HA! Yes!
Here is a post I once made on a message board, long long ago:
Screw you, automated public washrooms. Screw you and your tendency to flush while I’m still sitting on the toilet, followed by your refusal to flush once I’m actually done, no matter how frantically I wave my hands in front of your sensors. Screw you and your one-drip soap dispensers, your hyper-pressurized taps in front of which I must spend 15 minutes contorting myself into the exact position required for you to emit a three-second blast of scalding water. Screw you and your four centimetres of paper towel that you reluctantly spit out just as I am reaching the very very end of my very last shred of patience. Screw you, automated public washrooms, and your assumption that human beings are not intelligent enough to figure out how to press the necessary buttons in order to flush their own toilets, aquire their own soap, regulate their own water flow, and measure out an appropriate amount of paper towel. Screw you, automated public washrooms, and everything you stand for.
I wrote this post for an educational blog that I was invited to participate in, after attending a three-day workshop on learning disabilities a couple of weeks ago. Because I spent a lot of time on it, and because I am a shameless self-promoter, I’m going to re-post it here.
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My first impression as I took my seat in the back – near the snack table – was that I recognized that familiar buzz in the room: it’s the buzz that happens whenever a large group of educators comes together in one place. The steam had barely risen off the morning’s coffee and already the room was humming with questions, ideas, stories, gripes, concerns, and speculation. The issue of learning disabilities, it seems, is a catalyst for never-ending discussion – often cyclical, sometimes controversial, and usually resulting in more questions than answers.
As a relative newcomer to the adult literacy field, I knew that learning disabilities were central to my practice, but I wasn’t confident in my ability to help learners identify them, or to provide tutors with the tools they need to work with them. Over the course of the training event, I realized two things: first, that I had a better grasp of the issues surrounding LD than I thought I had, and second, that a lot of people with more experience than me are still asking a lot of the same questions. This I find both reassuring and worrisome.
Instead of trying to cram the entirety of my learning experience into a few paragraphs, I’d like to distill it down to the main themes and ideas I came away with. Let’s see if I can put it down in one sentence: Learning disabilities are complex yet fairly easily identifiable syndromes that differ for each individual, and therefore require a wide range of approaches and accommodations which turn out to be useful for most any student in any educational setting; this realization has led to the development of new educational philosophies such as the Universal Design for Learning. (Phew! Is it cheating to use a semi-colon?)
Linda Siegel’s presentation on assessment reaffirmed something that I think many of us already felt – that with a few simple tools, and our own instincts as literacy practitioners, we can work with our learners to create a fairly accurate picture of their needs and challenges, without a $2000 price tag attached. Formal assessments, of course, can help learners access programs and funding that might otherwise be unavailable to them, but I was inspired by the (rather obvious, when you think about it) idea that help should be available to anyone who displays a need for it.
This led me to wonder why help isn’t always available to those who need it. Is it a question of politics? Economics? Limited resources? Possibly, but I think there may be something else going on here as well. Many times I’ve heard the idea expressed – have, in fact, expressed it myself – that a formal identification of LD is a way to help an individual avoid being labelled “lazy” or “stupid”. In a way, the underlying assumption here is that help should only be available to those who have a good excuse for requesting it, as opposed to those who are lazy and don’t want to do things the hard way, or those who won’t be able to learn no matter what approach is taken. Yikes.
Maybe what we really need is a re-evaluation of our society’s collective assumptions and biases. Are any learners really “lazy”, or do they come across as such because they are overwhelmed by any number of factors – family life, self-esteem, socioeconomic status, poor nutrition – and unable to deal with the tasks we have set out for them? How do we define “stupid”? At what point on the IQ scale does an individual move from having an officially recognized cognitive disability to simply being “stupid”? Does the individual in the former case deserve help more than the latter? I think most of us in the field of education would recoil from using such terms to describe our learners, but as a society, I don’t believe we are free of their stigma.
By the end of the three days, I had the sense that the training event’s strength lied in inspiring this kind of meandering train of theoretical thought, further feeding the buzz in the room that I had picked up on the first day. I will admit that I didn’t feel I had come away with much in the way of concrete actionable strategies that differed greatly from ones I had already been employing. On the other hand, the complex nature of LD belies any sort of “quick fix” or magic one-size-fits-all solution; as much as I’d like a flowchart that tells me to use strategy X with learner X, I realize now that it doesn’t really work that way. Overall, I feel I have a clearer understanding of the issues surrounding LD, and – apart from the bedbugs in my hotel room (don’t worry, Lit BC, I know that wasn’t your fault) – the event was a very worthwhile experience. I hope I can pass on some of the inspiration I felt to my tutors and colleagues when I facilitate a workshop on LD next spring.
