Archive for September, 2009

Decision followed an annual review of Kathleen Scherf’s leadership

The outgoing president of Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, B.C., is defending her year in office after she was fired by the school’s board of directors.

Kathleen Scherf had been president and vice-chancellor since September 2008, but the board of directors said it lost faith in her leadership.

Scherf said she respects the board’s authority to dismiss her, but “thought my performance was excellent given the results.”

Reading from a prepared statement, Scherf listed off accomplishments from the past year.

“We broke all previous campus United Way campaigns, raising just short of $64,000; during my time, TRU’s fundraising activities increased 342 per cent from the 12 months previous,” she said.

“And finally, we were able to bring the first new law school in 35 years in Canada to TRU.”

The board’s decision followed an annual review of her leadership during the past three months.

Scherf is known for her often colourful demeanour, from referring to other people as “dude” to keeping bold-coloured streaks in her hair.

However, the board has insisted her eccentricities weren’t the reason she was fired.

Scherf will receive nine months of severance worth $168,000, and she is allowed to return to the school to teach if she wants – an option Scherf said she’s keeping open.

Scherf was the school’s fifth president.

Before moving to Kamloops, she was a dean at the University of Calgary and had previously taught at the University of British Columbia and the University of New Brunswick.

- The Canadian Press

Edmonton bar gives students $20 just for showing up. MADD is mad.

Can’t afford to go drinking? Well, if you’re a student in Edmonton, you can’t afford not to. A bar there is reportedly luring students by offering them free cash–just for showing up.

The bar–called Union Hall–announced Student Night last Thursday. Students who show up before 10pm will be given $20 in cold hard cash.

The owner of the bar, Jesse James, called the move a “recession buster.” He told the Edmonton Journal it wasn’t a intended to circumvent minimum drink price legislation brought into Alberta recently.

However, the Canadian Press reported that James was billing the promotion as “battling back” against the new regulations and he complained about having to cancel previous promotions like 10 cent shooters. “They’ve really tied our hands promotionally, a little bit,” he told CP. “The only thing we can give people, legally … is money. So we’re doing it.”

The government says it is not illegal for bars to give out free cash.

Predictably, MADD is upset. The Edmonton Journal story quoted spokesperson Joan Macleod as saying it was “the stupidest idea I’ve heard in a long time.”

“Anyone who thinks this is a good idea has never lost someone to impaired driving,” she told the Journal. “To me, it just encourages everybody to do it.”(Bit of a logical leap there, Macleod.) Also predictably, the article went on to state the details of Macleod’s daughter’s death after being hit by an intoxicated driver 18 years ago.

CP had a more rational argument for why the bar’s promotion might be a bad idea for students: giving away free money encourages students to drink more than they had originally planned and the legislation was intended to curb excessive or binge drinking. Fair enough.

But the most obvious reason that Jesse James’ free money promotion is a dumb idea is that there is no obligation to spend the money in his bar, which is why other bars that have tried the free money stunt have quickly canceled it, according to Lynn Hutchings-Mah of the Alberta Liquor and Gaming Commission. “They quickly found out that people were coming to collect free money and then going home with it.”

So, Edmonton students: if you’re short of cash this year get over to Union Hall and collect your money while you still can.

It sucks, I tell you. And here’s why…

So, this is my last day of freedom before getting back to class. I was super excited about getting back to school… Now I’ve realized I was just excited about getting back to City X. I’ve been here for a week and I’ve been busy- unpacking, working on my blogs and music website, going to rock shows and spending time with pals.

And now I have to fit school into my schedule?! How in the heck am I going to do that?!

And, thus, here and ten reasons why going back to school sucks.

1. Alarm clocks are the devil. Aren’t these things the worst?! Always waking you up during fantastic dreams and letting you know that you have to get up and, y’know, be not sleeping?! Ugh. Alarm clocks are horrible.
2. The lack of free time. How dare school interrupt your social stuff? How dare it?! Stupid school stuff. I once read that you will learn more outside of class during college than in the classroom. (OK. Didn’t really read this. But I’m sure someone significant said it at one point in time. Probably.)
3. Dealing with professors. Ugh, look at them in their silly tweed jacket. Who do they think they are anyway?! And who told them they were allowed to pick on you during class, especially when you have no clue what the answer was. Or even what the question was. Because you weren’t actually listening… Ugh. The nerve of those people!
4. Dealing with classmates. Sure, you like some of them. Of course. But then there are also the ones who drive you nuts. Like What’s-His-Name in your Whatever 101 class. That guy is a certified idiot and a total d-bag. And how did he end up in more than one of your classes anyway? He’s likely stalking you. Oh, God. And what about What’s-Her-Name? Ugh, she’s horrible, isn’t she? Why do we, as a human race, have to deal with these people anyway? It’s. Not. Fair!
5. Studying. It is almost 2010, for pete sake. There should be a Smart Pill*** or something by now, shouldn’t there?! A pill that you take before class so you retain everything the professor says during lectures and everything you read. Studying takes up way too much time- time that would be much better spent… I don’t know… watching CSI: Miami or playing World of Warcraft. Obviously.

