When the air quality was particularly bad from the smoke from so many fires, my son decided it would be a great time to fry up some burgers on the stove top. I don’t have a BBQ because I mainly don’t eat meat, so we fry burgers. But he heated
Continue readingTag: Teaching
A Puff of Absurdity: Bill 98: Better Schools and Student Outcomes?
Bill 98 got Royal Assent a couple months ago, on June 8. At the time ETFO commented, “The level of authority that Bill 98 grants the government, with regard to the new provincial priorities framework, is unprecedented and could all but eliminate the ability of school boards to respond to the specific
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Back to Basics – Again
Leece’s new and improved education system that he’s flogging all over the place is keen on “Back to Basics” rhetoric, despite it being an archaic mantra. Conservatives love that old-school shit. Besides maybe a few people for whom it’s a dog whistle indicating their anti-CRT side is winning, people have
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Extremist Group Criteria
A mom delegated at a school board meeting in the states about the group, Moms for Liberty. Here’s the Tiktok video (but also at the link in case – I wish TikTok embedded more reliably): @nowthispolitics A mother in Wilson County, TN, read out some of the homophobic and demeaning
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Mixing Church and State
The religious far right is growing and getting more powerful and unnerving, and we know the fights happening in schools board meetings. This 25 min. BBC video from earlier this year is instructive. It’s telling that Patriot Mobile put millions of dollars behind school board elections, taking over politics from the
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: The Charter’s not a Buffet
Trudeau spoke to parents concerned with their right to decide what their children are taught in schools. The group of Muslim parents were very worried about the “gender ideology” being forced on their children. The reporter called his answer evasive. Listen for yourself; here’s what he said in full, “I’ve heard
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: On Training Children
I have some nuanced or maybe fence-sitting views about Applied Behaviour Analysis (ABA) that I’ll try to sort out below. As a trustee, I went to a PD session in part about the WRDSB’s use of ABA, which I questioned, and I’m currently taking a course with some material about Autism
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Teaching in the Face of a Bleak Future
I can’t imagine teaching right now. This post is a mishmash of thought around teaching at such a momentous time in history. Well, momentous for us. I’ve only been retired a year, but the world has gotten so much worse in that time with climate change hitting some serious tipping
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Ideology and Indoctination
We’ve got marches and rallies surfacing, sometimes right outside of schools, with people chanting, “Leave the kids alone” in order to put an end to “gender ideology.” What does this even mean? First off, check out this 8 minute TikTok on indoctrinating kids (also here if embedding doesn’t work): @headonfirepod Replying
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: On Track for Privatization
A couple weeks ago, Texas came very close to passing a bill defunding public education: a “school choice” bill that would provide vouchers for parents to be able to “use taxpayer dollars to pay for private school tuition.” It passed in the Senate, but then died in the house. They’ll
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Rough-Cut Research Peer-Review: On Remote Work
One more thread to be saved before I write something of my own; this time it’s James Heathers‘ scathing take down of Talia Varley’s article in the Globe and Mail. in which Varley attempts to prove that remote work negatively affects our ability to learn and innovate. If I were
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: On Keeping Kids "Safe" From Pride
Student Trustee Kenzy Soror wrote an excellent, brief thread on the problem with parents keeping their children home because it’s pride day or month: “I take great concern with the decision of some families to ‘keep’ WRDSB students at home on June 1st. I hope that those who made this
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: On Letting Them Fail
In my recent “Kids Today” post, I mentioned the problems with not letting kids fail classes as one of many examples of how we swoop in to rescue them instead of actually supporting their learning and growth as human beings, arguing that their behaviour is being affected by never having to experience
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Kids Today!
A letter has been circulating and in the news complaining about kids today. Things have changed in the last few years, but I don’t think it’s as dramatic a shift as is being portrayed yet, and while phones play a role, so does our cowardice in neglecting to set clear
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Neurodivergent with Hindsight
Maybe because I finally have some time to just exist without anything to plan or prepare, or maybe because I’m back in school as a student, whatever the reason, many childhood scenarios have been resurfacing, playing out in my head, and I’m all, WTF? No trigger warnings necessary – nothing
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: A Quick Evolution of Masking
After my laptop died, and I found out the harddrive was corrupted, and all my pictures were lost, I started backing up my phone photos, and noticed an evolution in my mask wearing that evaded my memory. I’m not much for selfies, but I did take a few along the
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: World Health Network’s Safe Schools Initiative
The World Health Network has a 30 minute video out about Safe Schools with a small panel of people looking at how to make schools DavosSafe! Michael Bailey, co-founder of Indoor Air Care Advocates, talked about ventilation and filtration. They published a parent advocacy guide to help parents advocate for
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: The Times They are A-Changin’
Doing another degree has been eye opening to see how much university has changed over the past 20 years since my last Masters. TL;DR: It’s a lot more like high school! I’m doing it at the same time as my youngest is in first year (at the same university even!),
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Year in Review
I don’t normally do a year in review, but his was my most tumultuous year in decades. It’s right up there with the year I dropped out of high school and moved in with my sister in Ottawa on a whim, and the year I moved six times mainly by bicycle.
Continue readingA Puff of Absurdity: Yup, Masks Really Work. I’m not Sure Why This is So Hard to Grasp!
I’ve been inundated lately with pictures from the sides of mask boxes that say something like this: I could return volley with this, from the side of my 3M Aura N95s: Instead I went for a lesson in logic, specifically, the fallacy of accident: And here’s a great thread from
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