Ron Palangio Group at Norma Jean's

This is the bunch of musicians who performed at Norma Jean's in London, ON on Saturday November 7. Benefit for Cancer research.

For more information, http://ronpalangiogroup.com

Air Show Junkie

You know you like planes when you go to an air show alone. It was well worth it to take the drive to Brantford a couple days ago. It's not just the sight of the warbirds, but it's the jet planes are what really gets me excited. Here are some of the highlights.

The Lancaster bomber cooling down after its flight. Really shiny, imposing, classy. One of only two remaining operable craft in the world.

The Snowbirds, with the Hawk One commemorative F-86 Sabre jet, painted like the Golden Hawks from air shows past. This marks the 100th anniversary of air flight in Canada.

Trivia question: Who was the first Canadian to succeed in powered flight, what was the plane and where and when did it happen? (Answer at bottom) Below, you're looking at a specially painted CF-18, the F-86 (backswept wings) and a tutor jet, similar to the snowbird planes.

The f-86 Golden Hawk colours. Flown in air shows around N.A. until 1964.

Snowbirds final fly-over. Nice.

Trivia answers: February 23, 1909

Canada takes fiight: With men on skates to steady the Silver Dart’s wings, J. A. D. McCurdy pilots the biplane for 0.8 kilo-metres over the ice-covered surface of Baddeck Bay, N.S., completing the first flight in Canada by a powered heavier-than-air machine. The plane was developed by Aerial Experiment Association members Alexander Graham Bell, F. W. Baldwin, Glenn Curtiss and McCurdy. Two years later, they are granted United States Patent No. 1,011,106 for their “flying machine.” (from http://www.canadiangeographic.ca/Magazine/so00/aviation_history.asp)

What the Heck am I Reading? - pt. 7

'Into The Wild' - Trailer 01 - Moviefone

Shared via AddThis

This was an audiobook, by Jon Krakauer. The true story is of a young guy named Chris McAndless who took seriously the idea of living simply and morally true by leaving material comforts behind and living off the wilderness in Alaska. Very touching, thought-provoking and inspiring story.
Perhaps someday I'll see the movie.

Hiking Along the Lake, and What Do I See?

This was a surprise: a beautiful (dead) specimen of a coho salmon, freshly washed up on shore. He was about 2 feet long. Would've been a real catch.

Then, we saw about 6 newly dead cormorants, who had hit the power lines high above the beach when crossing over from the Lake to their nesting ground in Hamilton Harbour. Up close they are a beautiful bird, although I hear that they are becoming pushy and crowding out other bird species. They no longer require government protection; a success story of species comeback. Now the anglers and hunters want them culled regularly because of their appetite for game fish!

Why Do I Have to Oppose Early Childhood Educators?

Once again, my union has put me in a spot where I have to defend something I don't believe in. The following letter, found in thestar.com, sums up the issue:

As a long time elementary teacher, I was ashamed to read that the ETFO voted against sharing their classrooms with early childhood educators.

It appears to be a vote of (mostly) women against women. We have waited decades for universal childcare in Ontario and now teachers are standing in the way of progress. Our ECE grads are also professionals and they are trained to work with babies, toddlers and preschoolers. Most have not been recognized for their dedication to the important work they do and most are underpaid.

We, as teachers, should be the first to acknowledge their worth and expertise in the future of childcare.

Anne Mare McMullen, Stratford

The first thing our new ETFO provincial leader, Sam Hammond put on his agenda was staking out the territory of the newly enlarged, full-day kindergarten program, claiming it for elementary teachers. The ETFO took a survey of 800 Ontarians to back them up in saying, "People want a certified teacher providing instruction within a full-day kindergarten program." But I'll bet the questions were limited in scope and context.

The only reason I could oppose ECE people in the classroom is because there was evidence that they were somehow incompetent or underqualified.

Why not propose a partnership of Early Childhood Educators and certified teachers? E.C.E.'s have training, they have great skills, they create programmes, they have a heart for kids, they know how to work with parents, they are sensitive to health and safety issues. Surely a partnership is better than an us-or-them approach, don't you think?

Thinking of Indie Music? ha ha

Indie Music | Cracked.com

Indie Music. The most important aspect of the indie music culture is discovering bands that nobody else likes. But how's an over-educated 32 year-old to decide between all of the weirdly named

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What the Heck am I reading? - pt. 6

I think when we look at the summer weather and say, "Doesn't this weather suck?" we should in the next breath be thinking about the Inuit who would be saying, "Doesn't this weather really suck?"The video gives you an idea of what he's writing about.

