centre of the universe

Category: education

  • School’s Out

    I was going to make this big ranty post about the SK provincial government’s attitude toward education, citing the absolute farce of our premier scolding school divisions for instituting or increasing school fees for parents while at the same time his government has been underfunding primary and secondary education (and likely post-secondary as well) for […]

  • A Canadian (Thanksgiving) Parable

    Once there was a Queen. She reigned over many lands, in the manner of constitutional monarchies with their own parliamentary systems based largely, if not wholly, on the parliament of the Queen’s own land. The Queen had many great powers, not the least of which were Longevity, Great Hats, and Mechanical Aptitude. But one of […]

  • Back to Back to School

    A Story of Parenting, Told in School Supplies Kindergarten, First Child: I purchased these school supplies over a year ago, have been awake since Friday labelling every pencil, every marker, every individual crayon, every eraser, and every individual tissue in the box. I have labelled every article of my child’s clothing, and moved on to […]

  • Acting Your Age

    Acting Your Age

    Here’s the thing. We live in a society that values youth over experience, wisdom, ability and knowledge. I’m not sure why we do that, but children are more valuable to us than non-children, which also translates into vilifying people who opt not to breed. There’s a whole bunch going on in this statement, and I […]

  • Fuck Libraries

    The Saskatchewan government, in its 2017/18 budget, has slashed library budgets around the province. It’s done all kinds of other things too like force civil servants to take a 3.5% cut in pay, shut down the only highway bus transportation service in the province, increase the provincial sales tax, and basically pissed off pretty much […]

  • Education Governance Reform

    The Government of Saskatchewan recently released a study commissioned from Dan Perrins called Educational Governance Review Report, Kindergarten to Grade 12. The first 21 pages of the report are pretty straightforward: there’s a need in Saskatchewan to centralise administration for our dozen-and-a-half school divisions, and to ensure school boards are using best practices for efficient, responsible, […]

  • Downtown Train

    It’s been an interesting couple of months living downtown in the city. There are some truly great things like music festivals (two in August alone) and farmers’ markets (every Wednesday and Saturday, and sometimes on Thursday evenings) and outdoor movies and going to the pub for supper with friends and not having to worry about […]

  • Ain’t nothing wrong with faith

    After yesterday’s little rant about public funding going to “independent schools”, let me be clear about something: I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with religion or with faith (I know some folks disagree, but that’s a discussion for another time). As someone who spent every summer in bible school, who helped run church youth groups, […]

  • Jargon is the death knell of business planning

    Allow me this one small dalliance into negativity. It won’t take long, and it’s about jargon. In this case, it’s specifically about business/financial jargon, but every group has its own set of nonsensical words that may have a specific meaning in their particular setting, but which become ridiculous outside of that setting. Jargon is basically […]

  • How to get engaged in Canadian politics: an educational resource

    Here is a handy guide that will help you, disenfranchised Canadian, get engaged with and get involved in the upcoming (eventually, at the end of several more weeks of pre-election hell) federal election! The first step, as the number to the left would indicate, is to click every single link you see in social media […]