My aunt had a friend who was famous in Eastern Ontario for her preserves. She won prizes at county fairs and even published two books. When my aunt and I would go to visit her, she always had some concoction cooking on the stove or waiting in jars or bottles on her counter. She must …
When I was in elementary school, one of the regular lessons in language class was poetry. The expectation for a student was that you would memorize the poem to recite back and then learn about the poem and its place in literature. This article in The Atlantic, written by an English teacher suggests that teaching …
Early in July, Canadians with substance use problems received support from an unexpected group: Canada’s police chiefs. This is taken from the statement of Chief Constable Adam Palmer, the President of the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police, on July 9, 2020: “The CACP proposes increased access to healthcare, treatment and social services to divert …
For about the past week, stories about conducting school classes outdoors have been capturing my imagination. I loved school anyway, but there were no better classes than conducting science experiments out of doors or spending art classes drawing in nature. And isn’t poetry more poetical when it is recited under a tree in English clash? …
My youngest son was about seven years old when I married for the second time. His father had married again about one year earlier. My new husband had two sons, both older than my youngest son, who already had an older brother and sister. He was now the youngest of five and he was terrified …
For most jurisdictions where they were legal, alcohol and marijuana were available at every stage of the pandemic. In North America, the shops selling marijuana and alcohol were deemed an “essential service” which meant that they were open throughout the pandemic, in the same way as grocery stores and pharmacies were open. Even in news …
I wrote this thinking about parents, but the more I worked on this essay, the more I realized: Everyone needs a “thinking rock”. My experience with parents is that they always know best what their child needs. When they come to me with a problem that they are having with their child, the first thing …
Isn’t that a title that captures your attention? But this essay is not about the first thing that might naturally come to mind with the title Parenting and Marijuana. This is my way of introducing the two topics that I want to spend the summer considering. I have spent the last four months writing about …
In between COVID-19 Journal entries, I have spent the past four months writing. I have been writing without thinking and, in the past eight days, since I last published my journal, I think I have begun to think a bit more before writing. Sometime in late February, panic overtook me. There was news of the …
This will be the last entry in my COVID-19 Journal. It is not that I won’t write about the Pandemic again, but, for me, this phase of my service to keep people safe from COVID-19 is ending. On June 30, I will return to the Youth Program fulltime. This is a picture of the corridor …
