Friday, November 12, 2010
Lakeshore - the Cultural Mosaic gets Trashed ...
I, not having cable, have never seen Jersey Shores. But I HAVE seen the promo for the Canadian rip-off, Lakeshore, which is coming soon to some channel near you that will, thankfully, not be beaming in through my bunny ears. This promotional video is so mired in reality television tropes, that I seriously thought it was a satire when I first saw it on a friend’s facebook feed (he was so appalled that he didn’t want to confirm it was real, and didn’t want to check up on whether it had been mentioned in the news so he could remain in his belief that it was a joke …. But of course he shared it with the rest of us …). We have the under-dressed 20-somethings who all describe themselves as “fun”, “sexy”, “crazy”, or some combination thereof. It appears they do things like drink a lot and show off their chests. They maybe live in the same house, but there doesn’t appear to be any kind of contest inherent in the show. What is fascinating is that the producers have decided to cast all first- or second-generation Canadians, who are identified by their ethnic origin: “the Armenian;” “the Vietnamese” etc. There is nary a WASP in sight. On the one hand, it’s an interesting concept – a recognition of the cultural mosaic that is Toronto, which is a good thing. But, ah, then you have “the Turk” saying “I’m not racist. I hate everyone equally. Especially Jewish people,” and I’m pretty sure that this stereotypical parody of a reality show is going to keep its cultural diversity message at the level of stereotypical parody of the stars’ native cultures …. I sure hope that fine minds at Racialicious get a whiff of this – I’d love to see some good analysis from someone more qualified than myself (and, uh, with cable …).
Too Smart for Everyday Life
As a child, I benefitted from our board of education’s “enrichment” program. I got to leave class to do fun activities once a week, and spend a day with kids from all over the county once a month. We did science projects and word puzzles. I remember visiting the weather station in Wiarton once. We made friends and had crushes on all the “exotic” kids who were from some small town other than the one in which we’d grown up. But I spent most of my time in my own class with the kids who lived on my block, who were in my Sunday School class, who were born down the hall from me at the same hospital.
And I am very grateful that I had the opportunities I did through Trail (as our program was called). But I am also very grateful that I did spend most of my time in my “normal” class. I think that growing up with people with different interests and abilities is important. As I’ve continued my education, my direct circle of friends and acquaintances has become more and more educationally (and socio-economically) homogenous. What would I have gained if that streaming had started when I was 8?
All of this is one of the many reasons why I was so annoyed with the following paragraph in a Globe and Mail article about “gifted” programs for children: “Calgary parent Ralamy Kneeshaw didn’t want to wait until Grade 4, so she worked to get her son enrolled at Westmount in Grade 3. “They don’t become gifted at Grade 4,” she says. Her son was enjoying some extra attention at his old school in a “pull-out” program once a week, but it wasn’t enough. “He was only gifted for an hour a week. He loved that. But then he had to go back to regular everyday life.””
This parent has a completely skewed vision of what it means to be “gifted”. Her child is “gifted” all the time. Whatever intellectual capabilities have gotten him labelled as such exist no matter what kind of classroom setting he’s in. It’s the preferential treatment that he only gets once a week. And maybe that’s ok. A lot of life, even for those of us blessed with a superior intellect at the age of 8, as this child apparently is, is “regular everyday life”. I can hardly imagine that this parent is helping her son to be anything other than dissatisfied with it, if she expects his talents to be developed and catered to every minute of every day. A child who is raised to believe he’s too good for regular everyday life is not likely to turn out to be the kind of person we will want leading our next generation – an aspiration perhaps worthy for overly-involved parents of gifted kids?
And I am very grateful that I had the opportunities I did through Trail (as our program was called). But I am also very grateful that I did spend most of my time in my “normal” class. I think that growing up with people with different interests and abilities is important. As I’ve continued my education, my direct circle of friends and acquaintances has become more and more educationally (and socio-economically) homogenous. What would I have gained if that streaming had started when I was 8?
