Showing posts with label nuance. Show all posts
Showing posts with label nuance. Show all posts

Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Wherein the Senate forces me to rethink everything I've ever learned at all ever

My first impressions of the Senate came when I was a child (somewhere in the 9-12 age range) from overhearing the adults around me. It was the lazy fat cat sort of stereotype that's useful for Air Farce sketches and Toronto Sun headlines. The sort of thing that's clearly A Problem.

Then when I started translating and started looking at bits of the Hansard on a regular basis, I gained a more nuanced perspective. They do actually have a role. They do actually do stuff. The fact that they're appointed does serve a purpose.

This is a normal learning arc for me. I start with a crude idea of the concept in question absorbed from my environment, then as I learn more I gain a more nuanced view that questions many of the assumptions I grew up with. That's what always happens, with everything.

But with yesterday's events, it seems I was wrong about my more nuanced view of the Senate, and the stereotypes I grew up with were more accurate.

So were the nuances I thought I saw not really there? Where did I get these ideas from? And how can I trust other things that I see as more nuanced than I once thought they where? Or was what I saw once true, and the nature of the Senate has changed just recently?

If this isn't a fluke or a very recent change, then this will have been the first time in my life that a dynamic opinion has ever changed direction for me. I've always trusted the direction of my dynamic opinions because they've always served me well, but if this one's wrong then the rest of them might be wrong.

So now I have to learn a whole lot about the Senate. I have to learn whether this vote is typical or whether they're usually more intelligent about these things. I have to track how often votes follow party lines uber alles. Because until I figure this out, I don't know how much I can trust everything I've always known about how my mind works and how I learn.

I don't have time for this!

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Remembrance Day blogathon

One thing I've always hated about life is that if you don't go around gloating about what you're doing, people assume you're ignorant.

When I was in Montessori school, I wanted to play with these beads, but the teacher wouldn't let me because she said you had to be able to count to 10 to play with them. I could totally count to 10 - I could count to 100! But back then, at the age of 3 or 4, I didn't realize that she wanted me to show her I could count to 10, and just slunk off sad and confused.

When I was in Grade 2, I got really frustrated with how slowly my classmates read aloud. So rather than wait for them to struggle through a sentence, I'd read ahead and see how the story ended, then go onto the next story in the reader. By the time it was my turn to read, I was three stories ahead and had no idea where we were. So when it came time to put us into reading groups, my teacher put me into the blue group, which was the second-lowest. I was confused and rather humiliated, as I felt like I could read fluently. Eventually my parents intervened and I was bumped up to the green reading group, which was the highest, but not until after they'd all finished learning how to do cat's cradles.

When I was in Grade 7, a girl at my school was diagnosed with cancer, and some of her friends started raising money so she could buy a wig. I gave a significant amount of money to this fund - something like $5 or $10 when my weekly allowance at the time was $2 or $3. Then I came home from school and my father said he was writing his yearly cheque to the United Way, and asked if I'd like to add a donation. I said no thank you. So I got a lecture on why you have to be charitable. I really resented being treated that way just because I preferred to do the right thing quietly and humbly without gloating (I was still Catholic at the time and this was a virtue - c.f. Luke 18: 9-14 the parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector) rather than giving money to an organization that seemed to spend an awful lot of money on giving its donors public bragging rights. (Which, incidentally, is the reason why my father has since stopped donating to the United Way.) That grated so much that since then I have only ever made anonymous charitable donations.

I got to thinking of all this because tomorrow is Remembrance Day. Remembrance Day is one of those things where people assume I'm ignorant when I don't go around holding forth at length about what's inside my head. It all started when I was in high school and our school band provided music for our local cenotaph ceremony. For four years (I wasn't in senior band in Grade 9), I saw the whole ceremony firsthand, from live on "stage". And the more I saw of it, the less comfortable it was. It seemed uncomfortably glamourous, with too much emphasis on the fact that the veterans were heroes and not enough on the waste and horror and pointlessness of war. (I've written some about that glamourization here.) I wasn't getting any sense of "Never Again," but I was detecting certain connotations of "and if you join the military, you can be a hero too!" So after high school I quietly stopped wearing a poppy. I knew Remembrance Day was really important to various people for various reasons and didn't want to be an ass about it, but I just didn't feel right playing along myself. I have since done a lot more research, especially about WWI (which was the original reason for Remembrance Day), and the more I learn the better I feel about my choice not to participate. The problem is, the standard assumption when I don't wear a poppy is that I'm completely ignorant of my history. In reality, when I was ignorant I was proudly wearing my poppy over my heart and hoping those old men in the navy jackets (who were OMG HEROES!) would notice that I remembered to say blow not grow.

