Category Archives: education

To Be or Not To Be

What Shakespeare was talking about in the famous soliloquy from “Hamlet” was not all about whether it’s better to end your life or to continue to endure pain and heartbreak. It was not an extended existential whinge. It was, rather, a contemplation on whether or not to use the plural or the singular third person [...]

Full Stop

The Nipper is learning punctuation. They were studying periods, exclamation points, and question marks in class. He told us they have hand signals for each one (they clap for an exclamation point, raise their eyebrows and touch their chins for a question mark, and they hold their hands out in front of them, palms facing [...]

Eighty Men Died Trying to End That Spree

It seems like the only time we really have is time that’s under pressure from five different directions. We were at the rink Thursday, Friday, twice on Saturday, and yesterday. We’ll be at the rink again tonight, tomorrow night, Friday, and Sunday nights. It’s the nearing-the-end-of-the-regular-season crunch to get all our games in. And then [...]

Just an earthbound misfit

Just a wee preview, then. No long-winded stories about Canadian pilots. No jibber-jabber about aeroplanes. Just this: The skellington of the Nieuport 17, covered in tissue paper, shrunk and strengthened. Tomorrow is Painting Day.

Taking an Aeroplane Across the World

I have been peeling glue from my fingers for a week. This, too, is strangely cathartic. Insert long-winded, slightly purple prose about shedding the old skin and leaving troubles behind, blah-blah-blah. In reality, there are little fingerprint flakes all over my favourite spot on the chesterfield. Don’t tell His Nibs. The Captain and I cut [...]

I don’t need no arms around me

It occurred to me that in putting together this aeroplane methodically, piece by piece, painstakingly gluing one tiny piece of balsa wood to the next, that this has become my therapy. It wasn’t a huge revelation. I didn’t fly through the streets of the greater metropolitan valley centre area shouting that I’d discovered the next [...]

Take these broken wings and learn to fly

This is a balsa and tissue paper model of the Nieuport 17 aeroplane flown by Billy Bishop during WWI. Well. Technically, this is the completed fuselage of said aeroplane. In the top left corner of this photograph are the parts for a Sopwith Camel, which Bishop also flew, although only a handful of times. The [...]

Sage Words of Advice

“I really really wish that it wasn’t just expected that boys are supposed to ask girls out on a date. Because all of the guys I know are super shy and are terrified of asking girls out on a date. I mean, girls are pretty comfortable telling people that they like someone. “Most of the [...]

I owe you. All of you.

You want to know what teachers make? If you haven’t heard yet, teachers in SK are looking at job action because their union’s negotiations are not going well. Teachers in the province have been without a contract for a shameful amount of time, and while the action on Thursday is not specifically a strike (it [...]

Some things do surprise me

Do you realise it’s been fewer than twenty years since Apartheid was officially abolished in South Africa? For a social studies project in elementary school in the 80s, I did a report about Apartheid. No one in my class had heard of it. I talked about what it was, its historical roots in colonialism, its [...]