Can you believe this? Only in Canada you say? Shitty!
Trudeau speaks about federal funding to fight racism given to anti-semitic organization. “We cannot accept intolerance, we cannot accept racism, hatred and anger, particularly that which is not funded by the government.”
“After all, we do racism better than anyone. Just ask the Black Olives Matter organization.”
Oh and by the by-way, to fight systemic racism at the Canadian federal level only BIPOC individuals will be new hires. Whitey need not apply. There! Whew! Case closed. Next file?
Oh yeah, I forgot : 2 + 2 = 4 is a sign of whiteness or white priveledge. We prefer: “hey dude and dude-ess, bad ass: 2 + 2 = 5. Yeah bro, 4 / 2 = 0 white assess we have to worry about.”
However, woke math advocates pivoted from the falling performance of students, stating the curriculum needs to incorporate Indigenous Knowledge Systems and anti-racism to counter white supremacy and Eurocentrism, i.e. Colonialism.
That should fix the falling grade standards.
“Okay whitey: 10 beads divided by 15 beads equals 25 beads but I have no beads. No? Ask the feds for more beads then. I particularly like the earth tone coloured beads myself…taupe!
I hope none of these woke graduates go into banking, or accounting, or financial advisement.
All this talk about the abusive residential schools? What about all of us Anglo Saxon Caucasian Catholic School boys and girls? I was abused by the nuns in elementary school growing up in Toronto: Our Lady of Peace – as in the strap and the hard slap across the face by the hands of Sister Mary Bernice (not her real name). When I graduated to a Catholic Private High School for Boys that was run by the Basilian Brothers I also graduated to major pain.
I wrote a book about it. “I thought I Died And Gone to Heaven. An Existential Journey.” Check it out by clicking the link at the top of the page.
Here is an excerpt. From my elementary school days:
September 1957. It was now time for school. Grade one. I
was a smart young lad back then, for I skipped kindergarten.
What kind of name is that anyway, kindergarten? Jimmy-mum
and I would go together: walk to school, and keep each other
company all the way and on the way. It was about a mile and a
half to walk, normally taking a shortcut through a huge hydrofield.
I can still remember that walk. Stay on the left side of the
road, face traffic, look both ways, cut across the street, quickly,
then walk through the tall long grass of the hydro-field. That
field’s tall soft early autumn grass seemed to undulate in the light
breeze, like an ocean of grass. Each long and tenuous swell
appearing to a young fellow like me as an enormous mountain
barrier or a sea swell that had to be climbed or sailed across.
Down hill and dale we would go, through valley and trough, then
up to the next crest, then to the next and to the next, finally
portaging across some wild and raging river until, alas, back to
the reality of the schoolyard where I would be confined for the
next seven years.
Catholic grade school: grades first through eighth. No middle
school, no junior high or whatever they feel inclined to call these
things these days. To us kids it made no difference. And to an
imaginative lad, school was school. And it sucked. And the
Catholic schools really, really sucked because in addition to all of
the scholarly stuff we also had to contend with the wrath of God
disguised in long flowing black robes and habits. Sister this and
sister that. Father this and father that. Adapt quickly and quietly,
and quickly and quietly we did for it soon became apparent that
it was us against them. For that reason alone our time in the
Catholic school system was the very best of times as well as the
very worst of times. At its worst? A residential school for white
Anglo-Saxon boys and girls. At its best? It was a great deal of
fun and a whole lot of laughs, for it was us against them for the
next seven years. Seven years, as I skipped a grade for being the
smart-ass that I was back in those days. Then again, the Catholic
Separate School System had a mandate and a mission to spit out
as many good Catholic boys and girls on society as fast as was
heavenly possible.
Sweet innocent Sister Theresa. We all loved her. Beatific:
possessing an angelic soft-hewn face with saintly features. She
was young and she was beautiful. And a nun at that! Thinking
back, what a waste. But at that time she made a lasting religious
impression on our impressionable minds. In today’s world she
would have been our elementary school “Ying.” And with all
things “Ying” there had to be a “Yang” and in this case our
elementary school “Yang” turned out to be Sister Mary
Bernice… “Yang.” Burly, tough as nails, she wore polished black
ankle-height sea boots with that black habit of hers. Her gait was
that of a sailor who was not yet accustomed to the stability of dry
land. She possessed a jaunty walk, more like a saunter, not unlike
Charlie Chaplin’s, and would stride through the hallways twirling
a baton or strap that we would become very familiar with soon
enough. She was so intimidating that even the parish priests took
notice. Her face was nondescript really as it was framed by that
white veil of nunnery. I think her hair was black, slightly greying
at the temples. I know this because her temples seemed to bulge
out whenever she was laying out the wrath of our heavenly father
across the palms of our earthly hands.
To match her gait, she yelled like a sailor: a real Chief
Boatswains Mate, or Buffer in the naval vernacular. Her wrath
came down unexpectantly and unrepentantly with the surefire
will of an archangel, but no St Michaela here! She had two main
weapons in her arsenal to keep us all in line. Her hands, left or
right, it didn’t matter, came across one’s face totally and entirely
out of the heavenly blue like some religious and corporal stealth
attack. Just like that: whack, whack, and more whack, followed
by the incessant burning of the cheeks and ringing in the ears.
