The starfish and the power of caring

Lissadell Beach, Co Sligo, Ireland

One day, an old man was walking along a beach. There'd been a storm with very high tides and many starfish were stranded above the high water mark. In the distance, he saw a young girl and noticed she was carefully placing starfish back into the sea. Curious he walked over and said, "There are thousands of beached starfish and you can't possibly put them all back. Why are you doing this?  What does it matter?" The girl looked down at the beauty of the starfish shimmering in the palm of her hand. She then looked up at the old man and replied with some confidence, "It matters to this one."

This short story helps illustrate two points.  The first is about the idealism of youth. Thank heavens there are young people in every generation who don't know that something can't be done and so they do it. The world would quickly sink into a quagmire of unresolvable problems without them!  And the second?  Well, that's the point of this story.

People often ask me why I am a trustee and as I sat before a video camera on Saturday, I was reminded how often I'm asked this question.  In a sense, I understand why it's asked. It can seem to be a rather strange occupation as the compensation is small, the level of stress is high, and there's little power or prestige attached to the job particularly in recent years.  I receive angry phone calls about unknown problems and sometimes hundreds of emails lobbying me on a particular issue.  It can be lonely too as there are few others in the profession and those who are can be political foes. That's the nature of politics generally and at times, it can feel like the Wild West.  In response to the question often implied, yes, some days I should have my head examined!  Then there are the other days.  The reason I am a trustee is that it's the best job on earth.  

Let's step back a moment and look at our schools.  All government, health, economic or educational institutions are organizations we create to meet human needs. By their very nature, institutions call on people to subsume their individualism for the collective good and must of necessity treat individuals in their care in a set fashion.  This is not done with callousness or a lack of caring.  Serving hundreds or thousands of people often has to be done in a standardized fashion if it is to be done at all.

But children are individuals, complex individuals, and they are not amenable to routine treatment.  Their needs change from child to child and they even change from day to day. We can't bake them with a recipe nor make them on an assembly line.  Children are not vessels to be filled or clay to be molded. Their ultimate attributes and personalities are not apparent but come from years of learning and experience.  Like a butterfly from a chrysalis, they emerge and are emergent in the sense of being unpredictable.

Trustees can feel responsible for students and schools in their jurisdiction but we are often told to focus only on governance, that is on the making of institutional rules or policy. This message is delivered by lawyers at orientation meetings shortly after municipal elections and it is often hammered home in many local and provincial governance sessions that follow. While this might sound appealing to a few lawyers and policy wonks, the thought of attending meetings debating school board policy is for the average person something akin to envisioning the seventh level of hell.  If that's all there was to the job, few would want it.  The reality is that trustees do far more because we can wield influence.

Let me explain what I mean.  If a politician is able to help bring about the passage of a law, let's say one that prohibits smoking in a public place, that is political power.  If a politician works with others and aids in the development of a program that encourages people to stop smoking, that is influence.  In both cases, the outcome is similar in that the harmful effects of smoking are reduced.

Consider societal changes you've likely seen in your lifetime.  A generation ago, no one thought about drinking and driving.  Now thanks to the effort and influence of organizations like MADD, most people consider the effects of alcohol before getting behind the wheel. There's not only been a legal shift in the norm but a cultural shift too and it's often the cultural one that most influences human behaviour.

Today, school trustees wield more influence than power.  We come from all walks of life and few of us are teachers or educators.  This is a good thing as it allows us to see the school system differently and it gives us an ability to bring other considerations into the mix.  Many trustees have volunteered in community or political organizations, schools and school board committees, for years before running for political office. We often come to the job with a firm understanding of the personalities and structures that shape our school boards. Trustees have contacts in the community who can bridge gaps and we sometimes bring them together to create now opportunities for children. Sometimes we act as advocates for children and families and discover in the process that a solution can often be found not from stating the case but by knowing whom to call.

As a trustee, I have been fortunate to be in the right place at the right time to occasionally make a difference for numerous students. I am proud to have supported the Empower Reading and the Pathways to Education programs in Ottawa.  Both these initiatives have proven to be invaluable for many. 

