Wednesday, April 29, 2020

Some lessons from school... #1: confronting “ism’s”

These incidents happened a long time ago, and I make no special claims for the accuracy of my recollections. They are based on my fallible memory, my inclination to organize memorable incidents into anecdotes, and not on a written record. 


The year after Robron Secondary opened, John and I joined the faculty.
It was a brand-new building -- so new, in fact, that there was still some ongoing construction – which housed a newly-assembled student body, staff, and administration. There were still a lot of start-up problems, and before we left, our solicitous colleagues at Carihi had made a point of acquainting us with rumours about all of them.
The school had opened with Grades 8 to 10, added Grade 11 the year we joined, and 12 the year after. With very few exceptions the school drew its student body from Pinecrest and Rockland, the most middle-class parts of Campbell River. Consequently, with the exception of a significant cohort of children of immigrant South Asian parents, the school was very white.
In the years when there was still a forest between Rockland and Pinecrest, before Robron and that part of Campbell River were built up in other words, there had been a number of nasty racist incidents in our Rockland neighbourhood, including at least one pitched battle involving a group of Sikh young men pitted against a group of their Campbell River yahoo contemporaries. Fortunately, if I’m remembering correctly, the police managed to break it up before any serious physical damage was be done. But the tone had been set.
Anyway, that legacy had entered the school’s culture, carried by some of the students, including some of the most senior and the most socially elite.  
Racism was more overt in Robron than I had ever experienced it in a school before, and particularly ugly when it involved South Asian girls, who had the double burden of being obviously South Asian and female. So it wasn’t at all surprising when it became the topic of a staff meeting.
I’ve always attributed the plan that emerged to the Vice-Principal/Principal team of David Brown and Kieran O’Neill. It now seems unlikely there wasn’t some kind of class instructional component, it being a school, and all, but what has stuck with me is the part that actually worked. And that was simplicity itself: it required each member of the entire staff to instantly confront any racist act or word with the admonition: “We don’t do that here.”
Lecture, lesson, follow-up not required: just “don’t”.
I initially had my doubts. In my experience, teachers (and I count in my own inclinations here) don’t like confronting students they don’t know well, and don’t like dealing with issues not directly connected to their particular part of the curriculum. Especially social issues like racist beliefs and culture; teachers tend to believe schools have Counsellors and Administrators to tackle those tasks. Furthermore, this initiative required unanimity, which is also really hard to achieve on a very diverse staff.
But it worked, and remarkably soon we (almost) never again had to confront racist sentiments in the halls.

Years later, when Timberline opened, melding the high school components of Robron (closing because of dropping student numbers) and Southgate (becoming a middle school) we experienced a similar issue. For some reason homophobic expressions were very common that first year; you literally couldn’t travel the halls and common areas without hearing someone call someone else a “fag” usually in jest, but frequently to wound or belittle. 
That was clearly inappropriate and unacceptable, and the staff agreed to institute a program similar to the one that had been a success at Robron, years earlier. 
This time the program initially appeared to be less successful than before, possibly because it was a much larger school, possibly because there were many more common areas and hallways which were hard to monitor, and probably because there was less staff buy-in. But it was successful in the longer run; by the time I retired some seven years later one hardly ever heard homophobic slurs in the hallways.

I’m quite sure no fundamental racist or homophobic beliefs were modified, but they certainly weren’t amplified either, and that’s the point. It is perhaps enough that it became unacceptable to express them at school. 
I think that’s probably as much as any school can aspire to.

