I haven’t read the book yet, but I stumbled on Timothy Snyder’s talk about it from four years ago. Unfortunately, it’s all still very relevant! “The things that are happening to us are not just bad but there’s something weird, something unsettling going on.” He speaks of the politics of inevitability,
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A Puff of Absurdity: It Ain’t Over!!
Just a quick update on Ontario’s Covid numbers, currently: In the words of Colin Furness, MISt PhD MPH: “It’s clear politicians from all parties won’t act until there is public outrage. And there can’t be public outrage if the public is in the dark.” Covid is still disabling and deadly,
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: On Peanut Butter and Covid in Schools
A woman on twitter posted an unfortunate tweet, I assumed satirically, that a good solution to keep immunocompromised kids safe from Covid while they eat lunch indoors is to send them with a peanut butter sandwich. Then they’ll be made to eat lunch in an isolated room to keep others
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: On Divisiveness
This post is so short! As I wrote about anti-anti-racism education (and that two ‘anti’s don’t necessarily make a ‘pro’) yesterday, a connection became crystal clear to me. It’s often the same people who are, to various extents…. anti-CRT in schools and against any diversity training or lessons on discrimination
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: A Really Deep Dive into Anti-CRT Rhetoric
This will be a long one, but I’ll break it into headings (after this preamble) for easier bit-at-a-time reading! There’s a division among school board trustees and some parents around the best way to tackle discrimination to ensure the best outcome for students and society. The board currently has been
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Privatization in Ontario
It’s vital in Ontario that we understand the problems with privatization because the shift of essential services from the public to private sphere is happening right under our noses. Brittlestar does a great job of explaining it here: The typical disaster capital scheme goes something like this: Wait for a
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: On Finding Answers in Research
I recently posted, on social media, a list of studies showing the effectiveness of masks and of mandates. One commenter said he doesn’t trust studies because they could be biased, and instead he has used raw data to come to his own conclusions. A few problems here: If a group
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: A Useful Crisis
I’m a big movie buff, and I used to love watching meaty psychological thrillers and films with evil people murdering one another. No Country for Old Men is one of my favourites. Or deep absurdity, like Synecdoche, New York. But I find I can’t watch that anymore. With the exception of Better
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: What Happened to Politics?
I want to save this thread by Jeff Rybak, defence lawyer, lecturer at the University of Toronto, and a not-for-profit corporate director: “I’m trying to understand what’s happening with politics in Canada, especially on the right. I read a lot of comments, though I obviously don’t have time to pick
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Strap One On For Safety!
I wrote about the almost total absence of PSAs around using masks to prevent transmission of a virus that, in some areas, kills ten times as often as traffic collisions, and then look at the possible reasons we’re being pressured to ditch this simple and effective tool: On Mandates: Mitigating
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Covid-Free Schools are Possible!
A school in Texas has been 100% Covid-free with zero learning loss. They used good masks indoors (N95 or better) with no ‘mask breaks.’ Everyone eats outdoors even in the hottest weather. Every room has a HEPA or Corsi-Rosenthal box filter and a CO2 monitor to track air quality. At 650ppm,
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: On Anti-Racist Educating Provoking Bullying of White Kids
Addressing a local concern about bullying: I’m very sorry to hear about any child’s bullying experience in school. Bullying of any kind has no place in our schools, but we’ve seen that it can be so difficult to eradicate. Kids will jump on any little thing in order to try
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: On Showing My Cards
I’m showing them!! People keep telling me not to let people know what I stand for until after the election, and that doesn’t sit well with me. Others have told me to choose my words more carefully and avoid words like “equity” or “inclusion” because it will turn people off. It’s the one
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: We Need to Discuss Systemic Racism in Schools
In The Record article, “Waterloo Region District School Board Trustee Mike Ramsay speaks up about sanctions against him,” Mr. Ramsay writes that he is concerned that education has shifted from a focus on literacy and numeracy to White Privilege and Critical Race Theory (CRT). As a teacher at WRDSB this
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Masked and Vaxed in School
Q. Do you support bringing back masks mandates for schools, defying provincial orders, if necessary? Do you support your board demanding that the province add vaccination for Covid to the provincial list? A. (on the fly on Twitter) It will be so much harder to get masks back now that
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Tossed My Hat in the Ring
I officially put my name forward to campaign to be a Trustee for WRDSB, Waterloo/Wilmot area. I’m confident in my ability to be a Trustee. I can read difficult and tedious reports and condense them into more accessible chunks to help people understand some of the issues and the decisions being made.
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: 3QD: Tossing the Canon in a Cannon
I’ve started contributing to 3 Quarks Daily once each month. Here’s my first: Tossing the Canon in a Cannon – about choosing philosophers to read that aren’t posthumously tainted by racist, sexist, or homophobic commons mixed in with more useful arguments.
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: On Claims of Porn in Schools
There’s a call to arms on a social media from a few people who think the memoir in graphic novel form, Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe (e/em/eir pronouns), should be removed from shelves in school libraries for being pornographic. For the uninitiated, “graphic novel” means it’s a cartoon, not that it’s graphic
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: A Plague of Willful Incompetence
This The Tyee article, “Get Ready for the Forever Plague,” by Andrew Nikiforuk, hits all the important notes about our ongoing pandemic. He says that we’re dealing with a “plague of willful incompetence” as Covid continues to evolve. All reasonable responses have been abandoned, including masking, testing, data collection, and
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Covid and Climate Change: Similar Rationalizations, Different Intensity
I was searching through YouTube looking for things to include in my career retrospective, mainly looking for a clip of an old CKCO show, What’s Your Point/The Final Round, from March 28, 2009, filmed at my school. Four teachers were set up to argue on various random issues, and Brent
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