March 28
(Para
los padres de Sergio, si estan leyendo mi blog, me imagino que Sergio ya les
describio todo de su ceremonia de ciudadania. Disculpenme que no tengo muchas
fotos, pero la luz en la sala no brillo mucho, y aunque tenia mas fotos, no
revelaron bien.)
Here
are the pictures from the citizenship ceremony of my friend Sergio, who became
a citizen officially on February 28, 2007--exactly 1 month ago from this entry.
I was so happy to be able to join him on this day, one because he doesn't have
any family here, and he is like a big brother to me, and two because I've known
him almost since he first arrived in Canada 8 years ago. It was also
interesting just to go to this ceremony as someone that was born in Canada
because this is an experience that we never go through ourselves.
The
judge gave her little speech as to what she wanted to say, and then everyone
had to give the oath or swear that they would be loyal to the Queen of England
and all that jazz. During that part, no one was allowed to take photos. Tonia
and I couldn't figure out why that was, but since then, I've talked to other
people to see why they think that is, and someone suggested that maybe just
because it's supposed to be a sacred part of the ceremony, it's considered to
be sacriligious to take photos. That sounds reasonable to me. The funny thing
was that everyone has to has to say the oath in both official languages. The
judge does the French part first, probably to get the worst over with, and she
said everything really slowly and with minimal syllables in each phrase. She
said they did the best job in French of any group she heard, but when they said
it in English, suddenly the volume rose in the room!
Anyways,
each of the people becoming citizens were called up--either individually or as
a family--to receive their certificate and citizenship card. Each person had
been assigned a numbered chair to sit in, and at first I wondered why, but upon
hearing the other judge helping to call out names, I realised what I think is
the logic: the person couldn't pronounce at least a good half of the names on
the list, so if she mangled them too much, it didn't matter because everyone
was called out in numerical order so you would know you're next, whether you
understood your name or not! It was quite funny. After, they had a little
reception outside the room, consisting of fresh fruit, cookies, and juice, but
as Tonia and Sergio hadn't eaten lunch, we walked across the street to a little
restaurant for more substantial foodage.
Congratulations,
Sergio!!
8:48 AM | Permalink
March 26
It
seems unecessary for me to have titles for every entry. Not all the episodes of
my life are worth framing in that way. So I'm not giving this one a good title,
and you can expect a few more like that in the future, I'm sure.
Since
my last entry, my health hasn't really improved much. I've been sick for 2
weeks now, and I'm getting really tired of it. I am actually improving day by
day, but so slowly. Whereas last weekend, I cancelled all my activities that I
didn't have to do on account of being ill, this past weekend, I couldn't do
that, plus, I can't put my whole life on hold for such a long period of time. I
went to the Beijing Opera both Saturday and Sunday evening. There were two
different shows each night, which is why I didn't want to miss anything. The first
night was 4 mini-operas showcasing various aspects of what is considered to be
part of the art of Chinese opera, which were singing, dancing, fighting, and
dialogue. The fight scenes were amazing with some very complicated acrobatics.
The dialogie part wasn't translated at all, so I can't really comment on that
much, but there is much more speaking in these operas than in western ones. The
speaking style, also, is highly stylised in a higher-pitched, slower form of
speaking than would normally be spoken. As Chinese languages are tonal, I
consider them to be musical in that sense, so the dialogue sounded very
sing-songy to me. The dancing is not really like dancing I am used to, but you
can see the choreography there. The singing incorprates some of the techniques
I would be familiar with from western opera, such as breathing and use of the
sinus cavities for sound amplification, but it was more nasaly and much more
higher-pitched. To be quite honest, it was hard on my ears after a while, but
it's the same reason I don't enjoy a lot of female singers from India, because
it's generally the style to sing in much higher, sharper tones than what we
have in western music. The interesting thing, though, is that many of the male
singers that are considered to be the Beijing Opera's top singers also sing
like the women do. It certainly sounds very unnatural to me!
The
second night was one long story and combined all the things we saw the night
before. If this opera made regular appearances here, I probably wouldn't
frequent it, but it's definitely worth seeing that for the experience and to
compare how it's different from operas here.
