Organized by English Professor Devendra P. Varma, a renowned Dracula-lit buff, the goth-before-its-time conference boasted “the largest gathering of vampire experts ever presented in Canada,” and featured a screening of the classic 1931 movie Dracula, starring Bela Lugosi.

The Himalayan-born Varma, who died in 1994, was apparently quite a character. According to Oostveen, he “had a ten­dency to believe in con­spir­a­cies, secret police, and other forces” who, he believed, harboured an unsavoury interest in his collection of vampire books and memorabilia. At his insistence, “the really important stuff” was kept in a locked cabinet at the departmental library.

Time passes, [and] the library peri­od­i­cally asks about his use of their space, does he really need this secure storage, and so on. He says yes, and the cab­inet gets moved a few times as the library moves divi­sions and departments.

The Berlin wall falls, the world is more open, evil forces are in retreat, and Varma decides he can take home his trove of vam­pire doc­u­ments and literature.

He comes to the library with the one and only key, and of course, it’s an empty cabinet.”

Oostveen professes not to know who to blame for the pilferage: Abraham van Helsing or Dracula. I suspect Cletus Hollohan had a hand in it.

I appreciate a lot of Jay Macneil’s general complaint. I’ve made similar ones about decision-makers not trying hard enough to make this place more livable, and even actively trying to make it less livable. I can even be pretty cynical about council at times. Maybe that cynicism is what made me think twice about this vote, since Morgan the populist voted with Kim Deveaux the radical. Curious.

Did Morgan vote for what he knew would be the popular sentiment (“All he wanted to do was dance!”) despite testimony from the Chief of Police that the dances were phenomenally unsafe? But that’s not all council voted on. There were two motions put forward on Tuesday, and it’s the second one that MacNeil ignores in his rant:

1. Councillor Derek Mombourquette brought the motion to council to ban the dances, not because he hates young people (he practically is one), but because the Chief of Police told him the dances were a danger to the kids who attend and the police could no longer ensure their safety. I suspect that, after this police testimony, council probably couldn’t continue to allow the dances at municipally-owned buildings, as such, without being liable for what goes on. (Maybe why the schools stopped holding the dances in the first place.)
2. Council then agreed to put resources into a committee made up of police, schools, decision-makers, and kids themselves, to come up with a way to create a safe environment for kids to have fun. (Or, I suppose, more realistically: ways to provide a reasonably safe environment.)

So if you take [1] and [2] together, council didn’t really ‘ban’ dances at this venue, they only suspended the dances until those dances can be made safe(r) for the kids who attend.

The schools, on the other hand, seem to believe the dances themselves were the problem… rather than alcohol, drugs, and violence being the problem. The schools seem to have said, ‘Ban dances, problem solved.’

All the schools solved was their own problem of liability. Whereas, if we give council the benefit of the doubt (I can’t believe I’m saying that), what they’re really saying is that the problem goes beyond the dances themselves, and that creating a safe and fun atmosphere for kids is the responsibility of the community (and should be a priority of the community).

So the community — especially the “people in this community who spend their entire day trying to find ways to inspire and engage the youth of their community” — should get behind the new committee [2] instead of blaming council for doing what they (likely) had to [1].

With the advent of TED Talks, Sir Ken Robinson, the current, undisputed rock star of public education, has been, or will be, coming to a School Board near you, so it’s wise to be forewarned and perhaps even forearmed.

Sir Ken puts on quite a show, especially with that snazzy RSA animation. Very few can match him when it comes to the British accent, rhetorical flourish, and sardonic humour. Having listened to him many times, I’ve become more aware of how much he benefits from speaking to audiences with little or no grasp of educational theory, history or philosophy. That gives him free rein to deal almost exclusively in broad, contestable generalizations.

Former NSCC principal Bert Lewis is right to be skeptical. Good teachers and thoughtful educators come with what Neil Postman once described as “a built-in crap detector.” In “Changing Educational Paradigms,” Sir Ken repeats his familiar refrain that the entire Educational System is totally obsolete and has been for years. Strangely enough, he appeals most to those who favour process (pedagogy) over substance (knowledge) in education. They are reduced, for some reason, to putty in his hands.

Let’s start asking him a few pertinent questions: If the system is so obsolete, then why do those in charge of the System pay him huge fees to promote that message? And why do most audiences of teachers seem to lap it up? More to the point, after listening intently to Sir Ken, why do they retreat back into the system with their heads down? It simply doesn’t add up.

I’m not sure why (or whether) mainstream school systems have embraced Robinson, but I think I understand his appeal to non-expect critics of the contemporary school system. The public suspects schools and teachers have been complicit in the trend to pathologize little boys as suffering from a medical condition; schools and teachers do a poor job of accommodating creative misfits; and the hierarchical structure of school systems deters innovation and critical thinking.

[UPDATE]Ken Dewar, emeritus professor of history at Mount Saint Vincent University, who claims to be old, shares Bennett’s and Lewis’s scepticism:

You call Robinson’s talk “brilliant,” and it certainly is that — clever, amusing, dazzling — but his rejection of contemporary education is absurdly sweeping. By the end, one has almost forgotten the kernel of the valid point he has made about ADHD…

[The answer to Bennett's concluding question] is that rejection of all that might be seen as “old” or “traditional” in pedagogy has been embedded in modern teacher education for the past 50-100 years, with the result that listening to (or watching, or reading) an iconoclast on the subject is satisfyingly self-affirming.