Then today I saw an article about a revamped citizenship guide that would include "greater emphasis on Canada's military history and on the poppy as a symbol of remembrance and of Canada’s sacrifice in the First World War." That made me go "Huh?" because "sacrifice" implies that it's to achieve some goal, and the more I learn about WWI the less I agree with that assessment. I started reading up on it shortly after I finished university, when I realized that I didn't actually understand why it happened. Yeah, yeah, yeah, assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914. But how does that lead to a war? So I read and read and read, and the more I read the more I came to realize that it was a pissing match. Countries were declaring war on each other because they wanted to go off and have a jolly good adventure or because they didn't want their penises to fall off. It didn't need to be a war, even under standards by which it is sometimes necessary to have wars. And young men, unaware of the hell that awaited them, went off to enlist to have a jolly good adventure with visions of dashing uniforms and shiny buttons dancing in their heads - the very kinds of images the heroic glamourization of our local cenotaph ceremony might give an impressionable young person.

I learned in History class that initially Remembrance Day was created by WWI vets (then Great War vets) with this very sentiment - that war was senseless and wasteful and foolish and Never Again. It wasn't a jolly good adventure, it was hell. So thinking about this, I found myself wondering if it was more important to real-life WWI vets that they be viewed as heroes (even if it meant WWI being seen as worthwhile) or that future generations see just how pointless war is (even if it meant that the vets don't get treated as heroes). Unfortunately, the last WWI vet in my family died when I was like 10 years old, and I wasn't quite at the point where these questions occurred to me yet. (I was still early enough in my education that I was all proud of myself for memorizing 14-18 and 39-45.)

But I did think of a story my grandmother once told me about the first time she voted. When she was young, the voting age was 21 (although apparently soldiers and vets under the age of 21 were also allowed to vote.) So by the time she was allowed to vote, she was already married with one small child and another one on the way. After a long day doing housework and chasing a toddler while heavily pregnant, the last thing she wanted was to squeeze her swollen feet into shoes, corral the toddler into a stroller, and walk all the way to the polling place. But when she told her husband this, he freaked. It was the maddest she'd ever seen him in their two years of marriage. He said this is what he fought for in WWII - this is what his buddies died for - so she was damn well going to go and vote. So she did, and is now very vociferous about making sure her descendants vote.

The goals in the other branch of my family were much more prosaic. They had spent the last several generations getting buffeted back and forth between German occupation and Russian occupation (with some of my ancestors having been, legally and honourably, conscripted on both sides at different points during WWI). All the surviving members of this branch of the family were civilians in occupied Europe during WWII and caught behind the iron curtain in its aftermath. For them, what Canada stands for is food - not having to wait in line for bread, supermarkets fully stocked whenever you want. I can best honour these ancestors by eating well and being strong and healthy, which is neither here nor there. (They'd also like me to be a devout Catholic and sprog lots of adorable babies, but we have to be realistic here.)

Interesting as this all is, I can't spend tomorrow eating and voting, not least of which because there aren't any elections for me to vote in tomorrow. (Things They Should Invent: hold elections on Remembrance Day to honour what our dead soldiers were fighting for?) So I thought some more about this. What were my ancestors actually, in real life, not in political spin, sacrificing for me to have?

I ran through a number of ideas, and then it came to me: freedom of expression. What I'm doing right here and now. I'm sure my ancestors living through and/or fighting against various flavours of fascist oppression in Europe would be quite gratified to know that any thought, idea, or experience I wish to share I can instantly post where the whole world can see it.

So tomorrow, in honour of the sacrifices made on my behalf, is blogathon day. Not about Remembrance Day, about everything and anything. A massive deluge of thought, belief, opinion, and expression. Hopefully I'll get to posting everything that's festering in my brain and my drafts folder, but if not there's at least gonna be a whole lot of words. My ancestors who sacrificed on my behalf probably wouldn't be thrilled with everything I have to say, but I'm sure they'd love the fact that I'm able to say it like this.