What the Heck am I reading? pt. 5

This one put me back into the sci/fi head space.

It's a bit old, but who cares, because the ideas are very intriguing. The reason I picked it up was because Allen Steele, author of Coyote, mentioned it in his reading lists at the back of his series.

It is economically feasible, for instance, to establish a fleet of low-orbital, reusable space craft for the purpose of travelling from place to place on earth. Can you imagine flying to Australia in 45 minutes?

The chapters on terraformation, or changing a planet to make it suitable for habitation, are really stretching my imagination. Who would have thought that Mars could become habitable if you could warm up the planet a few degrees using a giant mirror, and by adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere?

Microsoft School of Counting

Let's see...

First comes 3.1
Then... 95
After that... 98
Next? 2000
And then... ME
Followed by... XP
Then: Vista!
And of course after that we have .... (fanfare please) 7!

It makes perfect sense, don't you think? 3.1, 95, 98, 2000, ME, XP, Vista, 7

Not getting excited about Twitter? For good reason

Now that I know what a narcissist is I'm glad I did so crappy on the test!

Check out this graphic (click to enlarge) -->


"narcissist" –noun

inordinate fascination with oneself; excessive self-love; vanity.

Psychoanalysis. erotic gratification derived from admiration of one's own physical or mental attributes, being a normal condition at the infantile level of personality development

What the Heck am I reading? pt. 4

Just finished this one last night. Another book about the Arctic, sailors and high adventure. What is it with me and the Arctic?

A great lesson on the changes wrought in Inuit life on Baffin Island during the great whaling era of the late 1800s. My sense of understanding about Inuit culture has greatly increased.

James Houston lived in the Arctic from 1948 to 1962, and was largely responsible for introducing Inuit art to the rest of the country. He has written several other books about his time in the Arctic.

Tornados Happen in Ontario

This is what happened last Thursday in Vaughan, a suburb just north of Toronto.

That string of storms just brushed by Hamilton, we got lucky this time.

44 houses there are beyond repair.

I'll bet these are two of them!

What the Heck am I reading? pt. 3

I plowed into The Terror at the beginning of July, after coming across it on a random visit to Indigo. It was in the Horror section. I have this ongoing interest in The Arctic, and I blame it on my reading of The Arctic Grail by Pierre Berton. The book fantasizes about what really happened to the John Franklin expedition, whose ships, The Terror and Erebus vanished in the Arctic and has never been found, despite dozens of searches over the decades, and as recently as last year by a Canadian icebreaker.

All we know is that the crew starved slowly, agonizingly, and attempted to walk overland to the nearest fur-trading outpost in NWT, hundreds and hundreds of miles away. One look at the landscape of NWT on Google Earth will convince you that this is impossible! We also know that they were all being slowly poisoned with lead from their crappy tinned food. What we don't know is where the book begins.... an unknown creature is lurking on the ice and attacking the ships as they overwinter in the ice.

I like the ending of this book, which paints a very realistic view of the Inuit. It is a hopeful book, and an entertaining read.

What the Heck am I reading this summer? pt. 2.

Canadian history always suprises me. Or maybe it's just the way the Pierre Berton tells the story. After reading The National Dream and The Last Spike, I understand why we have a statue of Sir John A. MacDonald in Gore Park, Hamilton. The man almost killed himself healthwise over a period of about 20 years as he rode the political waves of getting the railway built.

The key to this story is that the railway had to be built entirely on Canadian soil, or else the commerce and flow of people to the expanding West would never have been controllable by the Canadian government. Many investors from the US had ideas about connecting the lines through the northern states, such as Minnesota, Wisconsin, N. Dakota, but due to the vision of the MacDonald government, and tons of political wrangling and controversy, the better plan prevailed. It was the plan that built Canada and knitted it together from Ontario to British Columbia.