All of this is one of the many reasons why I was so annoyed with the following paragraph in a Globe and Mail article about “gifted” programs for children: “Calgary parent Ralamy Kneeshaw didn’t want to wait until Grade 4, so she worked to get her son enrolled at Westmount in Grade 3. “They don’t become gifted at Grade 4,” she says. Her son was enjoying some extra attention at his old school in a “pull-out” program once a week, but it wasn’t enough. “He was only gifted for an hour a week. He loved that. But then he had to go back to regular everyday life.””
This parent has a completely skewed vision of what it means to be “gifted”. Her child is “gifted” all the time. Whatever intellectual capabilities have gotten him labelled as such exist no matter what kind of classroom setting he’s in. It’s the preferential treatment that he only gets once a week. And maybe that’s ok. A lot of life, even for those of us blessed with a superior intellect at the age of 8, as this child apparently is, is “regular everyday life”. I can hardly imagine that this parent is helping her son to be anything other than dissatisfied with it, if she expects his talents to be developed and catered to every minute of every day. A child who is raised to believe he’s too good for regular everyday life is not likely to turn out to be the kind of person we will want leading our next generation – an aspiration perhaps worthy for overly-involved parents of gifted kids?
Wednesday, October 20, 2010
The Shameless Self-Promotion Edition
For the past several months, I have been volunteering as a coordinator for the One World Film Festival. It's been a challenge - it's a lot to do in my spare time, and I've frequently felt out of my element. More than once, it looked like the festival might not happen, but now it's only two weeks away, and we have a line-up of amazing films. And, one of our amazing volunteers has made this amazing video to promote it!
The video makes me excited about this event that has consumed so much of my summer and fall. And to all of my 8 faithful readers ... help to make OWFF a success - come watch fabulous documentaries at the Library and Archives, November 5-7, and tell 8 of your friends ....
The video makes me excited about this event that has consumed so much of my summer and fall. And to all of my 8 faithful readers ... help to make OWFF a success - come watch fabulous documentaries at the Library and Archives, November 5-7, and tell 8 of your friends ....
Monday, September 20, 2010
Gender Studies, Classics, and Who we Are
Leah MacLaren wrote a piece last week encouraging undergraduates to steer clear of gender studies, and to stick to the classics. Her argument (I think) is that, in the end, women’s studies (or the new studies of masculinity) are facile, while classical literature and philosophy, which just happens to be mainly by men, contains real revelations about humanity that these theories can’t even come close to elucidating.
Now, I’ll agree with Leah that Shakespeare knew a thing or two about human nature and that we don’t necessarily do students of literature any favours by inserting random female writer here just to make sure we have a woman’s voice in our Elizabethan literature class, if the woman in question couldn’t really write (I once took a class entitled literature and social change, which ended up being exclusively on suffragist literature …. while it would have made a fascinating unit in a larger class, there really weren’t enough suffragists who could write well to, in my opinion, warrant an entire class to their work – I had been hoping for Voltaire, Swift, Martin Luther King Junior’s speech, and maybe some Bob Dylan.)
Gender, whether you believe it’s biologically determined or socially constructed, effectively divides the world’s population into two halves (yes, I know that I am ignoring middle-sex, transgender, gender-queer …. but that’s outside of the scope of what I’m trying to say, so work with me …) and which half you fit into has such a profound effect of your life, no matter what culture you live in, that I can’t agree with Leah that the study of gender is facile. Maybe some of the theories that emerged in the early days of the second wave of feminism are, but all the more reason for a continued academic dialogue on the topic, an antithesis to these early theses from which new understandings of how the gender assigned to us affects the choices we have and, ultimately, the quality of the lives we live.
Now, I’ll agree with Leah that Shakespeare knew a thing or two about human nature and that we don’t necessarily do students of literature any favours by inserting random female writer here just to make sure we have a woman’s voice in our Elizabethan literature class, if the woman in question couldn’t really write (I once took a class entitled literature and social change, which ended up being exclusively on suffragist literature …. while it would have made a fascinating unit in a larger class, there really weren’t enough suffragists who could write well to, in my opinion, warrant an entire class to their work – I had been hoping for Voltaire, Swift, Martin Luther King Junior’s speech, and maybe some Bob Dylan.)
