halfway to the old boys' club - not even with this MA which I am working my tail off to acquire.

My head spins trying to fathom how people in my office that teach an extra class than I do, can make over twice what I do.....Those in question of course scored their positions at a time when Masters degrees were novelties and colleges were growing. Now, college job postings for permanent positions state that a PhD is  recommended, and colleges go out of the way to avoid hiring full time faculty. (The creation of the 10-month maximum at Ontario colleges is a direct response to the union's agreement that employees working 12 consecutive months must be offered a permanent position.)

It pains me and fills me with disappointment every year, that so many people out there can live such out-of-reach lifestyles, but also the shocking lack of balance in the system: college presidents make twice what our premiere does.

There isn't much else to say on the topic as change is out of the hands of the ones most affected.

For the moment, I'll just keep reminding myself how much I love my job, and I love my students, and I love my faculty......

JM

In a world...

"In a world without Hal Douglas, trailers were never the same again...."

When in doubt, bake cookies.

The life of a grad student is one that cannot be imagined until one is fully in its grasp, swept into the whirlpool, sucked into the quicksand. It is something I had heard about and yet really never understood. Until one day you look up and realize you haven't left the house in over two days, you're wearing yesterday's clothes, there's a bunch of healthy, unassembled ingredients in the fridge, yet your mac and cheese shelf is empty. And you dream about research databases. True story.

While there were probably many reasons that you initially chose it, it ultimately becomes the badge of your commitment to what you deem so important, bags under the eyes as permanent as tattoos somehow less important than the world of information just waiting to be discovered.

I've been at this for a mere two semesters, working full time, class at night, working for a prof on top of it all. I question my ability at least twice a week. I sleep with highlighters. I survive on pots of stew and chili that will last for days.

I have to admit, I am pretty lucky. I couldn't do it without having the best guy in the world at my side. Amazing how one's priorities change depending on one's situation. Right now, I love how he comes over and quietly does the heaping pile of dishes before he sits down to hang out.

In the past seven months, I have dealt with vague assignments, APA 6th edition, stats (although keeping a safe distance from them as much as possible), macro issues, which for a teacher is completely counter-intuitive....."so what does that look like in practice?" and even vaguer teachers....is that a word? And most recently, two weeks of class discussions that have completely questioned...no...clobbered...everything that I believed about language....

And so, tonight, when it's been all a lot to take in, I am baking cookies, something I used to do all the time to relax, to procrastinate, to escape. Sure I have to be up at 6am, two classes to teach in the morning. But somehow right now, it can all just wait.

Because while most would agree that there are too many difficult and vague people in the world, too much structure (take that, APA) and too many expectations, I have never heard anyone argue that there are too many cookies.

Food for thought (no pun intended): In a world of unwelcome alarms blasting us out of our dreams far earlier than we would like, there is something about the ding of an oven timer that puts everything right again.

JM

Small Town Canada

Reason #341 that this country feels like one big small town - when the Liberal Party's Foreign Affairs Critic used to babysit his now boss, the Leader of the Liberal Party.