Seriously?

I have had a slow introduction to the Quebec Education system. I had a temporary contract at a private school for three months last winter and have done some substitution work at a private school for learning disabled kids. At the special needs school, I noticed my first day that the classrooms were pretty old looking, the books, having been used for twenty-some years were falling apart and that for a class of ADD children, there was an alarming amount of reading in the curriculum, with very little hands on learning. The school is 75% French and 25% English, and my first experiences there were on the English side. Then I worked on the French side. With new books, new desks and even blinds for the windows! Coincidence? I've been in Montreal too long to believe in that.

So finally after a lot of running about, I finally got all the appropriate papers to the smaller school boards to apply for teaching. I'm still missing the mandatory exam, but I'm hoping I may have found a way around it. At least for now. A few days later, the Commission Scolaire de la Pointe de l'Ile (Tip of the island school board) called me and proposed two positions. They were both teaching drama, one at an elementary school and one at a high school. I told her I would prefer the high school and set up an interview for the following day, Friday. I made my way up to Montreal North and approached the address I had been given. I reached an enormous building on Henri Bourassa East and the sign on the building confirmed that I was at the right place. I made my way to the front doors, just as a student leaned out the window and yelled "Hey Sexy!". I began to question whether high school was the place for me. How hard would I have to work to get respect from the kids and the staff if I was mistaken for a student at my interview? I walked into the building and began to feel slightly overwhelmed. A group of security guards were huddled around the reception desk dealing with four awkward looking boys. I tried to get their attention and eventually asked one of the guards for directions to human resources. Up the escalators to the third floor.

The human resources lady greeted me excitedly and informed me that they had been looking for a drama teacher for awhile. She directed me to the principal's office for my interview. He seemed immediately unimpressed. For the next forty minutes, I was grilled about my pedagogical vision. I struggled to find a way to explain that it was difficult question, given that drama isn't like science or math, where students are coming in with a particular set of skills. I gave examples of exercises and activities, long term goals and tossed out the idea of each semester culminating in a final performance for the school. He seemed unimpressed. How would I go about preparing a lesson plan? According to my goals for that class. Here are some examples. I was getting flustered and frustrated that his questions seemed to be coming out of a standard interview guide, without room for understanding that the arts cannot necessarily be taught in the same way. I struggled between helping him to understand how important the dramatic arts are in the school curriculum and sounding too artsy. I soon discovered the reason for his hesitation, his barrage of questions and his insistence that my plans need to be more concrete. I was being interviewed to teach nineteen classes of thirty students each. I suddenly understood and became quite uneasy. With six hundred students, how likely is it that I would even learn all of their names by the end of the year? How effectively would I be able to help them reach the goals that I had set for them, if I only see them for seventy-five minutes every nine days? Most importantly, with nearly six hundred students to keep track of, how quickly would I lose my mind?

And so continues the quest for the perfect job- or at least a tolerable one. ..

Reasonably Québécois

If Quebec were a reasonable province, Bill 101 would never have passed. Montreal would still be the country’s economic centre. Francophone children would have the right to go to school in English and allophones the right to choose between French and English education. If Quebec were a reasonable province, it would never have built the world’s second largest airport two hours away from the city it was meant to serve. Nor would they have built a stadium that took thirty years of smoking by Montreal residents to pay it off. Were Quebec a reasonable province, two hundred thousand Montreal residents would not spend their national holiday moving. Major grocery stores would be allowed to staff more than four employees after nine pm and bread would be delivered everyday, even on Mondays.

In light of these lapses of judgment, forgive me if I question the goals of a body established to discuss the issue deemed reasonable accommodation. Do I believe that newcomers to Canada should have the right to retain their culture? Absolutely; what would Montreal be without its Muslim population or its Jewish population? It would be a city without Schwartz’s and shish taouk. Diversity characterizes Montreal. Makes the city and the province more rich. In how many other cities of the world could you have ten friends sitting around a table, all of different backgrounds, switching back and forth between English and French as though they were one language? It should go without saying that values guaranteed every Canadian under the Charter of rights and freedoms will also be applied to newcomers. That is what made Hérrouxville’s code of conduct so shocking- that it was denying the newcomers basic rights promised to every Canadian. The Charter is not a buffet. It doesn’t allow us to decide that particular groups are exempt from it. The Charter is part of our culture in Quebec, and in Canada. There is no greater threat to this culture than a proposed code of conduct that contradicts what it means to be a Canadian.

My old roommate, Fajer, on the cover of a Quebec weekly

drawing attention to the reasonable accommodation debate.

The world is changing. Economics and communication are moving people more than ever from one edge of the globe to the other. It is not just Quebec that is changing. Korea has always been proud to have the most homogenous population in the world, but even they are starting to see blue-eyed Korean children. There is no need and no point in fighting these changes- they are inevitable. In a diverse city like Montreal, mixed race couples are now common place and there is no turning back. The argument that society is changing too fast is a weak one. The pace of change around the world has been accelerated, not just here.

