End of Big May Mean Scrapping Little Red School House

When I was news editor at the Chatham Daily News in 1968, my mother, Muriel E. (Hunt) Morris decided to come from Chapleau and spend  the summer with me. To keep herself busy during the day, she decided to take a summer course in education.

The times they were a changing in the late sixties in more ways than one, and education was included. Mom, who had taught school for 34 years at the time became increasingly frustrated with the new thinking in education being set out by the professor.

Just an aside about the changing times in the Sixties -- shortly after I arrived in Chatham Martin Luther King Jr. and Senator Robert Kennedy were assassinated; peace talks started in Paris to end the Vietnam war and on June 24, Pierre Trudeau led the Liberals to victory in the federal election. Our headline in 120 point type was CANADA GOES TRUDEAU, which wasn't quite true as he was not popular in some parts of the country.

Anyway, back to Mom and the professor.


One day the professor said in effect that teachers must "account for individual differences" in children, and used some other trendy words in his lecture. Mom, who had not said a word in class all summer, raised her hand to ask him a question. But the classroom teacher still taught to the middle simply because the way the system is structured., including new trendy words signifying really nothing.

"Don't you mean that all children are special with needs?," she asked. I don't recall his reply to Mom, but I do know the rest of the class agreed with her. After spending her entire teaching career treating each and every child as special with needs, she retired two years later after teaching at Chapleau Public School and at Kekabeka Falls for a total of 36 years.


Mom taught elementary school and emphasized the child before the subject content always.
Obviously she had no use for the labelling of children, or anyone else for that matter.


Let me give you an example that involved me. I was teaching economics at Chapleau High School, and almost all the students in my class failed a test. I was having coffee with my mother and pontificating against my students in typical teacher fashion. Mom stopped my little rant, made some suggestions including that maybe I scrap the course content as I had prepared it, and start over. She also suggested I might want to think about finding another career.


"Start where the students are, not where you are," she recommended, adding that she didn't have the foggiest notion what I was talking about when I tried to explain the material on the test.
I took her advice and we started over. In fact, as Junior "B" hockey was very big in Chapleau at the time, I used a hockey rink to teach the factors of production.

Some years later, a school board member, on a tour of the school, stuck his head in my classroom and asked me, "Is this there where they teach hockey?" I replied yes it was and offered to demonstrate. He didn't take me up on the offer. 

Today, more than ever, I believe my mother was right, and I was so fortunate to finish my teaching career at College of the Rockies where I helped found a grad program in new media communications which was very student centred. I will always be indebted to Dr. Wm. Berry Calder, the president of COTR, who believed that the future is now in 1994 and supported me as we pioneered web based communications when many told me that even email would never really catch on.

The advances in technology since I retired in 2000 have been phenomenal, and today I think of the possibilities for a real student centred education system where it is accepted that each child is special with needs is a starting point. Increasingly methinks that the little red school house and all its trappings designed for the 19th century should be relegated to the dustbin of history.

Recently, over coffee, I was thumbing through 'The End of Big: How the Internet Makes David the New Goliath' by the American writer Nicco Nele which I had bought from Amazon.ca and picked up at the Canada Post Office in Shoppers Drug Mart.

However, I chuckled to myself given that I usually have coffee in "big" coffee chains and kept thumbing through Nele's rather incredibly good read and near the end came across two suggestions he makes. To better help us inhabit the End of Big, he suggests that in revising institutions, focus on making them more amenable and responsive to individuals and second, demand serious, thoughtful, informed leadership. (Italics are Nele's)

I would be most interested to hear from you. Please comment or email me atmj.morris@live.ca