Outside
of that, I have posted a couple of new pictures. The one that I would like to
point out is the one of the Bohemian Waxwing. I hope to get a better picture of
it up soon as I have to re-install my camera software so I can edit it
properly, enlarge it and crop it so you can see it better, but I wanted to post
this for a while now. This is a really neat bird. I had never seen one before,
and this one was eating the berries off the tree in our front yard. I didn't
know that we had birds with such bright yellow on them. Fortunately, Kelly has
a Birds of North America book, which is how we found out what this bird was.
Happily for me, on the same page was a picture of the Great Kiskadee, which is
a yellow-breasted bird I had seen all the time in Mexico and was dying to know
the name of. I did find it once on the Internet, and then I didn't remember the
name and could never find it again on the Internet. So I felt a little
frustrated about that, but here, I have the name of it, and since I've posted
it on my blog, I hope I won't forget it again!
11:01 AM | Read comments (1) | Permalink | Entertainment
March 18
...because
I have the sense to question things to see they are not always what they seem
to be. This thought (not specifically the reference to the "I Can't
Believe it's not Butter" commercial) has been on my mind during the last
week. I started my new job at the junior high school, and my first day
consisted of joining in with the grade 6 orientation. A couple of the feeder
schools popped over to see what kinds of things our jr. high has to offer, and
it was my chance to learn about the school as well. It was interesting to
follow along with one group and observe the very polite behaviour they exhibited,
raising their hands to ask questions, keeping quiet when a teacher was
speaking, and so forth. I think back to the days when the bane of my existence
at school consisted of standing in lines to go anywhere or do anything,
following directions as precisely as they were given if not even more so, and
quietly biding my time until instruction from authority asked me to do
otherwise. I
take it for granted that I question so many things I am told to do now.
As
educators or other types of people involved in the education system, we
frequently express our incredulity at the lack of critical thinking skills
students possess. We wonder where their parents failed them or where our system
failed them, but if I think about the kinds of questions I ask now, I would probably
have been labelled as a troublemaker or some such thing had I asked such
questions at a much younger age. I did ask some of them then. I remember
critiquing my own jr. high school, pointing out its hypocrisy, which was the
difference between the way they said they wanted to treat us (as adults) and
the school rules (which were infantile). I critiqued this in the form of a
poem, which I handed in for some assignment in Language Arts class in grade 9.
I can't even remember what grade I got, although I think it was ok, but I do
remember the teacher writing the comment on it that I was taking chances with
my writing.
In
grade 6, I questioned one of my teachers, who treated one of my classmates with
disrespect. Granted, the kid had not helped himself by the amount of times he
had been disciplined by the principal himself, but it was no reason to call him
the kinds of names my teacher called him. I didn't question the teacher
directly, but I think I did take the right route by reporting this indignity to
my mom, who approached the teacher about it, and he stopped calling that
student names.
In
high school, I questioned a substitute teacher we had, who came into our
classroom and treated us as though we were some sort of feral members of
society for which she had been tortured to tend to for the rest of her already
tortured life. I had rarely been treated with so little disrespect in my life.
It did not justify the fact that our class decided to stage our own rebellion
by not working at all during that class, undoubtedly ensuring the rage of our
teacher the next day, but when he had finished venting, I somehow gained the
courage to state the behaviours of this poor woman, and the teacher then had
reason to at least realise what kind of person we had been facing. I supposed
there are always ways of going about all these things.
But I
started thinking, if all our kids really engaged in critical thinking, we could
have quite the rebellion on our hands! There are many rules and regulations
that are senseless, but the kids should only have enough critical thinking
skills to question why the cotton ginny helped to revolutionise Industrial U.S.
rather than why we should need to wear indoor/outdoor shoes in perfectly dry
and clean weather. If we gave them the skills to question our policies, they
would be forced to join our master's degree programs where we talk about these
things--and I have no doubt that they do not lack the meta-cognitive skills to
do so!
I
don't know that I quite finished formulating all my thoughts around this
subject, but as I observe kids more in the next little while in my new jobs, I
think I shall be able to conclude. In the meantime, I've been dealing with
being ill again, getting another cold. Thankfully, it didn't last long, but a
week was long enough. I realised that I hadn't put anything up here for a
while, so at least I've had time to think of a topic to write about other than
just cheating and putting up stuff for blogthings.
8:00 PM | Permalink