Category: Education
Those orange lunch bags — conclusion
In the interests of tying up loose ends, here are a couple of final notes about the insulated orange lunch bags the Department of Education handed out to grade primary students in four school boards this winter. I voiced suspicion that the selection of the color orange was a transparent political ploy, and even suggested the NDP should reimburse the taxpayers for their cost.
It’s clear I was wrong. The detailed explanation provided by Ann Blackwood, Executive Director of English Program Services for the Nova Scotia Department of Education, has the unmistakable ring of truth. Education bureaucrats chose the color for reasons that had nothing to do with politics.
As to the color itself, I have now seen one of the bags, and I’m hard put to call it anything but orange. The back, sides, trim, and top third of the front panel are orange beyond reasonable argument. The glossy panel that occupies the bottom two thirds of the bag’s front is, in my perception, orange trending toward reddish. Reasonable people could disagree. The overall impression is: a bright orange bag.
The value of the program? This year the province distributed 3,500 bags to Grade Primary students in four school boards: Annapolis Valley, Cape Breton-Victoria, South Shore, and Strait-Richmonsd, at a cost of $126,000, or $35.44 per bag. Each bag contains construction paper, scissors, a magnifying glass, colored animal counters, magnetic numbers and letters, plasticine clay, a sound shaker, a pencil, a kick sack, My Toys (a children’s book ), Jack and the Missing Piece (a picture book), I Went Walking (a children’s book), and Paws and Claws (a musical CD by Halifax children’s musician Maria Alley).
Next fall, all 8,500 grade primary students in all eight boards will receive the bags at an estimated of $306,000. The project has been carried out entirely within the department, without the aid of an advertising agency.
“This investment supports our effort to help children earlier with their reading, and strengthen connections between parents and schools, key priorities within the Kids and Learning First plan,” wrote Education Minister Ramona Jennex in an email to Contrarian. ”It is so important we engage our children early with rich language experiences and it is my hope the contents of these bags will offer the opportunity for parents to engage in fun and meaningful experiences.”
“We know that children need oral language and good vocabulary experiences to build the foundation for reading and writing,” Jennex wrote. “Many teachers are expressing concerns about our youngest children coming to Primary with limited ability to engage in conversation due to limited language experiences.”
Does this add up to good value for the education dollars it required? I don’t feel qualified to offer an opinion, although I’m sure some parents will be skeptical, especially in light of the NDP Government’s cancellation of the Reading Recovery program.
Rosa goes birding
Last Friday, Rosa’s school had an in-service day, so Rosa went birding at Point Pleasant Park. She brought the cardboard binoculars she got for Christmas.
She spotted a Common Loon trying to swallow a whole crab:
Way off the tip of the park, she spied a Common Eider Drake:
A Northern Pintal was hanging around First Beach. Notice his blue bill?
Here he is again, standing on one leg:
A Pintail-Mallard hybrid was resting on the sand:
A Red-Breasted Merganser was drying his feathers in the sun…
…but when Rosa got too close, he headed for the safety of the water:
The trip was exciting, and fun, but also exhausting:
Photos: Joshua Barss Donham
Orange you glad we didn’t choose blue or red?
Halifax engineer Jeff Pinhey thinks Contrarian’s attempt “to find political intrigue in childrens’ lunch bags is beyond petty, it’s almost creepy.” Pinhey first advanced this view in a clever message whose irony sailed right over Contrarian’s head:
I am outraged at all the obviously NDP sponsored vests being worn by almost every single construction worker in Nova Scotia! And when I looked into this I found that not only are they all NDP orange with some yellow – get this – they are forced to wear them by a LAW! We actually have been legislated to show our support for the governing party. How Orwellian is that?
In a follow-up exchange, Jeff wrote:
I don’t give a rat’s ass what some politico-phobic people think about primary school kids’ lunch bags, but I would object if they were NOT orange and/or yellow simply because it would represent a lost safety advantage for free.
Ann Blackwood, Executive Director of English Program Services for the Nova Scotia Department of Education, doesn’t cite safety as a factor in the selection of NDP orange for the insulated school lunch bags handed out to Grade Primary students this month, but she insists politics played no role. The bags were filled with a variety of learning and play materials, and described as part of “Succeeding in Reading” and the “Kids and Learning First Education” plan.
Having teachers work with parents on how to use these bags will help children connect their learning in school and at home – and connect learning with play and creativity.
The process that went into choosing the red and orange colours* of the bags… was managed solely by professional educators aimed at getting a product with greatest appeal to children. Political colours did not enter into the discussion.
The team that evaluated submissions for the bags and their contents comprised the Department of Education’s Literacy Coordinator, Early Learning Co-ordinator, Literacy Support Consultant, Literacy Evaluation Coordinator, and a Student Services Consultant.**
The insulated lunch bag was available from our supplier in the following tote colours/trim and gusset colours: red/light orange, black/grey, blue/royal blue, green/lime green.
The team as well as support staff, who were consulted, liked red/orange for the following reasons:
- Blue/royal blue was considered, recognizing that blue is a colour often associated with boys (as pink is with girls).