Gerry Warner on Sears closure marking an end of more innocent times

Perceptions By Gerry Warner

So, if the abrupt closure of Target wasn’t bad enough, now it’s bye, bye, Sears. You have to wonder where it’s going to end? Hopefully, we won’t have to do all our shopping on the computer in the future, but who knows?
 And where’s Santa Claus in all of this?
That may be a bit of a facetious question, but only a bit. After all, look at what Uber is doing to the taxi business world-wide. Throw robots into the mix and you have to wonder if anyone will need to shop in the future? Let the bots do it! A robot could probably do a decent job of impersonating Santa too. They’re already building our cars and checking people into their lodgings in Japanese hotels. But is that the kind of world we’d want to live in?
Not this cowboy! 
Heck, I’m so old I can remember when Eaton’s closed in 1999 after more than a century of operation in Canada. An  Eaton’s was a Canadian department store, not a clone of an American operation south of the border.  Timothy Eaton was a Presbyterian Scot immigrant who opened his first store in Toronto in 1869 and quickly built it into a nation-wide chain that pioneered catalogue shopping and huge, multi-storey retail stores in Canada’s major cities long before so-called “big box” stores came into existence.
I remember well the Eaton’s store on West Hastings Street in the heart of downtown Vancouver. It was a big box close to 10 storeys high, but unlike the big boxes of today, had huge leaded glass windows adorned by lattice screens and wide plate-glass-windows at street level with lavish displays that would catch the eyes of shoppers as they passed by on the street. 
And in those days, Eaton’s wasn’t the only big department store downtown. There was Woodward’s just down the street on a grubbier part of East Hastings and the Hudson’s Bay store up on Granville Street, the only one of the big-three, department store behemoths still serving customers today. Back then, the big Vancouver Sears store wasn’t located downtown at all, but over on Kingsway Street, a busy retail corridor of its own. Later it moved downtown to Granville too where it met its demise.
As for Cranbrook, I didn’t live here in my younger days so the only Sears I knew here was the mail-order, catalogue store in the Cranbronbrook Mall downtown which was the last place in my life I made a catalogue purchase, a jade-color fall jacket that I still wear. I’m also still wearing a tattered, white Sears winter parka with a
burgundy hood much to the chagrin of my wife who threatens to throw it out every winter. That issue has yet to be settled in the Warner household!
But I confess to feeling a sad sense of nostalgia about the passing of Sears. Like many a young Canadian lad, I tied Sears and Eaton’s catalogues around my legs when we played shinny on the street before my parents bought a proper pair of hockey shin pads for me. I also remember how excited we were as children when the Sears and Eaton’s winter catalogues arrived by post before Christmas and we eagerly gazed at the wonders inside. Those were more innocent days when people were disciplined enough to actually wait for things they desired instead of ordering them up almost instantly with those fiendish devices they’re always clutching in their sweaty hands. Then there was the Sears Wish Book, which kids and kids-at-heart, anxiously looked forward to every Christmas season.
And to think in the future we can look forward to delivery-by-drone as Amazon is already experimenting with or have a robot serve you at the nearest Apple Store. Not for me, thanks. I still prefer Santa and his elves as well as real, bricks-and mortar department stores like Sears and Eaton’s.

Gerry Warner, a retired journalist is still a kid at heart and a member of the Friday Morning Coffee Club

Fleeing to our "liitle towns for moments of fellowship"

For such a time as this, Canadians surely did not ask or seek.

Let us please reject the poitics of fear and hate, as well as situations like the one that took place in Lethbridge, Alberta, involving a person from Cranbrook where I live.

 In 2014, I travelled  from Cranbrook to Toronto, (and back) where one of my oldest and dearest friends the late Harry "Butch" Pellow hosted a marvellous party attended by some folks I had not seen since high school days, more than 50 years ago. What a joyous occasion it was.

 As I flew across this vast and magnificent land, over the mountains, across the prairies to the forests of Ontario, into Toronto, which has been so much the central place in my life, I once again recalled the words of Bruce Hutchison in The Unknown Country.

Mr. Hutchison, who has Cranbrook roots, wrote in 1942, that "No one knows my country ...Who can know our loneliness on the immensity of prairie, in the dark forest and on the windy sea rock? A few lights, a faint glow in our largest city, the vast breast of the night and all around blackness and emptiness and silence. We flee to little towns for moments of fellowship."

2014 party attendees

In 2015, I made essentially the same trip across Canada but to Chapleau for the launch of 'The Chapleau Boys Go To War' which I co-authored with my cousin Michael McMullen.

Little did I think during my travels that I would be putting Mr. Hutchison's words into the context of 2018 in our country and beyond.

 He also posed the question: "Who but us can feel our fears and hopes and passions?"

 Indeed, who but us? And given our very troubled world, for a myriad of reasons, Canadians from coast to coast to coast vent their fears and hopes and passions as they try to understand, to make sense of it all.

 I won't pretend to have the answers, but I do know one thing for sure: Be not afraid.

 As Canadians, let us focus on the positive aspects of living in this still largely unknown country and strive to fulfill our hopes and passions.

 I often think of my mother's family who arrived in Canada in 1913 to make a new life for themselves. Not here long before my grandfather was badly burned in a fire but he survived. Then it was World War I, then the Great Depression, then World War II, and my father Flying Officer Jim Morris, was killed on active service in the RCAF in 1943.

 Through it all, my family and I know that yours faced its challenges too, and, never, ever let fear and hate rule their lives.

 Let me leave you with two quotes to think about:

 "Fear is the only true enemy, born of ignorance and the parent of anger and hate."  Edward Albert

 "The enemy is fear. We think it is hate; but, it is fear." Gandhi

 As difficult as it may be, let us focus on those things bringing us together rather than dividing us. Let us certainly not be intimidated, but lead the way to the "promised land" where our greatest hopes and passions will be fulfilled -- Canada!

 We are all children of the village in Canada and if need be, it is OK, even today to "flee" for a moment to the little towns for fellowship as Mr. Hutchison suggested in 1942.