Tuesday, April 21, 2020

Bilingual/bilingue

I’m only 75, and I’ve already been bilingual twice.
The first time, of course, was that relatively brief period after arriving in Canada between becoming functional in English and then dropping the Dutch entirely, even at home.
At first my parents really tried to maintain our Dutch at home and we must have done that, because at the time my mom’s English really wasn’t up to much. But when I was in Grade 6 my parents decided that they needed to go to Normal School to become teachers, and so Dutch was dropped en famille in favour of English. The family never went back.  My sister, who was 5 when we left Holland, has since regained a fair bit of fluency and my youngest brother, who wasn’t actually speaking yet when we left, spent a year in Holland after high school and became quite proficient. I, who first learned to read in Holland, can still read rudimentary Dutch, very slowly, because I have to sound the words out, and have retained an accent in the few words and phrases I can bring up when the situation requires that temporarily convinces Dutch speakers that I remain competent. 
It doesn’t take many sentences of very juvenile Dutch delivered in that authentic Dutch accent to disabuse them of that thought, however!
I’m often asked whether I regret that loss of my native language. No, I don’t. Our Dutch relatives are all really comfortable in English and my parents only spoke Dutch when relatives from Holland visited, and sometimes not then, so our incentives were and are limited. It’s not like Dutch is a very useful language...
Unlike French, which is, and especially in Canada. 
My dad had received a classic “Gymnasium” education: Dutch, French, English, German, Latin, and Greek. He was quite sure that his children should emulate that model to the extent possible, which meant English, French, and Latin. Being the eldest, I got to try out this educational theory, which is why I took Latin by Correspondence in Grade 9 and the second level in Grade 10 in a school where it was offered by my favourite teacher, who more regularly taught English.
I hated Latin, which was all rules of grammar and their application and I just hated rules of grammar. The joys of solving the elegant puzzle of Latin constructions, which people like my spouse claim to have relished, entirely escaped me.
Lesson learned: though it was available in a few schools in BC and always by Correspondence until the beginning of the present century, no other Havelaar took Latin in a Canadian high school. (Sandy took it in high school and at UVic, but she was an Irvine at the time!)**
But I liked French, took it all the way through high school, was active in the French Club, did fine, marks-wise, and cleverly took the “recommendation” on offer instead of taking the government exam, which undoubtedly required more knowledge of grammar than I had bothered to acquire.
Here the trail gets predictably sticky: because I had passed Grade 12 French, I was required to take the harder of the two first-year options at Uvic. And because I did well enough in that to pass comfortably, I was required to take the follow-up course the next year. 
And that is where my ability to fake competence in French came up against the hard reality of never actually mastering the grammar. Not once, but twice.
Eventually the rules were changed, and I managed to get my BA without second-year French.

Fast-forward a significant number of years. We’re living in Campbell River, where I’m teaching high school English and Sandy is teaching music theory. Sandy has a BA in French, the first three of our 4 children are already enrolled in French Immersion, and the youngest is due to enter “la maternelle” in the fall. I can see how this is going to end if I don’t do something about my lack of French skills: in a very few years the entire family is going to have conversations in a language I don’t understand. 
Besides, my failure still rankles.
So we decide to take a year off, rent out our house, and pile the entire Troop in our large, 12-passenger van. We’re off to Quebec City, where I’ve enrolled in a “French for non-Francophones” program at Université Laval and where the kids will spend the year in unilingual Quebec schools.
I arrive at Laval on the appointed day at the appointed lecture hall so I can take the competence exam, which will place me in the appropriate level. And once again my superficial appearance of competence strikes: I’m placed in the top level, along with students who are actually reasonably competent, in that they can speak what for all the world sounds like French to me. People who graduated from French Immersion programs but apparently didn’t learn the fine points, for example.
I realize immediately that I’m in well over my head.
There are 20 of us in the group, and I’m the oldest and least-competent. In the first session, trying to remember enough to explain myself to the class, I explain that “mon mari” and I normally live in Colombie-Britannique... and am at first puzzled by the burst of spontaneous laughter, then humiliated to discover that I’ve just told the class my that husband and I... You get the picture. 
It doesn’t get better for some time, and I’ve never worked harder or more persistently at anything academic than I did that year. Fear of being exposed as incompetent is a great motivator. But the results were worth the effort. By the end of December I had graduated out of the FNF program, and by the end of the year had completed the first half of Laval’s first-year French program.
For the second time in my life, I was declared and felt bilingual.
(Three years later I had negotiated an exchange to teach English in a rural school halfway between Victoriaville and Drummondville, so we returned to Quebec. But that’s another story.)
So that was me; what about the rest of the family?
When our kids started in French Immersion we heard a lot from “experts” who object to the program because: Immersion French is typically full of errors and anglicisms; too many of the students never achieve real mastery; the students’ English skills will deteriorate; the program is elitist.  There may be kernels of truth in all those observations, although we didn’t experience any of them.
Once Sandy had found us a place to live she registered the kids in local schools. For the three older ones, the transition was entirely seamless, as an anecdote will illustrate: Enid had just completed Grade 1 in Campbell River with Julie, a lovely young teacher originally from rural Quebec. In Beauport, where we now lived, she was in a Grade 2 class with two teachers, only one of whom Sandy had met previously. In October, during parent-teacher conferences, she met the other: “Enid is a good student, but has curious holes in her vocabulary. She didn’t know what a “chaloupe” is, for example.” Apparently no one had mentioned that Enid was an anglophone from BC!
Robin, our youngest, had a different experience: she started in the “maternelle” at another school and was picked up and dropped off each day by a little yellow bus. For the first few months of Maternelle parents were not welcome at the school, where there were no English speakers. In other words, she replicated the traditional immigrant experience: didn’t speak at school at all until late January and refused to speak English by the time we returned home again in July. Just like her dad!
Our kids are now the age Sandy and I were at the time. All of them are still competent in French, two have children in BC’s francophone school system (District 93) and two teach French in public high schools. All of them have had occasions to use their French skills.
As for me, we last lived in Quebec nearly 30 years ago, and what you don’t use, you lose. I no longer feel comfortable speaking (terrible accent never went away!) and writing French. I think if I ever had to, I could probably manage, but it would be a real chore. 
I still read French comfortably, so all is not all lost, but no longer consider myself bilingual.
Except for the census, of course, because being bilingual is a political statement in Canada, and I have papers to prove I’m entitled to use the designation!