I love it when one of my little pet theories is vindicated.
In yesterday’s Globe and Mail there was an article on driver distraction and cellphones. Ontario is introducing legislation (already in place in most provinces) that bans hand-held cellphones in the driver’s seat, but still allows hands-free devices.
Ever since the first province announced the first piece of this kind of legislation, I’ve been spouting off to anyone who will listen that hands-free isn’t good enough. Drivers may have both hands on the wheel, but that doesn’t mean they’re paying attention to the road. The Globe cites a University of Utah professor who agrees: “Prof. Strayer has measured the eye movements, brain activity and reaction time of cellphone-happy drivers, and has found those who prefer to chat while keeping their hands on the wheel are just as distracted.”
Dissenters argue that if we’re to ban dialing-and-driving outright, we should also ban loud car stereos and conversation with passengers. But I’ve always felt that there is an important difference, though I’ve had difficulty articulating why. Again, Prof. Strayer backs me up: “Talking to someone on your phone is more dangerous than chatting with someone sitting in the passenger seat: The effort engages visual and spatial parts of the brain that would otherwise be focused on the road.”
It makes sense, if you think about it. When someone is in the seat beside you, they’re sharing your experience of the road – they can see if there’s a busy intersection up ahead, if you’re getting cut off by a jerk in a sports car, if a pedestrian steps into the lane out of nowhere. They can shut up at the appropriate time and let you as the driver react to these situations; you don’t have to explain to them why you’ve suddenly dropped your end of the dialogue. In a phone conversation, the lack of visual cues means we have to put more effort into verbal responses and space-fillers.
I think there are a few other factors at play here, too – for one thing, voices over cellphones are obviously not as clear, and more concentration is required simply to decode people’s words. Also, I think the brain tries to visualize the person that is being spoken to, their surroundings, whatever situation they happen to be describing. My brain does, anyway. None of these things come into play when you’re conversing with someone inside the car.
Why do I care, you ask? I’m not even a driver. Well, I’m not a driver for a reason. The reason is that cars scare the ever-living shit out of me. Cars with distracted people at their wheels, even more so. It’s a bit of a fixation, I’ll admit. But consider one final quote from the Globe, which informs us that cellphone users are “four times more likely than other drivers to be in an accident – about the same rate of people who drive while drunk.” Seriously. Drunk driving in our society has been placed on about the same level as torturing puppies, and offenders are regularly hauled off to jail. So why do we continue to not only tolerate but defend other behaviours that are equally as dangerous?
My favourite news-geek mentions both my favourite bird and one of my favourite books of all time! Too much.
It’s the Rachel-giggles at the end that truly make my day.
I have a confession to make.
You know those eco-friendly light bulbs? The spirally ones that are supposed to help us save the planet by vastly reducing energy consumption while keeping our hydro bills down to a minimum?
I hate them.
I hate them! They’re so ugly. The light they give off is like the worst kind of institutional fluorescent glare, only put through an ugly-filter that increases their milky blue coma-inducing nastiness by a factor of 10. They make my eyes go numb. I really hate them.
I’m probably supposed to feel bad about this. What would David Suzuki think? I’m probably supposed to graciously set aside my shallow aesthetic concerns in favour of sustainability, environmental responsibility, peace, love, good vibes, and harmony with all living things.
Pfff. I hate them, I can’t help it. Normally I’m all in favour of environmentally sound practices, such as buying locally and eschewing cars and wandering the halls of my workplace looking for a recycling bin in which to deposit my (organic, thank you) soup can.
But I think I have to draw the line here. I will not live in a house lit up like a prison hospital. Honestly, light that ugly can’t be good for you. I bet in twenty years’ time they’ll be linking it to waves of chronic depression and increases in suicidal thoughts. Hopefully by then someone will have come up with a better version that makes the paint on your walls actually look like the colour it’s supposed to be, and doesn’t suck the energy directly out of the top of your head the moment you flick on the light switch.