As the reasonable accommodation debate heats up, I cringe. In a province that has never been known to be reasonable to any sort of accommodation, I fear the judgments that will soon flow freely. Quebec needs to wake up and realize they are dangerously close to falling behind the rest of the world. While children in China, Japan, North and South Korea are learning English, many Quebeckers are still unable to communicate in the world’s language of business. Bill 101 will not be remembered as Quebec’s saving grace, but rather as the nail in the coffin. If reason resided in Quebec, our street signs would be bilingual and bus drivers would all speak English, if for no other reason than to accommodate tourists. Quebec’s children would grow up perfectly bilingual and unconcerned about the politics of learning to speak English. If the Chinese are learning to speak Japanese, even after World War II, I’m sure we can toss French/English politics aside. But reason, I’m afraid, resides in Toronto. Which is what makes the reasonable accommodation debate so frightening here. If Quebec is unable to accommodate its English speaking population, what chance do other ethnicities have?

Adventures in Vars, Ontario

The last couple weeks have been chaotic. Carrie arrived for her first visit to Montreal, Thelma and Francis arrived for their wedding. Fred and I stepped up to the plate as tour guides and tried to give Montreal a fair showing, which doesn't take much. On Thursday, Carrie and I hopped into our rented Hyundai Elantra and sped off in search of Thelma's farm in Navan, Ontario. Armed with our MapQuest directions, we were sure to get there in one piece. We bravely faced the streets and highways of Montreal, marked not only by potholes, but also by the littered remains of cars that just couldn't go on. Ontario license plates scattered across the harsh terrain- drivers that couldn't handle the stress of driving the streets of Montreal. We sped towards Ottawa and finally an hour and a half later made a quick right onto Rockdale Road in the direction of Navan. Arriving downtown Navan, we realized that MapQuest had failed us (or rather we had failed MapQuest- apparently you need to give it a complete address). The directions were incomplete, so we dialed the farm, hoping that Thelma would be able to give us directions...

The night that changed the relationship between Thelma and I began with Rob and Syd, a lot of homemade wine, and a hot tub. Rob and I had already been dating for a couple months, and Thelma and Syd started dating that night. We were up all night and in the morning, Rob drove me to work and took the car to drive Thelma home. He'd never been to her house before, but I assured him that it wasn't far from where my mom lived. And it isn't. But Thelma's famous sense of direction (or lack thereof) resulted in a good hour of driving around SW Calgary until finally one of them saw something that looked familiar and were able to figure out where to go from there. Thelma had been living in that same neighbourhood for most of her life. This was the girl that I called to get directions from downtown Navan to her farm.

First off, Thelma informed us that she didn't in fact live in Navan, so were in the wrong place entirely. Carrie and I laughed and bickered through the nonsensical directions we were given. Thelma told us the addresses on her street weren't sequential, so not to bother looking at them. The house can't be seen from the street, so don't bother looking. We were told to look for a green mailbox, brown cows in the pasture and a corn stand on the corner. As you can imagine, there is no shortage of brown cows or corn stands in the Ontario countryside. After a heated argument about whether or not there was a fire station on Thelma's street, we discovered that she in fact lived in the town of Vars, and not Navan. Is it any wonder MapQuest and I had a fight about what town her street was in?

We eventually arrived. For the next four days, the Bearbrook Resort Inn was home to us at the incredible inflated rate of 100$/night. That night, we took Thelma out for her Bachelorette party with a group of her high school friends. Despite her best efforts to remain sober, Thelma had a few too many martinis at eighteen. For half the night, she sounded a bit like a broken record- proclaiming that she had too much to do to deal with being hung over the next day. By the time we met up with Francis's stag party, she was having fun and had forgotten about her list of things to do. On the way back to the farm, we enjoyed our last 4am breakfast run for quite awhile and dropped Thelma off at home. We told her we wouldn't leave unless she promised to go right to bed, she promised, so we drove back to our 'cozy' room at Bearbrook. I discovered the following day that my good friend Thelma, who I'd known for eighteen years and was about to stand beside as maid of honour, was a liar. She stayed up for hours after we dropped her off- making center pieces and finalizing the seating arrangement.

The wedding was beautiful, despite all of our fears that there was too much left to do. Thelma finally learned how to delegate the day before the wedding and everything came together. The ceremony was relaxed, simple and beautiful all at once. We were attacked by mosquitoes and Francis, ever the gentleman, was chastised during the ceremony for slapping his bride's forehead to save her from a bite. Both Thelma and Francis were so happy all day and it made me think. When I get married, I think we'll elope.