- Black was considered not appropriate since bright neon colour palettes appeal to young children more than dark colours.
- Support staff thought red and orange looked fun and would appeal to both boys and girls.
It was concluded that the red/light orange bags would be most appealing to grade primary children. That was the colour that was ordered.
We look forward to having teachers distribute these learning resources to parents of Grade Primary students in four regions this month and next. They will be available to families of all next year’s Grade Primary students in September.
Blackwood made these comments in an email forwarded by the Education Department’s communications branch.
The outrage directed at the giveaway reflects, in part, anger over the NDP Government’s cancellation of the Reading Recovery program. If there is money to send home free magnetic fridge letters, the reasoning goes, why not keep a much acclaimed program? Contrarian is aware of the controversy, but doesn’t feel qualified to offer an opinion. We welcome yours, however. See the comment tab, above.
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* My informants on the school bag issue go ballistic when defenders of the giveaway claim the bags are merely red with orange trim. “The f*****g bag is orange,” wrote one. “Orange. It is not red with orange trim.”
Contrarian has arranged to personally inspect one of the bags later today, and will render a verdict that will satisfy no one.
** I do not wish to take cheap shots, but the fact the department employs a group of professionals with these titles, and the fact their duties included selecting the color of a lunch bag, does give one pause. The fact that literacy is a common element in the titles suggests that the department does see the giveaway program as, in some sense, a replacement for the much praised Reading Recovery program.
Orange is as orange does
Labor lawyer Ron Stockton, who is also president of the Lunenburg NDP Association, protests that the insulated lunch bags distributed to Grade Primary students in Nova Scotia the Annapolis, Cape Breton-Victoria, South Shore, and Strait regional school boards this month and next (and pictured here) do not appear to be NDP orange, but rather, red with orange trim.
If the government were Liberal would you have levelled the same criticism? If a PC government put out materials that were blue (admittedly a much more commonly used colour) would you have criticized them? At my age I like things to be as colourful as possible (just as I did when I was a kid). I love the look of it even though I may have used more orange than red and added a bit of glow-in-the-dark green.
The confusion is, I’m afraid, an artifact of the way computer screens reproduce color shades. The bag is NDP orange. Here’s a close-up:
Contrarian reader Paul Taylor asks a bonus question: Where were the bags manufactured and printed? For the answer, we turned to the information label affixed to the bag, as required by the Textile Labeling Act (apologies for the poor resolution):
That would be Sweda USA, an “integrated supplier and manufacturer of promotional products that provides innovative marketing solutions for the advertising specialties industry,” and China, a manufacturing powerhouse in Asia. Jobs here? Not so much.
And while on the subject of full disclosure, this is as good a time as any to reveal that last Friday, at 10:30 pm, I joined the federal New Democratic Party, just before the midnight deadline for qualifying to vote in the leadership race. I intend to vote for whichever candidate is most open to cooperating with the Liberals in defeating the Harper Government and allowing Canada’s moderate-left consensus to govern, probably this one. When the Liberal leadership voting deadline rolls around, I’ll probably join that party, if they’ll have me, with the same goal in mind. And I voted Conservative in two of the last three provincial elections. Go figure.
But I still think the Nova Scotia New Democratic Party should reimburse the province’s taxpayers for this shameless bit of political promotion aimed at schoolchildren and their parents.
Early learnin’ NDP style
This week month and next, as part of the Nova Scotia Department of Education’s Early Learning Campaign, the Dexter government distributed a variety pack of learning materials — books, a CD, construction paper, plastic animals, bubbles, clay, scissors, and sundry other education-related items — to every Grade Primary student in the province Grade Primary students in the Annapolis, Cape Breton-Victoria, South Shore, and Strait regional school boards.
Best of all, the goodies all came packaged in a handy insulated orange lunch bag, suitable for use throughout the school year.
Subtle, eh? Early education for today’s families, you could call it.
No, the lunch bags do not come emblazoned with NDP logos. Just the colors.
Reasonable people may disagree about the value of sending home these learning materials. Personally, I’m fine with it. But packaging it all up in the governing party’s colors? That’s pretty slimy.
The NDP should reimburse the province for the cost of the lunch bags.
Dracula at Dalhousie: The mystery of the pilfered documents
Lauren Oostveen, Nova Scotia’s tweeting archivist, today unearthed a clipping from The 4th Estate, Halifax’s one-time alternative weekly, about a vampire conflab that took place at Dalhouse 39 years ago this month. The 4th Estate story is good, but the yarn Oostveen dug up to go with it is even better.
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.
CBRM’s war on young people — a different view
Grad student, cultural activist, and entrepreneur Mike Targett writes:
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:
- 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.)
- 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].
Sir Ken Robinson on education — more feedback, updated
[See update below] Paul W. Bennett, the director of Schoolhouse Consulting, and Nova Scotia’s best known educational policy critic, shares Bert Lewis’s skepticism about Sir Ken Robinson’s TED talk.
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.
Sir Ken Robinson on education — feedback
Former Community College principal Bert Lewis writes:
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.
How a sensible country teaches sex ed
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