I'll finish up with one last story.  On a sunny winter day almost two years ago, I lay in a hospital bed receiving chemotherapy.  Two sweet high school volunteers came by and asked what I needed.  Not knowing what to say, I sent one off for a cup of soup and the other off for crackers.

A third volunteer then stopped by my bed and pulled up a chair.  She was about my age and it turned out that she was in remission from cancer  She asked my name and when I told her, she said, "I know you." This isn't an uncommon a response as we trustees often have our names posted on signs in public places for weeks before an election. But this time was different.

Gail told me that she and her husband had adopted a child later in life and that as a young girl, her daughter had struggled in school.  Nothing seemed to work and in desperation, Gail had called me.  She said that somehow I had worked magic and from that moment on, her daughter did better in school.

There are rewards in life that aren't tangible and so it is with the role of trustee.  After Gail left my bedside, I tried to remember the phone call.  I imagined that on that occasion, I did what I usually do and simply called the principal to say I had received a call from a parent with concerns for her child.  Without interference, I had shone a spotlight on this child. The magic had come from the principal and the girl's teacher who with their attention and subsequent concern had made a difference.  Still as the school trustee, I too had been given a brief chance to hold this child in the palm of my hand ... and she shimmered.


The views expressed in this post are personal opinions only.

Crazy suburban development and the growth in new schools

Yesterday, my son and I had a wonderful experience.  We visited his former grade 6 teacher, M. Brisebois. I wrote about M. Brisebois in an earlier post.  High school teachers tend to run into their former students.  I know they're thrilled when a young person approaches them and says, "Hello Ms. Jones.  Do you remember me?  I'm Aaron and I was in your class four years ago."

My teacher friends love this!  They regale me with the details of what their former students are doing now and what nice young adults they've become. They remember their students clearly and with great fondness, even the ones who acted out in class! Don't ever be afraid to say hello to your former teacher.

It's often different for elementary teachers as young students are not as easily recognizable later on.  And it's more likely too that a child's family or the teacher has moved on in the intervening years. For an elementary teacher, it's a rare experience to speak to a former student and likely a real treat.

So it was with M. Brisebois yesterday.  He met us at the school office grinning from ear to ear.   He hadn't changed over the years but clearly my son has.  M. Brisebois mentioned that he wasn't sure he'd recognize Gabriel on the street, which is understandable given that not many elementary students sport facial hair.

We were given a little tour of the school.  Clearly M. Brisebois hadn't changed in other ways too as the entrance of his classroom was decked out like the portal of a spaceship. Gabe is now a little too tall for the grade-4 spaceship but as you can see, the spaceship comes fully equipped with a time machine and a space-reading helmet (decorated plastic colander) for each child.  One child could even be seen jumping through a space warp <wink>.  Nothing's too good for our kids!

But I digress.  On my way to the school in one of Ottawa's growing suburbs, I passed a French elementary school and then pulled into the parking lot of the school next door, thinking it was our school.  Turns out, it was a Catholic elementary school and our school was the third in line.  Imagine this if you can. Three large elementary schools all lined up in a row, each one likely capable of holding 500 students.  Our school now accommodates over 600 students and there are 12 portable classrooms already, the maximum allowable for the site.  I don't know where we'll put the extra students next year as the kindergarten class will likely double in size with the introduction of full-day kindergarten.

I suspect the two other schools are more than filled too.  But why are there three schools rather than one or two?  Why three schools in-a-row on a main street rather than scattered within walking distance inside the subdivision?  And why the extraordinary growth in outer-ring subdivisions when there are single-family homes in older suburbs with schools and classroom space available nearby?

I read an article this past weekend stating that Canada has become a suburban nation. The majority of us live in suburbs.  But here's the thing, families aren't settling in the perfectly good older suburbs that come fully equipped with uncrowded schools, libraries, and community centres with pools and skating rinks.  Oh no, instead young families are buying brand-new homes in the far-out suburbs, which creates added expense in terms of new school and facility construction, new infrastructure construction, additional commute time, additional car use, more pollution, and a reduction in arable farmland.

Meanwhile in my middle city area, there are some lovely neighbourhoods and family homes without families. This creates a doughnut effect as condos are built downtown to house empty-nesters and new homes are built on the outskirts.  People aren't crazy so why is this happening?