(*** Don’t do drugs, kids. Even if your friends say it’s a Smart Pill. They’re probably lying. They just want to steal your liver and sell it on the black market. Probably.)

(Oh. And the above photo is by Kaptain Kabold. BTW.)

“The Oprah Effect,” “Bad Girls of the Bible” and “Zap, Pow, Bang: Pop Lit”

University professors are spicing up course titles to attract the focus-challenged, head-in-the-cloud, abbreviation aficionados of today’s youth.

“The Oprah Effect,” “Bad Girls of the Bible” and “Zap, Pow, Bang: Pop Lit” are just a few examples of new, “grabbier” titles doctored to hook and lure the exotic “Internet generation” of current students.

I think they should give us cookies and hugs too.

The brains behind this latest “bid for fussy students who keep heading for business and engineering” extol their brilliance in Louise Brown’s Toronto Star article here. I, however, can’t help but feel a little insulted.

I can read 200-character course descriptions. You don’t need to say “Paris Hilton” or “OMG” to spark my interest.

Susan Knabe of the University of Western Ontario calls the title of her course, “Bad Girls: Sexual Dissidence and Popular Culture,” her “bait and switch.”

I think holding a glow stick or shiny spoon during the first day of classes would work equally as well.

Personally, I’d stray from these gimmicky courses. However fallacious my thinking may be, I can’t help but assume that the courses doused with perfume are the ones covering up their obvious irrelevance. Then again, I could be wrong.

Maybe I’ll check out some course outlines… if only I didn’t have so much tweeting, blog hopping, and celebrity gossip to get through. Damn my short attention sp—

If you can put it in a sandwich, you can put it on these pizzas – and impress your friends, too

I am on a bit of a culinary kick at the moment.

This would surprise almost anyone who knows me well, as I am not known for my enthusiasm in the kitchen. If anything, I invite friends over for dinner and then learn how to cook the chicken. Gives it a sense of urgency, I find.

Because of this, I’ve received an endless number of cook books for Christmases and birthdays – “Easy Chicken”, “Rookie Cooking”, “Cooking for Useless and Impatient Slobs”, etc. None of these have enticed me. I open them, I look at the pictures, but something stops me from re-creating the meal.

Namely, there are too many ingredients involved. Really  – when am I going to need oregano again? Let alone capers.

So I am providing here a series of impromptu recipes. I say recipes loosely, because to qualify for my approval, they have to be too simple to appear in any genuine cook book. So simple they would shame any genuine cookbook. So simple they can be made in about ten minutes, while reading the paper, washing the dishes, and talking on the phone.

The first recipe is my Mum’s, and it has been my saving grace at endless dinner parties. It is called the “gourmet pizza.”

The “gourmet pizza” is only gourmet because it looks more attractive than the average pizza.

Use a pita of any size or disposition, layer on what you want, put in the oven on broil, and take out when it looks crispy. The only key is good, colourful ingredients (this we have learned from the Italians.) Here are my favourite combinations:

The Italian Pizza: Pesto sauce with fresh mozzarella, a combination of green and red peppers, onions and zucchini, plus shrimp or prosciutto.

The Cowboy Pizza: Barbeque or chipotle sauce, Monterey jack or cheddar, with caramelized onions, red peppers, and roast chicken (you can always use a full, cooked chicken from the grocery store for this one.)

The Asian Pizza: Peanut sauce, plus mozzarella, red peppers, cilantro and shredded carrots, roast chicken or shrimp.

I’ve also tried sausages, bacon, feta cheese, cucumber, goat cheese, asparagus, and a particular favourite – slices of avocado. I rarely use actual tomato sauce. A good rule of thumb is: if you have it in your fridge, you can put it in a sandwich, and if you can put it in a sandwich, you can put it on a pizza and serve it to friends.

If you’re entertaining for many, supply the pitas and the spreads, and get everyone to bring a different topping. Everyone picks what they want, and the combinations get a little more exciting than your average pepperoni.

For other lazy, sloppy and generally unwilling student cooks, I’ll be including a series of super short and easy “recipes” from time to time, suggested by competent and creative friends across the country (and one in Australia.)

Soon to come are tips for making Mexican salsa burgers (with sweet potato fries and fresh guacamole), and the world’s easiest salad wraps.

When Ben and I graduated from high school, we both went on directly to post-secondary studies simply because were expected to and didn’t know what else to do. We had decent grades and the ambition to do something and university was just the next step—end of story. Ben earned a degree in business from the [...]