**My siblings assure me I'm wrong on this recollection: they took it as well. Both
brothers recall hating Latin as much as I had so I was also wrong to feel uniquely
persecuted! I'm pretty confident, however, that years later, when my dad and I
were both working English teachers, he confessed he could no longer see the point.

Monday, April 13, 2020

Fear: a door into fascism

I was born in 1944 in Occupied Holland, during the last year of the war. My father, who had done his National Service in the Bureau of Statistics because of his Conscientious Objector status, was in hiding for a considerable part of that year because the German army wanted him. Happily, they were unsuccessful, and our little 3-person family was present for the subsequent Liberation by Canadian forces.  (Although my grandparents in Nijmegen were both killed before then by the Allied bombing that made that liberation possible.)
I don’t, of course, remember any of the war, but the familial memory of the time and the events leading up to it are the rock upon which much of my understanding of the world has been built. We haven’t discussed it, but I’d be surprised if that wasn’t also the case for my siblings.
My parents were not the sort of people who tell war stories. That would partly be true because their experiences had been mostly of banal deprivation and loss, punctuated by relatively brief periods of intense anxiety and fear. Mostly, I suspect, they had just muddled through, like most of their compatriots. But two stories from the war have accompanied me throughout most of my life: my dad hiding from the German army, when he knew they were hunting for him, in the pigsty of a neighbouring farm, and my mom recounting the horror she felt when, in the early stages of the war, citizens of Nijmegen, either fearful for their own safety or from personal conviction, turned fellow citizens who happened to be Jewish over to the invaders. A couple of those citizens who just happened to be Jewish had been their classmates.
At the time my parents were very liberal Christians, so much so, I discovered fairly late in my dad’s life, that before the war he had seriously considered studying to be a Minister. The war intervened, but when we moved to Canada and Terrace some years after the war, they sought out the United Church there and became staunch contributing members. That continued when we moved to Victoria, and ended abruptly when my father discovered the new Minister was an anti-Semite. I never learned the particulars, but the family never went back, and as far as I know none of us were ever Christians in that church-going sense again.

None of this is particularly interesting or relevant except that it accounts for my dismay when I read recent Facebook comments to the effect that some correspondents, particularly those already insulated by bodies of water, are so fearful of infection by Covid-19 that they believe their fellow citizens should be forcibly prevented from traveling. (At Easter! Talk about missing the message!)
I wasn’t traveling at Easter, and I won’t be traveling anytime soon but I just know that attitude, the one that says, “you’re not from here, and therefore you’re a danger” is very close to “you’re different, and therefore we should fear you”. It’s a wake-up call to considering where such attitudes potentially lead, and how they cater to that beast that lurks inside us all: the call to authoritarianism, the call to repressing the “other”, the call to our worst instincts, to fascism.
We have short memories, but most of us can remember when AIDS had us in a similar place, and the overt homophobia it engendered. We appear to have weathered that, but many of us can recall the calls to quarantine, to banish, to outlaw.  Indeed there are countries and states and politics that still indulge those fascist inclinations, usually in the guise of religious belief.