Meanwhile, in practice, open-minded teachers motivated by the love of learning and attentive to the needs of their students struggle to communicate knowledge of various kinds and by various means, just as they have done for centuries. They might even have learned something by the odd furtive glance backward.

There is a lot of merit in Dr. Robinson’s theory, applicable to P-12, colleges, and universities. However, there are examples of brilliance in the classrooms, labs, and shops, where students are excited by the experience, in spite of the system. Let’s give credit to those innovative teachers who make the learning fun and entertaining.

I thought Robinson’s talk was quite brilliant, but I had the same thought as Bert in response to some of his generalizations.

Remember the kerfuffle when the Province of Nova Scotia’s official sex guide for seventh graders, called Sex? A Healthy Sexuality Resource, was unveiled in 2004? Some school boards refused to distribute the guide because, of course, knowledge encourages teen sex and ignorance prevent it. That’s the guide’s chaste cover, at right.

Want to know how a sensible country does sex education? Check out this sex ed kit for kids of comparable age in a European country. From the outside, the kit looks like this:

And inside:

The sensible country is Finland. Click here for a translation of the news story describing it. The paper expected a huge backlash, but as a subsequent story reported, of the 6,500 comments they received, 75 percent were favorable.

H/T: James Fallows

I don’t normally post videos that already have five million hits, but this animated version of a talk by educator and creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson underscores a point made by Sunni Brown in her TED talk about the merits of doodling. There is something about the combination of speech and visual note-taking that enhances comprehension, especially comprehension of irony and ideas in conflict.

Robinson’s talk is about education, but the animated nature of the talk the talk is as arresting as the content.

[Educators] are trying to meet the future by doing what they did in the past, and along the way they are alienating millions of kids who don’t see any purpose in going to school.

When we went to school, we were kept there with a story, which was that of you worked hard and did wel and got a college degree, you would have a job. Our kids don’t believe that, and they’re right not to, by the way. You’re better having a degree than not, but it’s not a guarantee any more, and particularly not if the route to it marginalizes most of the things you think are important about yourself….

[ADHD] is not an epidemic. These kids are being medicated as routinely as we had our tonsils taken out, and on the same whimsical basis, and for the same reason: medical fashion.

Our children are living in the most intensely stimulating period in the history of the Earth. They are being besieged with information and calls for their attention from every platform: Computers, from iPhones, from advertising hoardings, from hundreds of channels. And we’re penalizing them for getting distracted. From what? Boring stuff, at school, for the most part.

RSA Animate, produced by the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, has a series of similar animated exhortational videos.

H/T: Doug MacKay

From the wonderful FlowingData blog by Nathan Yao, who advises, “Try not to think too hard.”

David McCandless of Information is Beautiful has the graphic details.

(Which turn out to be complicated, especially for pale-faced contrarians.)

Supporting data here.

Better schools for less money is not only possible but achievable in Nova Scotia. Judging from the “Kids not Cuts” spending spree, the NSTU, the NSSBA, and their acolytes sense that the public is awakening to their “Kill the Friendly Giant” strategy. Why else would they be pouring thousands into a media campaign attempting to remould their image?On the matter of teacher hiring, I think that you are slightly off the mark. The NSTU certainly runs a closed shop. Some 2,000 teachers are on those “supply lists,” and most will never be hired as regular teachers. The real issue is the Hiring System and the dominance of NSTU rules and regulations known as the LIFO seniority system (Last-In, First-Out). When reductions have to be made, it’s all based on seniority, further demolalizing those promising teachers langushing on supply lists. In New York City, those teachers got organized and formed Educators for Education (E4E) and the rules eventually came tumbling down.

Getting the school administration out of the NSTU simply makes common sense. In Ontario, for example, superintendents, principals annd vice-principals are not in the bargaining unit. It’s just a matter of time before those supposedly in charge of the system come to their senses. Having everyone in the NSTU from the regular classroom to the Superintendent is indefensible. When tough decisions have to be made, who actually represents the public interest, aside from the Minister and her staff? It’s actually costing us dearly at contract time. We should be asking why the Nova Scotia government tolerates the current situation.

Contrarian, you are not alone on this critical public issue. Most Nova Scotians, presented with the stark facts, are with you on this matter. Virtually every education article posted recently on the topic of school boards and the union elicits the same response – a pox on both their houses. It will take more than a “Kids not Cuts” ad blitz to alter the deep seated public attitude that the “core interests” in education speak only for themselves.

Alistair Watt adds:

One major force in the farce is the NSTU, which consistently bargains for their permanent full-time employees at the expense of casual or term employees (I am using the NSCC terminology, though substitute teachers and new hires are treated just as poorly within the public school system).

The hiring processes used in P-12 and beyond are appalling , and they need major overhauls.

As long as nobody is willing to stand up to the NSTU and change the hiring processes, nothing will improve. The only people that I know who could do this are the ministers within the provincial government, who have mostly hidden behind a wall of “not interfering with the bargaining process `(my wording). In theory, the hiring processes are fully the responsibility of the management, and are not controlled by the bargaining processes, which leads us back to the Ministers.

Changing the way people are hired would be a win-win move. All it needs is some guts from the Ministers ( and some cooperation from NSTU).

Surely Mr. Lewis, a retired Community College Principal and recent NDP by-election candidate, will elaborate.

Meanwhiles, HRM resident Ryan Van Horne  recalls:

Your comment about the hiring process is bang on. That’s exactly why I never considered becoming a teacher in Nova Scotia. Even my wife, who is a bilingual math teacher, would have to go through the same rigmarole if she wanted to move from a private school, where she’s been teaching for 10 years, to the public system.