Gender, whether you believe it’s biologically determined or socially constructed, effectively divides the world’s population into two halves (yes, I know that I am ignoring middle-sex, transgender, gender-queer …. but that’s outside of the scope of what I’m trying to say, so work with me …) and which half you fit into has such a profound effect of your life, no matter what culture you live in, that I can’t agree with Leah that the study of gender is facile. Maybe some of the theories that emerged in the early days of the second wave of feminism are, but all the more reason for a continued academic dialogue on the topic, an antithesis to these early theses from which new understandings of how the gender assigned to us affects the choices we have and, ultimately, the quality of the lives we live.
liberal guilt
It’s always strange to return to the blog after a bit of a hiatus – I feel like my first post back has to be somehow momentous, but I don’t always have momentous thoughts …. so it can delay the post even further. This is not a momentous post, but I’m getting back on the horse.
One of the many things I’ve been doing while not blogging for the past few months is organizing the One World Film Festival . This means I’ve been watching a lot of documentaries about people from all over the world. For a fundraiser for the festival last week, we showed Remnants of a War, a movie about de-miners who are working to clear up cluster bombs in South Lebanon. Most of these people are locals who go every day out into the fields and orchards of their homeland to find and remove bombs. I’ve also been watching films about Afghani-Canadians who broadcast a radio station to Kandahar from Ontario and American honey farmers who are trying to deal with colony collapse syndrome (among others).
And seriously, the world is so much bigger than my little corner of Ottawa, and there are so many problems that are so much bigger than whether I have a functional iPod for when I work out or time to wax my legs. And I know that, by watching the films and reading the books, I am aware these problems exist, and I can put faces to them, and that’s something. But even though I watch the films and read the books, I still put the vast majority of my energy into things that, in the end, will really only serve to make my life more pleasant. But how do I get beyond that, and how do I get beyond knowing what’s going out there, but actually doing something about it, rather than just wallowing in liberal guilt?
One of the many things I’ve been doing while not blogging for the past few months is organizing the One World Film Festival . This means I’ve been watching a lot of documentaries about people from all over the world. For a fundraiser for the festival last week, we showed Remnants of a War, a movie about de-miners who are working to clear up cluster bombs in South Lebanon. Most of these people are locals who go every day out into the fields and orchards of their homeland to find and remove bombs. I’ve also been watching films about Afghani-Canadians who broadcast a radio station to Kandahar from Ontario and American honey farmers who are trying to deal with colony collapse syndrome (among others).
And seriously, the world is so much bigger than my little corner of Ottawa, and there are so many problems that are so much bigger than whether I have a functional iPod for when I work out or time to wax my legs. And I know that, by watching the films and reading the books, I am aware these problems exist, and I can put faces to them, and that’s something. But even though I watch the films and read the books, I still put the vast majority of my energy into things that, in the end, will really only serve to make my life more pleasant. But how do I get beyond that, and how do I get beyond knowing what’s going out there, but actually doing something about it, rather than just wallowing in liberal guilt?
Thursday, June 17, 2010
histories and apologies
In the news this week, the PM of the United Kingdom has given an unqualified apology for Bloody Sunday. I’ve also been reading about apologies for civilian massacres in Guatemala during the civil war. Both stories talk about how much it meant for the survivors to have the government stand up and say that what happened was wrong, and that the victims were innocent.
These stories caught my attention because we were talking about apologies for past wrongs at our Jean Vanier talk the other day. Jean Vanier spoke in his lecture about forgiveness: he said that to forgive a group, you had to start with an individual, so that you had a real human to deal with, instead of just considering the whole group as a faceless mass. As an illustration, Vanier talked about a young black woman who had hated all whites for all the oppression they had caused, and continue to cause, until she made a white friend in high school and realized that that individual, at least, was a person just like her.