From what I can see, the cost of new home construction is indirectly subsidized by government and tax revenue. Overall this artificially keeps the price of new homes down while it keeps the demand up.  When new home buyers pay school development charges, they pay to purchase the land only.  All other costs, the school construction and outfitting, are paid for by the school board and the provincial government.

Now these families could choose to buy a house in an older suburb, where schools and other amenities are already in place.  But they choose instead to purchase a house farther out because developers don't have to pass along the real costs of providing schools and infrastructure for the new subdivision and are thereby able to keep the cost of the new houses artificially low.  While there's money to be made in renovating and rebuilding older homes, I suspect the profit margins are better in the subdivisions where developers can go in and build many houses at a time.

Although this all sounds rather complicated, it could be fixed.  If Education Development Charges that are levied for new house construction truly reflected the actual costs of building schools rather than simply the land price, these new homes would become more costly to build.  The purchase price of new subdivision houses would increase accordingly and older suburban homes in established neighbourhoods would become more competitively priced.  Suburban sprawl would be thereby constrained, new school demand slowed, and the number of school portables would be reduced.  I suspect this is true for municipal development charges but what do I know?  I'm just a school trustee. What I do know is that it will never happen as long as developers continue to hold disproportionate political sway in our communities and in our province.


The views expressed in this blog are personal opinions only.

Letter to a SMU student

Dear Erin,

I hope you are enjoying your first year at SMU.  I saw the report on The National about Saint Mary's University's notorious frosh week chant, "... U is for underage, N is for non-consent."  I understand that SMU is not very different from other Canadian universities but as your aunt, I am concerned for your safety. I hope you will take a minute to read this letter.

The news item contained some interviews with young women at SMU.  One was with a student, a victim of rape, who said she cried for three hours after hearing the chant. Another was with a female student who said, "I'm not a feminist kind of person so it (the chant) didn't affect me personally."   The contrast in their views couldn't be more stark.

Did feminism ever mean how it seems to be portrayed today, that is did the women's movement ever say that women are the same as men or that somehow women's rights are more important?  Not in my memory.  As a supporter of the women's movement for over 30 years, the call was always for equality, the equality of rights.

Many of us believed and still believe that women can engage in similar employment to men, especially in the modern workplace.  Recent statistics bear this out as women are entering the sciences, engineering and business in record numbers.  Today there are more young women like yourself in medical schools and in institutes of higher learning overall.  

But the word feminism has been twisted to imply something it was never intended to mean, the denial of differences between men and women.  When I was young we spoke of equal rights, not identical attributes.  This false blurring of meaning has been used to discredit feminism and today it is rare for any young person to describe him or herself as a feminist.  In the day, there were many young men who called themselves feminists.

I don't think I've told you what it was like for me as a student over 40 years ago.  It was expected that your uncle would go onto university and there were financial arrangements made to assist him.  I was told that I should go to a secretarial school as I would soon marry and higher learning would be wasted on me.

The differences did not end at the threshold and even though I was an excellent math student, I was not allowed to study drafting as it was considered to be for boys only.  At university, there were no washrooms for women in some of the engineering and science buildings. Nothing says you're not welcome here like a lack of needed facilities.

When a professor of an organic chemistry lab course gave me a low mark in my third year at university, it turned out to be the final straw.  I spoke to him about it and he said that if I rewrote the rough work in two lab books, he would increase my mark from a C to an A because in his words, "How will you get a job as a secretary with ink blotches in your work?"  I was the youngest student in that class, the only woman, and there were no ombudsmen in Canadian universities at that time. 

Erin, I can't help but compare your great-grandmother's and grandmother's lives to mine and feel I've been fortunate. I have had so many more opportunities.  The women of your great-grandmother's time fought for the right to vote. They thought the vote would bring women political power.  Still there are too few of us in elected office today.

In Granny's time, they fought for the right to be educated and today you are.  And in my time, we fought for the right to work and reproductive rights because frankly, they go hand in hand.  Did you know all types of birth control were illegal in the Quebec of my childhood?  With any luck, you will find that with good qualifications, experience and hard work, most doors will be open to you. 