Before you get all excited, the topic of today’s post is… ♥♥ Love ♥♥. The other day I was perusing the latest issue of Off-Centre, Kelowna’s entertaining independent news-zine, which contained an article about the politics of telling your s.o. that you love them – specifically, who should say it first, and under what circumstances. My first thought was that the whole who-should-say-it-first thing, when put in the context of a same-sex relationship, either becomes completely moot or wildly complicated, depending on your point of view. My second thought was that my first thought was based purely on speculation, given that I haven’t been in a same-sex relationship. Yet.
It was my third thought, however, which drew me back to my poor neglected little blog here. It was a vague sort of half-formed thought (as many of my thoughts tend to be), and so it seemed appropriate to try to flesh it out in this forum. It had something to do with how romantic love is fetishized in our culture, turned into a token object to be coveted, kept close, and handed over like a prize at the end of some long and drawn-out audition process whose rules have been made up along the way.
Now, I’m going to resist the urge to get all hippie-philosophical about how love is everywhere and everything and connects us all like spaghetti noodles in a tomato-sauce universe. (But it does, you know.) Anyway. That’s not the point. Even if you don’t believe that, why should it be such a power game to tell somebody you love them? Why does love get carved up and categorized into the kind that’s okay to express with abandon, and the kind that must be tiptoed around carefully? If two close friends become lovers and eventually life mates, is there a period of in-between time where they have to stop telling each other they love each other because *gasp* it suddenly might actually mean something important? Doesn’t it always mean something important? And what’s so scary about that?
I don’t have the answers to any of these questions.
One of the ideas that has stuck with me from my time hanging around with the Baha’is is the concept of love, romantic or otherwise, as a reflection of divine virtues in another person. Simply put, we come to love people when we see them express universally virtuous qualities. I like this very much. It takes the responsibility for being lovable (and hence the scariness) out of our own hands and into the hands of whatever ephemeral higher power you may or may not believe in. Then the act of saying “I love you” becomes an acknowledgement of these qualities, rather than a handing-over of power with its resultant vulnerability. It’s like an extension of the Hindu greeting namaste: “I salute the god within you”.
Okay, my inner hippie-philosopher is creeping back out again, so I think it’s time for bed. Namaste. ♥
I’m gonna go off on a tangent here (if it’s possible to go on a tangent on a blog about nothing in particular that nobody reads except me) and talk about my troublesome relationship with food.
The trouble, basically, is that I’m not very good at feeding myself. I mean, my fine motor skills are adequate. But I experience an abnormal amount of stress around the ideas of planning and preparing and storing meals for myself. I enjoy food, very much, when other people make it; I just can’t seem to love cooking the way some people do. When I’m hungry, I want to eat NOW, not thirty minutes from now after I’ve chopped and mixed and sautéed. When I’m not hungry, I can’t be bothered to think about food. Hence I end up eating whatever takes the shortest amount of time to get from shelf to face. I think I would starve if bananas didn’t exist.
Some people who know me have picked up on this, and taken pity. I have a friend who invites me over for dinner at least once a week, and is so concerned for my nutritional welfare that she sends me home with Tupperware containers full of leftovers to see me through the next few days as well. I’m sure it helps that I’m pathetically grateful when people feed me. Just today my roommate chided me for calling her the “best roommate ever” simply because she offered me some leftover pea soup in the fridge. But honestly, gestures like that can make the difference between a healthy, well-rounded lunch and a microwaved burrito.
The funny thing is, a lot of other people see me as some kind of ultra-health nut nutritionist superstar. I mean, the quickie things I grab tend to be things like organic roasted cashews and fresh fruit, rather than potato chips and Twinkies, and I avoid meat, dairy, eggs, refined sugar, caffeine, yeast, wheat, processed foods, GMOs, trans fats, (pause for breath) and anything that has spent too long in the bottom of a frying pan. So I guess I’m doing okay. But I’d like to stop having paroxysms of inferiority whenever I’m confronted with a recipe book. Besides, I’m pretty much a sell-out, as far as health nuts go. Put a plate of homemade chocolate chip cookies in front of me and I will eat them all without blinking. I just can’t be bothered to bake them myself, you see.
I tend to bash this topic around a lot, but that’s because it’s important to me. And this is a new blog, with a new focus, so I’m going to have another go at it.