The biggest earthly obstacle was the area of what is now Northern Ontario. Apparently, muskegs were so deep that they would swallow an entire causeway in a matter of minutes as the soft bottom gave way. What first looked like a rather simple, shallow landfill operation could ultimately consume weeks and months of engineering, resulting in huge cost overruns. (According to Jon Krakauer, muskeg is "the expanse of spongy, poorly drained, peat like organic matter overlaying a permanently frozen bog". A cousin of permafrost, muskeg raised havoc on ... the route. To avoid the loss of vehicles due to sinking, the engineers developed the use of "corduroy". Thousands of logs were scoured from nearby forests and placed crosswise. The highway was built atop the logs. Thus the weight of heavy vehicles was distributed evenly and the problem of sinking into the bogs was solved.)

Then, the whole matter of surveying a passage through the Rockies. Tons of money was spent sending survey crews into the wilderness, only to have an entirely different route chosen a decade later!

Here's the famous Last Spike photograph. Burn this picture in your heads, people. Canada is written all over it.



"The last spike joining the Canadian Pacific Railway was driven at Craigellachie, west of Revelstoke, on November 7, 1885. Sir Donald Smith is driving the spike, and standing just behind him is a lad by the name of Edward Mallandaine. Mallandaine was 17 years old at the time and had been running a pony express service between Sicamous and Revelstoke. He went on to found the town of Creston, B.C." [present day home of Kokanee brewery!]

What the Heck am I reading this summer?

I first read Coyote Horizon, then Coyote, then Coyote Frontier, now I'm working on Coyote Rising. Totally the wrong order but who cares!

I confess. I'm a science fiction/space exploration/interstellar travel nerd.

Everyone seems to equate Steele with Robert Heinlein, author of the Dune series. Sorry, but I haven't read those, but I did see part of the movie which appeared rather lame, but that's probably got nothing to do with the books.

One intriguing story from Coyote is about the guy who woke up from bio-stasis (suspended animation sleep-state) about 215 years earlier than the rest of the crew on the starship. He lived the next 32 years alone on the starship Alabama, trying not to go crazy. After going through almost all of the smuggled booze on board, and consuming about 20% of the food stores, he finally had an accident and fell down a passageway ladder. A bot picked up his body and jettisoned it through the air lock. When the remaining crew woke up years later they had to piece together what happened.

Turns out that what saved the man's sanity was the arts. He decided to start writing a book. Eventually he moved from writing to drawing and painting. In the end, he had covered the ship's interior with colourful illustrations and murals about his story. The thing I like about this is that the arts gave him a means of occupying his mind, and expressing himself, at a level other than human conversation. Art kept him sane like nothing else could.

With no one to talk to, what can a man's mind do? Arts fills the black hole of a man's mind, at least partly.

Student Cellphones + Hoax = Chaos

So, If you think kids should have cellphones in the classroom, how do you filter the information they feed to their parents when in a lockdown? Read on....

The Hamilton Spectator
(Jul 11, 2009)

"Check the news. Police have us in the gym. There's a guy with a gun."

-- Text from Bianca, 17, to her mom during a lockdown at Bishop Ryan high school yesterday

We give our kids cellphones in case of an emergency.

We want them to be able to contact 911. Or us.

We are comforted knowing we can communicate with them in a crisis. Yesterday there was a crisis. Born out of a hoax. And the cellphones just made it worse.

A growing group of worried parents flocked to strip malls, street corners and parking lots surrounding Bishop Ryan school just after 8 a.m. Most were drawn by a flurry of text messages from students, other parents and friends.

Something bad is happening at BR. Police are there.

Parents -- some of whom had just dropped off their children at the east Hamilton school for summer school or volleyball camp moments earlier -- raced back. They found streets blocked by at least a half-dozen cruisers, lights flashing. They saw the heavily armed tactical Emergency Response Unit going in.

Anxiety began to turn to panic.

"There's been a shooting," came the text from 16-year-old Josh. His mom Lori rushed from Fortino's to the school.

"I'm nervous," she said, standing as close to school property as police would allow. She held her cell and glanced at it often.

Officers guarding the perimeter couldn't -- or wouldn't -- give parents information. More moms and dads arrived by the moment. Some parked their cars in the first place they could -- blocking in whole parking lots of vehicles -- so they could run closer to the school.

Virtually all the parents worked their phones, desperately trying to both gather information and reassure their children. But really, the bulk of information flowing from phone to phone was wrong. Worse than wrong. Wildly off-base.

Rather than reassure, it just created more fear.

"We've heard someone was shot," one mom said. "We've heard there's a guy with a gun."

"I've heard there's someone with a gun, too," another mom echoed.