Still you are privileged to live in Canada rather than India, where rape can be a death sentence.  But how is it that Canada is becoming more like India in this way?  All other rights count for nothing if women are raped and bullied to the point of ending their own lives.  

Each generation makes the world anew. You have now been handed this torch, my wonderful niece.  Make your contribution count.

Your loving aunt,

Pam

The views expressed in this blog are personal opinions only.

Games and the politics of teaching math

I hope everyone had a wonderful summer!  I had some time to read, found more grist for the mill, and strangely for someone who suffered from writer's block in her youth, I even missed the writing.

When I was 5-years-old and well before the advent of electronic games, my parents gave me a box of 52 board games.  In those days, it was an unusual gift for a girl and I managed to wear down the printing on the boards through endless use.  My extended family loved card games too.  I remember as a young child being tutored by a great aunt on the finer points of bridge. I was often pressed into service as the fourth player in endless games.

By the time I started school, I already had some basic mathematical concepts down pat. Playing a game of snakes-and-ladders encourages basic counting skills, checkers requires the use of spatial skills, and Tetris teaches the visualization of geometric shapes.  But for me, the fun continued outside the bounds of the games as I saw patterns in bathroom tiles and took pride in doubling the ingredients in a recipe.  As I child, I loved math.

Which brings me to this week's topic. Many students don't love math anymore, which is a real shame.  We now know that children who listen to and enjoy music, play board games, or cook do better in math.  This week, most everyone seems to be weighing in on teaching math since EQAO scores in Ontario have fallen significantly for students in grade 3 and grade 6.

Many are saying it's for lack of competent math teachers but to my mind, this is but another example of scapegoating.  It is also a simplistic response to a problem with many contributing factors.  One is that today's math curriculum is more intense in terms of the difficulty of the content and the amount of material covered.  Mathematical concepts I learnt in a university calculus course are now routinely taught in grade 9 math courses and some concepts, such as the notion of infinity, have even crept into the elementary curriculum.  There is also a problem with how math is taught as teachers are told to teach it creatively and by posing verbal problems.

This summer, I read the book The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at MIT who is known for his research on visual cognition and the psychology of language. One of the claims in his book is that the notion of brain plasticity has gone too far.  I'm not doing justice to his argument but in a nutshell, Pinker states the brain is mostly hardwired except for some fuzziness around the boundaries of areas in the primary sensory cortex, the part of the brain that controls for movement and sensory processing.  For example, if a part of the sensory cortex that controls for the use of a particular finger is damaged, the part that directs the movement of an adjacent finger may be pressed into service to take over the work of the damaged area.  This is what is meant by plasticity; one part of the brain taking over the function of another. Still there are very real limitations to plasticity and the brain cannot rewire itself holus-bolus.

Yet in a way, this is what we assume in teaching math.  Through the current curriculum, we are essentially asking the verbal area of the brain to engage in mathematical reasoning, something it's ill-equipped to do. This wonderful insight is not mine but came from a conversation with Dr. Jay Giedd, who is with the National Institute of Mental Health and is a well-respected authority on the functioning of the adolescent brain.  If we are making such a grave error by ignoring, or even worse, working against the brain's physiology with our teaching methods, why are we then surprised when children don't learn math?

Having debunked the current math curriculum, let me somewhat reverse myself and say that the new math approach is likely useful in teaching older children, those who have already mastered basic math concepts.  It is important that students learn to use math in a creative way to solve real world problems but this teaching should come after they have become adept at manipulating math, after the area of the brain that specializes in processing math has learnt the basic concepts.  We don't teach reading before children know the alphabet. Similarly like the phonics vs. whole word debate, the question of how best to teach mathematics will likely be settled through a greater understanding of how the brain functions, how children learn, along with an improvement in teaching methods.

The world is a complicated place and mathematics is a very useful tool in shining a particular light on its complexity.  In this blog, I try to link my personal experiences, the only ones I can truly know, to a very incomplete knowledge of history and theory that I've often stumbled upon by happenstance.  There is so much information available today that it is impossible for any person to make sense of it all especially when dabbling in various areas of study.  Thanks in part to a love of mathematics, I continue to hold fast to the notion that it is possible to make sense of the world.


The views expressed in this blog are personal opinions only.