I  did, even though the little town was a home in Toronto, and then Chapleau, the town where I was raised.  And as many readers know, my other safe place is Orlando, Florida My email is mj.morris@live.ca

Updated May 2018

 

School Days changing as cursive writing courses may disappear from core curriculum

Just as I was digesting a list of nine things that will disappear in my lifetime sent to me by an old friend, I stumbled across a story on Yahoo News that the end of teaching cursive writing in elementary schools is on the horizon.

Ever since, one of the verses from that old song "School Days" has been running through my mind. Remember?

"School days, school days,

Good old golden rule days.

Reading and 'riting and 'rithmetic

Taught to the tune of a hickory stick.

You were my bashful, barefoot beau

and I wrote on your slate.

'I love you Joe'

When we were a couple of kids."

Back in the day, so to speak. "reading, 'riting and 'rithmetic" were the Three R's, the core of the elementary school curriculum.

And above the blackboard in almost ever elementary school classroom was the alphabet in capital and small letters.

But first, here briefly is the list of nine things my friend sent me. Set to disappear are the post office, the cheque, the newspaper, the physical book and newspaper, the land line telephone, music listened to on devices as  as we have known it, television and generally many  "things" we own as they will all be on a "cloud". Actually I tend to agree, but they are a story for another day.

Back to cursive writing. It never entered my mind that was disappearing as core part of elementary school curriculum in over 40 states in the United States and several Canadian provinces. Although I can't remember the last time I sent anyone a handwritten letter, and only scribble notes as needed, and keep a journal, I never assumed kids would not be required to take cursive writing. 

Tori Floyd, writing in The Right Click a Yahoo News blog on June 16, 2013. writes,   "In the not so distant past, it was a rite of passage for student in elementary school to sit through lessons on cursive writing, slowly learning how to shape connected-up letters in the hope of one day having legible penmanship.

"But with the increased presence of keyboards everywhere, the days of cursive writing may be numbered and schools are seeing the writing on the wall.

"As the end of cursive writing appears to be nigh, many parents and educators probably find themselves wondering: should we still be teaching cursive writing?"

I wonder too. Those who argue it suggest it is "one more thing teachers have to help students with in light of the pervasiveness of electronic communication."

But, occupational therapist Suzanne Asherson  said on Mashable  “In today’s world children need to know how to both use keyboarding to type, as well as being able to pick up a pencil or a pen and be able to write.  Both skills are necessary and should be taught to our children in order to have functional adults who are efficient in their jobs and in the real world.”

Maybe, but it begs the question -- in the 21st Century is excellence in cursive writing needed to be a "functional" adult who is "efficient in their jobs and in the real world".

This debate over cursive writing takes me back to when I started high school in 1955. Because the powers that be determined I was university bound, I was enrolled in an academic program and took Latin instead of Typing. In fact, I took Latin until the end of my first year at university, and I haven't spoken or written it much in the last 50 years. I still don't know how to type properly using my own "hunt and peck" system, and I think I typed something every day of my working and retired life.

However,  as Mr. G.A. Hill, one of my outstanding Latin teachers told me, studying the subject made me better in English. 

And, he was right. Perhaps the same argument can be made for the continuation of cursive writing as part of the core curriculum. Simply put, it's good for students.

Nonetheless, no doubt I should have taken Typing too.

In 2011 in a piece for ABC World News, Brian Braiker wrote, "Antiquated or no, cursive is viewed by some parents and educators as essential to an education -- especially as text-happy teens become ever more thumb-centric."

Try as I might, I was unable to compose new words for "School Days". Somehow, "texting, tweeting and thumbing" and writing on a "tablet" just didn't do it, although tablet may be digital version of slate!

What are your thoughts? I look forward to hearing from you. You may comment here or my email is mj.morris@live.ca

                                     

Friday Morning Coffee Club annual golf tournament successful with surprise winner

The Winners

The Friday Morning Coffee Club held its third annual successful golf tournament at the Elizabeth Lake Lodge with a surprise winner.

Ed Saffin brought his grandson Tom along to play in the tournament - and he not only notched four holes in one over the 36 holes, but emerged as the winner of the Ron McFarland Trophy as the winner, with lowest overall score.

The foursome who emerged victorious in the tournament included Jim Roberts, Joel Vinge, Antoine Beurskens and Dennis Burton.

They will be presented with the Peter Davidson Memorial Trophy in a ceremony at a later date. Tom will also be presented with the Ron McFarland Trophy at that time.

Tom

The Friday Morning Coffee Club has been meeting regularly for four years now.

MJ, Tom, Ed Saffin

Joining Ed and Tom on the losing team were Ken Wellington and yours truly, who despite our best efforts, and some holes in one, could not pull off a victory.

Ken

Ken did get a hole in one

However, it was another great time with plenty of laughs for all of us, and thanks to the folks at Elizabeth Lake Lodge for having us.

Antoine

Thanks to Jim Roberts and Joel Vinge for putting it all together. Photos by Joel