So I’ll be the first to admit that because of my wide variety of classes taught, my marking has been somewhat schizophrenic.  I don’t generally mark the same way in CPT as I do in History, French or Science, and each class lends itself to specific ways of gathering marks.  Readers will note that I [...]

Last Friday, early in the morning (4:30), we welcomed the newest member of our household: Noelle Joy.  Obviously, we’ve taken some photos, which I’m including below for your enjoyment.  She was born quite quickly – Mandi & I arrived in Labour & Delivery about 4:00am, so that gives you some idea.  No time for drugs [...]

The middle of this last week was spent in Saskatoon at the UofR’s internship seminar.  The seminar itself was nothing to get excited about; fairly routine procedural stuff.  In the course of one of the discussions, however, an interesting debate was launched.
We were talking about the law in Alberta whereby teachers have to inform parents [...]

My grandmother has never been a big woman, but she never looked smaller than when she laid my grandfather to rest this Monday.  My grandfather, on the other hand, was a big man.  Not in his stature, to be sure, but his presence would easily fill a room.
My grandfather was the kind of person who [...]

So obviously, the big news in politics this week is the possibility that the government of Canada might be defeated on a confidence motion, possibly ushering in the first coalition government in over 90 years.  The fact that 114 Liberal and NDP MPs want to take the reins of government from 147 Conservative MPs is [...]

I’ve had my EEE PC 701 for about 6 months now, and last week, we bought Mandi an Acer Aspire One for her to work on.  I decided to do a bit of a comparison to see what had improved in the intervening time.
The Aspire One is superior in many respects: it has a larger [...]

photo credit: stan
So I’m playing late catch-up with the story of Canada’s Human Rights Councils. The French philosopher Voltaire once wrote “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” The Canadian version of this might read “I disapprove of what you say, [...]

Edupunk is a meme that’s been going around the edublogosphere the last couple of weeks. It seems like everyone’s written something on the subject, and I’ve been reading the pros and cons for a while. Yesterday, on a post at Students 2.0, in response to the author wondering if edupunk teachers are simply [...]

Here’s a story that’s sure to warm Jeremy’s heart: vouchers don’t work. Proponents of school choice (on this blog and elsewhere) have held up vouchers as the be-all and end-all of public schools’ problems. They would let all those poor, underprivileged kids just dying to get out of the slums go to the choice [...]

There are two ways of knowing things. You can know a lot of things in not too much detail, or know a few things very well. Schools are designed to teach the former in a world that increasingly values the latter. And schools aren’t even the best place to get in-depth knowledge [...]

The new Toronto District School Board (TDSB) policy on homework adds further fuel to the belief that all stupid education policies start in Ontario and BC and move towards the middle. Fortunately, they are usually debunked by the time Saskatchewan would start to consider them. Honestly, no penalty for late homework? I [...]

So one of the projects that’s been taking up my time over the last little while is the creation of a promotional video for my school. We’re looking for something that’s a little more glamourous than a PowerPoint to get prospective students interested in Carlton. The video I came up with is this:

It [...]