And, while I hesitate to weigh in at all, from my position of privilege, I couldn’t help but wonder – while there are many things that we privileged whites have to own up to and apologize for here and now, is it fair, or productive, to hold me responsible for the abuses of generations past? Is there a statute of limitations on apologies, or is it better late than never, even if 200 years have passed? Our histories are important, especially in a multi-cultural experiment like Canada, and I don’t doubt that we have to name our mistakes, and accept them as part of our communal story, but how do we strike the balance so that we can do that, without forever looking back?
These stories caught my attention because we were talking about apologies for past wrongs at our Jean Vanier talk the other day. Jean Vanier spoke in his lecture about forgiveness: he said that to forgive a group, you had to start with an individual, so that you had a real human to deal with, instead of just considering the whole group as a faceless mass. As an illustration, Vanier talked about a young black woman who had hated all whites for all the oppression they had caused, and continue to cause, until she made a white friend in high school and realized that that individual, at least, was a person just like her.
And, while I hesitate to weigh in at all, from my position of privilege, I couldn’t help but wonder – while there are many things that we privileged whites have to own up to and apologize for here and now, is it fair, or productive, to hold me responsible for the abuses of generations past? Is there a statute of limitations on apologies, or is it better late than never, even if 200 years have passed? Our histories are important, especially in a multi-cultural experiment like Canada, and I don’t doubt that we have to name our mistakes, and accept them as part of our communal story, but how do we strike the balance so that we can do that, without forever looking back?
where we live and how we live
I haven’t been writing much over the past few months. So, what have I been doing? Well, among other things, buying a house and going to Spain ….
PJ and I got talking at Easter about the fact that it might be time to move. We like our condo, but we’d like a bit more space, and a yard so we can have a garden. So, the search began, and we finally found the perfect place – it’s a middle of 3 row-houses in Chinatown with a little space out back to do some planting and put up a clothesline, a 3rd bedroom, so we can separate our office/sewing room from the guest room, and a basement for storage.
The whole process was, of course, fraught with anxiety. Should we be buying a bigger place? Paying more? Giving up location for yard? Giving up yard for location? The bank would have given us a lot more money if we’d wanted it, and the house inspector definitely found a few flaws in the 100-year-old property that we’ve chosen. So, even though we’re excited, there’s been an undercurrent of questioning whether we made the right decision.
But then, we spent a week in Spain. The trip was a total reality check re. the North American expectations around housing. In Spanish cities, most people, whether they own or rent, live in apartments. And in a city like Barcelona, which has been inhabited since the Roman empire, 100-year-old properties are just like new! Seeing how the Spanish live has reinforced the reasons that we chose our new place, shared drainage aside: we’re going to be able to store some things, but we’ll have to continue to be smart about what we accumulate; we’re going to be right downtown in a mixed neighbourhood close to work and friends; and we’re going to be able to entertain people, without being lost in our rooms when it’s just the two of us at home.
PJ and I got talking at Easter about the fact that it might be time to move. We like our condo, but we’d like a bit more space, and a yard so we can have a garden. So, the search began, and we finally found the perfect place – it’s a middle of 3 row-houses in Chinatown with a little space out back to do some planting and put up a clothesline, a 3rd bedroom, so we can separate our office/sewing room from the guest room, and a basement for storage.
The whole process was, of course, fraught with anxiety. Should we be buying a bigger place? Paying more? Giving up location for yard? Giving up yard for location? The bank would have given us a lot more money if we’d wanted it, and the house inspector definitely found a few flaws in the 100-year-old property that we’ve chosen. So, even though we’re excited, there’s been an undercurrent of questioning whether we made the right decision.
But then, we spent a week in Spain. The trip was a total reality check re. the North American expectations around housing. In Spanish cities, most people, whether they own or rent, live in apartments. And in a city like Barcelona, which has been inhabited since the Roman empire, 100-year-old properties are just like new! Seeing how the Spanish live has reinforced the reasons that we chose our new place, shared drainage aside: we’re going to be able to store some things, but we’ll have to continue to be smart about what we accumulate; we’re going to be right downtown in a mixed neighbourhood close to work and friends; and we’re going to be able to entertain people, without being lost in our rooms when it’s just the two of us at home.
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