Not tinnitus, mind you, for that would come later, but a tone-deaf
ringing with each whack of those unflappable calloused palms or
the gnarly backs of her hands. With years of experience under
her black habit, she learned to cup her hands ever so slightly and
in such a way that, with each open-palm whack, her fingers
would somehow claw their way across one’s face so that they
seemed to draw one’s cheek and face upward toward heaven, as
if in a corporal raptured state of mind waiting for and begging for
heavenly intervention. To be fair to her she was an equal opportunity
inquisitor. The girls got it too. And their faces? Wow. Pink
and as pink as pure virginity could be but stained with the tracks
of their tears. Such tears they were: welling up and falling down
and across those pearly, pretty, and innocent faces.
Us lads, we chuckled.
Tomorrow? The Artful Dodger.
Our Guessing Game for in the end it won’t matter at all:
Finally graduated from Catholic elementary school in 1964. Did seven years. Seems like a jail term in some sort of perverse way. It would have been eight but I skipped a year, grade three to grade five: Ms Upper to Ms Keller. Come to think of it now, in all of those years, I only had one male elementary school teacher. Mr Bowner. He was great: very theatrical and entertaining. Why was that? So many female teachers and so few male? Is it because youngsters in those early years still require the nurturing attention that can only be provided by the female sex? Feminists today would kill me for even suggesting such a thing. I don’t really know. Even in todays so called enlightenment school boards are trying to deal with the matrification of our Elementary School system, that boys are getting a raw deal. So they say! That they are becoming whusses, feminized, losing their religion. So they say! I don’t really think this is the case as this was the norm when I was in Elementary School some 55 years ago. If one were to check I do believe that one would find that women dominated the profession at this level for over a hundred years, two hundred maybe. I even remember reading about the explorer David Thompson and his schooling by the Grey Nuns of London back in the 1770s. Why are we so concerned about it today? Don’t know, don’t care, I don’t have an opinion on this. It seems to have worked.
Mr Bowner, our grade six teacher, decided to put together a school play. It was a musical, or more precisely, a musical revue. It was based somewhat loosely on Porgy and Bess. There we were, the entire Grade Six class in black face, singing and dancing, carousing and carrying on. Can you imagine that happening in today’s politically correct charged atmosphere? Nope, yet in those days it was all just innocent fun. People focused more on the entertainment value than the shock value. They didn’t think otherwise, or read between the lines, or over expostulate as they seem to do today on just about everything.
I do find it interesting that as one progresses through academia and the scholastic ranks, and the bolder, cockier and less enthusiastic one becomes with respect to scholarly pursuits, rebellious perhaps, that the male student requires the firm hand of discipline that only a male, Sister Mary Bernice excepted, can seem to provide. Worse yet if that male class of teacher is comprised primarily from the various religious orders of the day. Jesuits were the worst, the Oblates a close second, but tied with the Basilians. The Jesuits may have been highly intellectual but they were as firm and as dangerous in their physical and psychological prowess as their international reputation would suggest that they excelled at in the intellectual sense. No, ours were the Basilian Fathers: an order born out of the French Revolution. When it came to discipline they could give it out as bad or as good as any one religious law and order could. The only difference being was that the Basilians generally had a smile on their face as they were dishing it out. Jokingly they would say: “This, my young (insert name here), is going to hurt you a lot more than it is going to hurt me.” Then the customary whack, whack, whack and more whack. At least the Basilians were honest. The Jesuits, on the other hand, in some form of intellectual mind game or bait and switch logic, would try to convince us that the physical punishment about to be unleashed was going to hurt them a great deal more then it was going to hurt us. Intellectual existentialism perhaps, pedagogically speaking, but pure unadulterated nonsense nonetheless.
…Grade one: the beautiful Sister Theresa, our angelic, beatific, saintly Sister.Grade two: can’t remember except for my crush on Linda Naigle and of course McDink’s celebratory cheer when he found out, surprisingly, that he passed Grade Two and in doing so exclaimed to all of the world: “Yabba Dabba Do, I’m out-aPortable Two!” I should ask my friend Jimmymum, when I talk to him again, as to who our teacher was in Grade Two for he will know because his brain and memory are as tight as a locked jaw. To this day some 55 years later, he remembers everything about that period in our lives. And cars too! Sure enough, Jim knew. Miss Green was her name.Young, blond and good looking, at least according to Jim.
Grade three: Mr Upper, downer; Grade Five: Ms Kellar, old yellar; Grade Six: Mr Bowner, or Boner for short; Grade Seven, Ms McFayden, or Mrs Macdonald, the chain smoker. Man, did she reek of tobacco. She would always give us some assignment then disappeared somewhere only to come back a few minutes later with that customary giveaway smell and that distasteful gross smile of hers that revealed a mouthful of yellow stained teeth. At the time I really had no understanding of why those breaks of hers ran to a specific schedule, about every hour so, lasting about ten minutes, then back to class. It was more than the customary toilet break and it wasn’t until a few years later that I understood the machination, the almost ceremonial-like rite, of having a smoke during school, and later, during working hours.
Grade Eight was Ms Raydigan, Ms Radiator, in our vernacular. Kids will always do that. Assign some verbal handle on someone for their name, their appearance, how they talked, how they walked or how they chalked up in the overall scheme of things. She had a short fuse and could explode almost on cue given the right circumstances. And we could provide plenty of that. Hence Ms Radiator, as in those days cars were not quite as sophisticated as they are now. Simple really, with radiators that would, with enough heat and pressure, top off and explode into a wail of steam: screeching and whistling and wailing until the pressure was relieved. With us that relief normally equated to a dismissal from the class room with the obligatory meeting with our beloved and illustrious principal, Sister Mary Bernice, along with her scholarly and spiritual Sanctimonious Tool for Restraint And Providence…