Talk about the weather

For two years I lived in the tropics. For two years I sweated. Daily. And profusely. For two years I ran the air conditioning in my bedroom at night. I complained about the heat. I complained when my classroom aircon quit. However, as I reflect on those years, I am starting to see that things we “endure” becomes much more appealing once they have passed.

For example, this winter, I longed for the days of never ending sweat, sunburnt feet, and hit and miss aircon. This winter was cold in Saskatchewan. Very cold. Colder than usual, they say. And I hated every minute of it. I had kind of forgotten how much I hated it until I spent last week in Hawaii with my mom. But, a week spent in the tropics again reminded me of the glory of nice weather. My body quickly adapted to my made-in-Cambodia shorts and $2 Russian Market flip flops. I happily met the morning breeze, as it floated in the open windows of my mom’s house. The day before we left I cut the silicone that had sealed our own 1960s windows shut for the winter — they had gone un-opened in 5 months.

Hence, the question that came to the forefront of my mind as I was flying home yesterday was “why.” Why would someone choose to live in Saskatchewan? One argument is that it was cheap. Well, it is not nearly as affordable as it used to be.
The days of cheap housing anywhere in Saskatchewan are over. So why am I back? Well, it turns out that over and above the weather, this is where my friends and family live. Or most of them, anyway. And I do like them. So, I’ll stick out another winter or five, and enjoy the company. And drink a lot of hot chocolate to cope, I suppose.

Immigration

Since being issued a passport in May, 2005, I have gone through immigration 57 times in 8 different countries. Though I have considerable experience negotiating my way through immigration in countries with varying levels of corruption, I never fail to feel some anxiety each time I present my passport to an official. On Thursday night we flew to Hawaii to visit my mom, and the following conversation transpired:

Immigration Agent (with a thick, southern drawl): Why are y’all headed to Hawaii?
Teachingchris: My mom lives there.
Immigration Agent: And just why does she live there?
Teachingchris: Because she’s extremely fortunate, I suppose.
Immigration Agent: Yes sir she is. (to my wife) You’re going to have to be on your best behavior, miss.
My Better Half: I always am. Actually, I think she likes me more than him sometimes.
Immigration Agent: I could see that.
Teachingchris: It’s true. Why deny it?
Immigration Agent: You two enjoy you’selves.

We walked on through, remarkably impressed with the ease at which we passed. I guess a couple Canadians going on vacation don’t raise too many red flags.

By the time we left Cambodia, we were very comfortable with the process required to get through immigration. After our last trip into the country, my wife might argue that I was a little too comfortable. When returning from Bangkok on an Air Asia flight, I filled out our forms while my wife slept on the plane. I handed her the paperwork as we waited in line. Soon we cleared immigration, and walked through customs, handing in our final forms as we passed. As usual, the agent didn’t even look at the forms. And it was a good thing, for on the line labeled “occupation” I had written mine as “superhero” and my wife paid dearly for her sleep; her vocation was listed as “sidekick.”

The Media

This fall, in our city, a young man from the suburbs went to his girlfriend’s house and shot her. She didn’t die, but it was touch and go for a while. The media ran many stories about the event – they interviewed peers of the two students, who both attended an affluent school in the south end of the city. The newspaper outlined efforts the local school board was going to in order to ensure that grief counselors were available at the school, to help the students deal with the situation.

While explaining this story to my students, as we worked on our collective, I asked them how many of them lost a family member within the last year. More than half of the students put up their hands. I asked them how many times they or their friends were interviewed about the impact the deaths had on them. I asked them how many days grief counselors were at our school. The answers: never, and none. The news stories about deaths in the neighbourhood I teach in don’t involve interviews – they involve cold hard statistics and gruesome details. It is the expectation that bad things will happen in the inner city – because “bad” people live there. However, in the suburbs, something bad that happens is always an anomaly. It’s about time the media gave as much sympathy to the victims of violence in the inner city as they do to those middle class kids involved in “tragedies” in the suburbs.

A Play

I took 10 of my drama students to the local University on Tuesday to watch a production of The Importance of Being Ernest. It was brilliant, and my students really liked it. On the way in, we took the roundabout way, and I gave a brief verbal tour of the University, pointing at the buildings we passed. It went something like this:

Teachingchris: There’s the lab building. It’s where you’d do Science labs.

Awed silence from students.

Teachingchris: There’s the classroom building.

Shawn: (sarcastically) What’s in there? Classrooms?

Teachingchris: Yeah, kind of obvious, heh? There’s the library.

Shawn: Do they have books in there? Our school doesn’t get books – just magazines.

Jordan: No Shawn, we have books. You just don’t know how to read them.

Teachingchris: There’s the Language Institute.