Having finally come to terms with my not-entirely-straightness, it came as a shock to discover that I might have to answer to people about my not-entirely-gayness, too. A new word entered my vocabulary: biphobia – and, oh what fun, it turns out this particular brand of bigotry strikes from both sides of the fence. That a marginalized group of people should turn around and marginalize an even smaller group of people within its own ranks seems to me staggeringly hypocritical, but I suppose it probably isn’t without historic precedent. We’re all prone to the best and the worst in human nature, after all.
At any rate, even before learning of this phenomenon I knew I was not going to be saddling myself with any label. I’ve always avoided them in the past; why should this be any different? Aside from all the misconceptions surrounding the term bisexual (it’s a fad; it’s a phase; it doesn’t exist; it’s a brief stopover en route to Gayville; it means you’re promiscuous or flaky or confused or greedy or kinky or exhibitionist or into threesomes), there are a whole host of other potential terms to describe those of us who find ourselves somewhere in the middle of the spectrum: bi-curious, pansexual, heteroflexible, homoflexible, straightish, gayish, questioning, queer, etc. And yet I’m not comfortable with any of those, either. None of them feels like quite the right fit. The very reason people feel compelled to come up with new labels is because the old labels start to attract unwelcome nuances; it follows that the new ones eventually will, as well. My solution: reject them all.
The writers over at the excellent blog Bi-Furious! have made a compelling case for reclaiming the term bisexual:
I avoided identifying as bisexual for a long time […] because all of the negative associations that came with it. And it’s important to me to do something about that. […] I think it’s important to be out in the world identifying as bisexual, being a complex human being, and obviously not fitting the stereotypes. […] [If] no one speaks out against the way bisexuals are represented in our culture, those images will never change. There would be nothing to replace them.
I appreciate their argument, and applaud the steps they are taking to counter biphobia, yet I don’t find myself entirely in line with this ideology. I continue to be uncomfortable with the idea of using a single word to identify an entire human being, under any circumstances. I think it’s far more effective to force people to dig deeper, to learn first about who you are and what you stand for, before allowing them to mentally affix a set of syllables beside your name.
It’s just a bunch of junk. Garbage can lids and old saucepans and lard tins and car fenders, all wired together way down in the middle of the Siwash cave. Every now and then, this contraption moves – a bat will fly into it, a rock will fall on it, an updraft will catch it, a wire will rust through, or it’ll just move for no apparently logical reason – and one part of it will hit against another part. And it’ll go bonk or poing and that bonk or that poing will echo throughout the caverns. It might go bonk or poing five times in a row. Then a pause; then one more time. After that, it might be silent for a day or two, maybe a month. Then the clock’ll strike again, say twice. Following that there could be silence for an entire year – or just a minute or so. Then, POING! so loud you nearly jump out of your skin. And that’s the way it goes. Striking freely, crazily, at odd intervals.
-From Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
If you have never experienced an Indian wedding, I urge you to go out at once and invite yourself to one. Luckily for me, I did not have to be so impertinent; I was an invitee. Since I would include amongst my favourite things Bhangra music, matar paneer, gulab jamun, dangly earrings, and multicoloured silk, I jumped at the chance. And this was an Indian wedding like no other, straight out of Bollywood, including a dashing groom and a celebrity-beautiful bride who reportedly spent many thousands of dollars to cover her entire person in sequins.
Being the only white person in a room full of 500 Indians was an interesting experience. The friend who had invited me allowed me to raid her wardrobe, and I went all out: sparkly sari, sparkly bangles, sparkly necklace, sparkly earrings, bindi (sparkly thing between the eyes), tika (sparkly thing that lies along the part in your hair). I felt like a tourist in my own country playing dress-up. People stared at me and took my photo, and I stared at them and took their photo.
Being a wedding of second-generation Indians in Canada, of course, the event was an interesting mix of Eastern and Western customs. My friends explained to me that even fifteen years ago, the community would have been shocked and outraged by the slideshow of the bride-and-groom-to-be flaunting their pre-wedding smooches, by the bridesmaids getting tipsy on the dance floor, and by the best man declaring at the end of his speech: “It doesn’t matter where you get your appetite, as long as you eat at home.”
In this ballroom suffused with spicy scents and Punjabi syllables, it seemed ludicrous that anyone should fear cultural assimilation – who in their right mind would give up this colour and happy chaos for the drabness of a melting pot? – but then I found a French fry in my pakora (actually integrated into the batter, I tell you, not simply mixed in accidentally on the buffet table), and I began to understand.