So what about people who go to the cottage at Easter? Why are we even worried about them? Why would we assume they are less responsible than we are? If you live in a downtown condo with your two children, have you suddenly lost the right to some down time at your cottage? Have your rights diminished because you don’t live there year round? 
Maybe some people should mind their own business unless they are actually threatened by something other than paranoid fantasy.
I’m not suggesting that Covid-19 isn’t scary. It is, particularly because we don’t know who can spread it. But our health authorities have very deliberately not panicked, and neither should we.
Obviously we should practice social distancing religiously, because we know we will not be infected by a carrier who is 6 feet or more from us. I note that in Campbell River, anecdotally, we’re already very good at this: I have a lung condition which is helped by walking daily. These days there are many other walkers, and they all so far, like me, have been scrupulous about keeping their distance. They even make a point of keeping their dogs away, although dogs really aren’t much of a concern.
We should wash our hands and avoid touching our faces when we have touched something potentially contaminated. I notice that the stores I shop in, nowadays infrequently, are excellent at disinfecting carts, surfaces, etc. They’ve gotten the message, and if they hadn’t I wouldn’t shop there.
Lastly, we should cover our mouths and noses if we think we have any potential of being a carrier. The mask won’t protect us, but it will potentially protect the ones we meet.

If all of us do all those things, we will not be a danger to others and they will not be a danger to us. We will beat this Covid-19, regardless of where we live and work most of the time.

Sunday, April 5, 2020

And then, there's that.

That was Week 3, I think.
We're still mostly isolated. But our part of Campbell River appears to be mostly normal. Except for a distinct lack of kids in the park, no discernible gatherings in the neighbourhood, and many more walking couples than usual.
On Tuesday San went to do a grocery run to the Superstore, which is pretty much deserted after 6 when she goes.
On Monday I walked with Geoff as usual, except that we can't break the walk up with an exemplary cup of coffee at the Sundance, because it's closed. (Best Americano in CR!) It's a long walk for Geoff if we can't stop halfway, but the conversation is always good.
On Saturday, it started to hail and then it snowed at our house. (Of course I replaced the winter tires on Wednesday.) Fortunately, it didn't last, and other parts of Campbell River weren't affected at all: Robin and Mike, in Willow Point, were quite surprised to see the amount of snow on our car when I met them to walk behind the airport because they hadn't had any at all.
On Friday I was scheduled to walk with Paul, but had to cancel because I had developed a very sore throat overnight. Also, I thought perhaps I'd lost my sense of taste, because I wasn't getting anything from my morning coffee. And I know the symptoms.
So I went for a long one by myself, and felt much better afterwards.
On that walk I met Rodger and Barbara with their dog, Kona. I know them because Eli and I used to meet them quite regularly, and Kona, like Eli, being mostly husky, was one of the very few dogs we met who understood Eli's insistence on proper Husky Etiquette, and consequently didn't pose a threat. Anyway. I asked them how they were, and they said they'd only just recovered from something unusually nasty, which had all the externals of Covid, but couldn't be proven to be because they'd recovered, and consequently hadn't been tested. But it had laid them very low for over two weeks, and when I saw them was their first walk for some considerable time. Although they were walking, they weren't yet traveling at their usual speed. Kona, however, was just fine, and enjoyed browsing the long grass that was growing beside the road while we talked.
Speaking of Covid, my Twitter feed assures me Prime Minister Boris has been admitted to hospital for "tests"; I'm having to suppress my inclination to schadenfreude, and to hope for a speedy recovery... Though that seems unlikely, given Roger and Barb's experience.
Of course by now everyone knows that Sir Keir is the new Labour leader: my kind of Labour leader, although I could wish for a couple dashes more charisma. But my impression after listening to a couple of the speeches he gave was that he is a distinct improvement over his predecessor, both in policy and presentation. The most important principle of electoral politics is, of course, that a dogmatically correct position is no substitute for being agreeable and flexible enough that people will vote for you.
I'm always surprised when politicians like Corbyn and Sanders (and we've had our share in the NDP!) don't apparently get that.
On Thursday San needed to pick up a couple of exam books at Long & McQuade in Courtenay and I needed to get a prescription at Costco. So San picked up her books (phone ahead to let the sole attendant know you're coming, phone when you get there, stand back from the table in front of the door until the attendant opens the door and places the package on the table, retrieve package) and off to Costco. Room in the parking lot, and a few people at the door. Then a line all the way out the other end of the Costco parking lot and back out to the road. After 15 minutes of it not moving I phoned the pharmacy. No, they couldn't mail the prescription. To access that service you need to order through Costco.ca. But she'd noticed that the numbers fell off considerably towards the end of the day. So I left CR at about 5, zoomed through Costco picking up the entire list except popcorn, and was back in CR before 7. If we need to go back, we know what to do.
And that list of events doesn't even include all the SnapChats and Zoom conversations and...Leanne and Jay's Troops, who came over most days, just to talk for a while, us at the top of our steps and they at the bottom... All much appreciated.