Shawn: Too easy, Teachingchris, too easy.

I know that the banter doesn’t translate very well, but I was rolling by the end of it. Trust me. It was funny. Some days, I have the funniest job in the world.

Sharing Experiences

As part of the creative process for our collective (The Theatre part of the Dinner Theatre I’m working on) students wrote found poems using newspaper articles about their neighbourhood. Due to poverty and all the various isms that are alive in our world (racism/classism/ageism, etc.) almost all of the articles portray the neighbourhood negatively. To give you a sense, here are a few of the headlines: Break and Enters Rise; Trial Set for Teenager Accused of Lighting 80 Fires; 20 Years for Double Slaying; Twelve Sub-standard Homes Shut Down — I think you get the point.

One young woman in my class chose the article entitled Pit Bull Used as Weapon Against Officers, Police Claim. When explaining her poem to me, she asked if it was alright that she called the dog Champ, since that was his name. She told me that she knew the dog, and was so sad when it was shot by the Police. This led into a discussion about the stories we were reading. The students noted that only one side of the story was told, and it never included anything positive. We decided that part of our show will tell those stories to add some humanity to the negative daily (it really is daily!) press the neighbourhood receives.

Another activity students did was to list confessions about things they did. These were then reworded to begin with “we” in order to reflect the universality of their experiences amongst students their age. I used this activity to try to help the students understand that their realities are not all that different from those of other students. One confession was “We drink too much.” I related a story from years ago when some friends and I rented a house near one of the cities most prestigious high schools. Coming home from a night out, I passed hundreds, literally hundreds, of teenagers walking down the street. As I got closer to my place, teens were pouring out of the neighbour’s house, and a police car was there. However, there was no media coverage the next day. I asked my students if they thought that it would be in the paper if there was a party of teens that had to be broken up by the police in their neighbourhood, and they thought it would for sure. This led us to another discussion on the media, and what they choose to report, or not report.

So, it was a very satisfying week – however, we are running short on time. We have nine days until Easter (2.5 days of which we are on field trips touring theatres or watching plays) and after Easter, we have a week to pull it together. Oh my.

A new bike

Part of our effort to become more environmentally friendly involves reducing our use of our car. So far, in the 8 months since we moved home, we have driven less than 8000km. This is a marked improvement over our previous mileage — over 45,000km a year between two cars. However, with the weather changing soon (at least it better!) we are looking at ways to further lessen our driving. As such, we have purchased bikes. Mine is pictured below – a Trek SU200. I have added fenders, a rack, and saddle bags for transporting things to and from work. It is 8km one way to work, and it is my goal to ride, once the snow melts. And by writing it in my blog, hey, I’ve committed. I’ll keep you posted on how that goes.

Project – One Month Down

Time is flying in the project. We have 3 weeks until Easter vacation. Following our 10 day holiday (where I will be visiting my mom in Hawaii – poor me!) we have 9 days to finish the production. So, 23 days. Oh my.

So far, it has been challenging to build a sense of community and safety when the composition of the class varies every day. Now that we’re getting down to the crunch, I should have most of my students during all drama classes. Up until this point, they have been taking Entrepreneurship/English/Information Processing classes during some of my drama offerings. However, starting this week we’ve backed Commercial Cooking and Drama classes, so that I’ll have the majority of my students all the time.

Last week we worked on brainstorming ideas relating to the English themes. The idea was to give us a place to start when we look at building scenes for the collective. This process offered many insights into my students’ lives. They are so honest – it is refreshing.

I find the level of staff engagement to be very invigorating — we are all running at full speed, but we’re running the same direction. The professional dialogue is wonderful. Teaching is usually an isolating profession, each teacher working independently for 5 hours a day in their classrooms. However, the collaborative nature of the project has facilitated discussion about big educational questions, and enabled lots of collaborative problem solving. Also, our twice daily homerooms where we work with students to schedule themselves has enabled us to really get to know the students. After spending the first part of the year teaching grade 9, and now working with the grade 10s, I know almost all of the students in the school.

Life continues to march onward outside of the work day, and I have two assignments due coming up in my grad class — one is a “metaphor for teaching” where my wife and I will wow the class with the similarities between good improvisational theatre and good teaching. Also, I have an assignment on assessing using documentation, which involves a bunch of picture taking. I’ve also put the finishing touches on my ethics application, so I can use data from the project for my thesis. It’s a very tight timeline to get it approved, and I’m not sure if it will come back in time to use the students from the project, but I figured it couldn’t hurt to try.  I also had my second interview for an admin position for next year on Tuesday and I think it went well. I’ll hear within a week or so whether or not I made it to the next level – a panel interview. Alright, this should assuage the guilt I’ve felt about not updating the blog — now I’m off to metaphorize!