Here are the facts according to Inspector J. Anderson:

At 8:03 a.m. police received a 911 call from a man who claimed to have seen a young man with a handgun entering Bishop Ryan.

The first police officers arrived two minutes later.

The school was ordered into lockdown. At first, all 500 or so students were kept in their classrooms. When the ERU arrived and swept the school for a gunman, they moved students into the gym as they cleared each classroom.

At one point, the ERU found a boy in a second-floor bathroom. Not knowing who he was and given that he resembled a description of the gunman from the 911 caller, the boy was handcuffed and taken out of the school. It was quickly determined he was simply a student doing everything he'd been taught to do in a lockdown. He hid in the nearest safe room -- the bathroom.

Unfortunately, when the innocent kid was brought out in handcuffs by police, the crowd of parents jumped to conclusions.

He's the shooter.

In fact, nobody was shot. There were never any shots fired. There was no gun. And there was no shooter. Nobody was arrested.

"This was a bogus call," says Anderson.

Now police -- who had more than 20 officers at the scene for two hours -- are looking to charge someone for making the call.

I interviewed Anderson at the scene in sight of a crowd of parents. When I finished, I crossed the street to where the parents stood. They peppered me with questions.

I told them everything Anderson had said.

They didn't believe it.

The information I was giving them didn't jive with what they were getting from their children inside. Or with the rumours. Or even, it seemed, with what they had seen with their own eyes.

"No arrests? But we saw the kid in handcuffs ... "

Ironically, in the tote bag I carried, alongside my own BlackBerry and reporter's notebooks, is a copy of the book I'm reading right now, Columbine, by journalist Dave Cullen.

Though nobody said that word yesterday, I'm sure a lot of us were thinking it.

The Columbine horror unfolded 10 years ago. That day, students inside the school and parents on the outside passed around cellphones to try calling their loved ones.

It was the first mass shooting in North America to be talked about and reported on as it happened, thanks to technology. Hindsight tells us much of that information was incorrect. Rumours and speculation generated in the midst of the chaos were perpetuated and sometimes remained as fact for years until being debunked with thorough investigations by police and journalists.

Now nobody needs to share a cellphone. They're ubiquitous.

And so is the misinformation.

Susan Clairmont's commentary appears regularly in The Spectator.

sclairmont@thespec.com

905-526-3539

Digital Gimmicks or Learning Tools?

Quoted from the blog Leading from the Heart, by Tracey Rosen, a teacher in Quebec:

"...the concept of organizing thought, either individually or collectively – stands way above the decision process over which tool to do it with."

and later:
"As long as we keep our emphasis on the learning outcomes, the tools we use to get there can be varied. They do not need to be digital."

She's commenting on the fact that we get so preoccupied with using digital tools that we forget the reason we're using them, which is to organize our thoughts. The learning is still found within the organizing and connecting of ideas, not in mastering the latest fancy tools.

Why We Should Abolish Grades

"... a teacher's grade is a crude instrument compared with a student's self-awareness." -Paul Goodman

Goodman makes the argument that assigning grades obscures the true meaning of what students are supposed to get from their education, which is self-awareness. Testing is useful, but only for purely pedagogical purposes, to help a student become aware of their need for learning, and discovering their own deficits, and mastering their subject in order to "commence" on their own journey. In a medieval university, a student candidate became a master and was welcomed into the university community because that student had truly mastered a particular field of learning, had defended it and was then accepted as a peer. No grading was involved, no formal reporting to some higher authority was required, no comparison with others or weeding out took place.

All the grading that goes with testing is for the purposes of placement of a student, weeding out certain students who don't make the required minimum grade.

Stuck in the Middle

I'm getting annoyed at the predicament I'm in as a teacher, where I am hired to teach children, and to serve the parents and taxpayers in my comunity, but I end up having to be part of a union that represents my profession badly.

You make an accurate observation here Sandy- in my reflection on 20 years of teaching, I can't remember a time when the government was spoken of as the equivalent of the enemy, that needs to get off its butt and give us what we need to really teach well.

When I look around my classroom and my school and I see the ample supplies, and well-paid teachers and staff working hard to do their best for their students, I remember the few times I've travelled around the world. They're lucky if they have a classroom, let alone desks, paper and pencil in so many places. In other countries, humiliating, fear-based methods are used to motivate children. For the most part, in Canada, we have got it made in our schools. Heck, you turn on the tap and clean water comes out.