So that's what I'm doing tomorrow, and after much reflection I feel it is appropriate. However, I really resent the fact that if I don't explain this whole story, people will interpret my well-thought-out tribute as just playing around on the internet, ignorant of the significance of the day. That's almost as irksome as being put in the blue reading group and missing out on learning cat's cradle.

Saturday, June 20, 2009

Careless reporting

The Toronto Star governs itself by a set of values called the Atkinson Principles. The second Atkinson Principle is Social Justice, and the fourth Atkinson Principle is The Rights of Working People.

I think they came perilously close to violating those principles with a bit of irresponsible reporting about city employees' sick leave.

The situation is that city employees' sick leave is currently banked, and they get paid for sick leave that is left unused when they leave their employment with the city. In the current labour negotiations, the city wants to take this away and the union wants to keep it.

There really two separate questions here, the second conditional on the first:

1. Should sick leave be banked?
2. Should employees be paid for unused banked sick leave?

Banking sick leave is not uncommon, although far from universal. As I've blogged about before, of the people I know who have paid sick leave, nearly all of them have bankable sick leave. This is a good arrangement because, as many people are fond of pointing out, sick leave is for when you're sick, and most people don't get sick at the same rate every year. Most years you only need a couple of days (say half a day for your annual check-up and then one day off because your brains are draining out your sinuses), but one or twice in your life you need a whole lot of time off, say for chemotherapy or major surgery.

With bankable sick leave, there is no other provision for time off for major medical conditions that require extensive time off. The assumption is that you'll use your banked sick leave for this. You can probably convince your employer to give you unpaid time off for major illness (in the cases of the people I was able to ask while writing this blog entry, the unpaid time off is technically at the employer's sole discretion, but realistically you'll get it), but there is no separate paid long-term disability leave. For example, someone I know worked at her job for 20 years with barely a day off, then one day threw out her back and required several months off to recover. Because she had nearly 20 years of sick leave banked, she was able to take the time she needed to recover without loss of income, then returned to work bringing with her 20 years of corporate memory back with her.

Whether or not to pay employees for unused bank sick leave is a separate issue. Some of the situations I'm familiar with get paid out or are tacitly allowed to tack it on at the beginning of retirement, others don't get any compensation for it - it's just sitting there as a safety net. In any case, it is possible to bank sick leave with or without paying employees for unused leave. It can work both ways.

The problem with the Toronto Star article is that they're presenting it as a single yes/no issue. They're presenting the pay-out as an integral part of banked sick leave, implying that to get rid of the pay-out you have to get rid of banked sick leave. If you look at the poll, they present it as a yes/no question, with no room for opinions such as "Banking the sick days is perfectly reasonable, but the payout at the end is a bit excessive." And, if you look at the comments section (I know, I know) a lot of people seem to be reading it as a single inseparable black and white issue.

My concern is that this article, especially with its somewhat sensationalist presentation (it was the most prominent article on the Toronto Star homepage all of yesterday, with the cartoon the largest image on the page), will lead people to become outraged at the prospect of up to 130 days' pay-out (which, as we know, people will be inclined to read without the "up to") and, seeing the pay-out as inseparable from banked sick leave, then write their city councillors demanding that banked sick leave for city employees be eliminated. Then our city workers will be stuck with a less just sick leave system that does not respond nearly as well to real-life sick leave needs, and all because of some unnuanced reporting from our city's largest newspaper.

Saturday, May 23, 2009

Why students should be encouraged to use Wikipedia

A lot of people tell students they shouldn't use Wikipedia when researching stuff for school.

I think they're missing out on a golden opportunity to teach critical thinking.

Wikipedia is hugely helpful. Even in my professional life, I find it's quite frequently the best resource for quickly and easily getting a general overview of a topic. However, it is of varying quality and is sometimes edited by people who have agendas.

Students should be taught how to how to identify good information vs. questionable information vs. propoganda in Wikipedia. They could, for example, take an article on a topic that interests them and analyze its quality. Go to the sources to see if they check out, do linguistic analysis for biais and spin, look at the discussion page and history and see if there are any edit wars going on and describe how that affects the current state of the article.

It's a live, real, and immediately applicable tool for not only teaching critical thinking, but showing students its importance.

Then, once they've learned all that, they shouldn't be discouraged from using it for research; they should be expected to understand that it isn't the alpha and the omega, and marked accordingly.