When Ben and I graduated from high school, we both went on directly to post-secondary studies simply because were expected to and didn’t know what else to do. We had decent grades and the ambition to do something and university was just the next step—end of story. Ben earned a degree in business from the University of Calgary; I, a degree in jazz studies from Capilano College University.

It was well into our educations, and in Ben’s case his career, before we realized that we didn’t want to be what we were trained to be. We had learned a ton in university that we were able to apply to different career paths than originally planned: I became editor of my school newspaper, was able to apply my music studies to writing, and am now a professional journalist; Ben’s business knowledge led him to a few years as a property tax consultant, his curiosity turned into a serious philosophy reading habit, and now he is also a writer.

While we’re both grateful for our university educations and where they have brought us, in retrospect we realize that there is a lot we wish we knew before enrolling in post-secondary as 18 year-olds. And that is why we are writing this blog, which is based on research we are compiling for an advice book for university students called The Straight Up Guide: to going to college and university in Canada.

If you’ve already read our first column (on how the changes to the Canada Student Grant Program and federal student loans will affect you) you’ll have an idea of what you can expect to find on our blog. We don’t claim to be experts on anything; we only have one bachelor’s degree each after all! Instead, we will go to the real experts, from professors to financial advisors to nutritionists, to get the straight up goods on everything students need to know. We intend to provide you with inside information unique to Canada, about our programs and our schools, that you can’t get anywhere else. Our articles will include information your university will not tell you, in a no-nonsense manner, while acknowledging that life rarely goes according to plan. We’ll also be commenting on what we’re reading regarding our country’s schools.

The point of including our stories in this introductory blog entry is this: the philosophy behind our research and writing is that we believe there are many different ways to accomplish your goals at university. We won’t preach one route to success at school, since we believe everyone has good and varying reasons for being there (even if that’s just having a good time) and, if you’re anything like we were, you don’t know where you’ll end up anyways. Instead, we’ll try to provide the information you need to move towards your goal if you have one and remain flexible, so you’re able to grab on to that next thing when it comes along.

The best way for us to accomplish delivering the information that you really want is if we hear directly from you. We want to know what you need to know so we can track down the people who can speak to your needs. So email us at straightupguide@gmail.com and we promise to get back to you.

Colleges CEO says about 90 per cent of grads find work within six months

For the third year in a row, enrolment at Ontario’s 24 community colleges has seen an increase in first-year full-time students.

Colleges Ontario says enrolment rose seven per cent this year, with more than 113,000 students in first-year full-time programs. This increase follows growth of 5.6 per cent last year and a six per cent increase in 2007.

The province’s 24 colleges have a combined enrolment of more than 200,000 full-time and 350,000 part-time students.

Colleges Ontario CEO Linda Franklin says about 90 per cent of college grads find work within six months and 93 per cent of employers are satisfied or very satisfied with the ones they hire.

She says there is also a growing demand for college grads despite the economic downturn and predicts the demand will intensify in the years ahead.

- The Canadian Press

Monday, Wednesday and Friday are my new weekend

There are only 24 days of school between me and Christmas vacation.

That’s the beauty of a two day school week. My weekend isn’t at the end of the week anymore. Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Wednesday and Friday are now my weekend.

Last year, when I scored a three day school week, I thought I had the perfect schedule.

This year I won the Scheduling Lottery.

In rare unanimous decision, Ottawa city council votes to remove 28+ age limit on student passes

Ottawa’s city council has voted unanimously to allow students 28 and older to purchase student bus passes again.

City council set the age limit on student bus passes last December, and once the policy took effect in July students began protesting the decision.

Students from Carleton University and the University of Ottawa presented council with 2,400 signatures demanding that the policy be reversed. Student groups argued that all students face the same type of financial barriers, regardless of their age.

Many city councillors spoke in favour of the motion, some admitting they had made a serious mistake. Others also took the opportunity to criticize council’s decision to reject a universal bus pass proposal earlier this year.

The move will cost OC Transpo $220,000 per year, but saves students 28 and older about $20 on a monthly bus pass.

Untag all those photos, because my Dad is now on Facebook

When my Dad answered the phone on Monday, he had exciting news. “I joined Facebook,” he said casually. I froze, shocked. I had long feared this moment, but had imagined the danger had passed until now.

He was already updating his profile, adding friends, and uploading pictures. In short, he had already gotten the hang of things.

He informed me he already had several ‘friends’ – Uncle Yves, Uncle Burton, and Cousin Fay. It was a short, but powerful, line-up of family and friends who I had been alarmed to see entering the social media bubble. My fourteen-year-old brother, unsurprisingly, seemed reluctant to accept his friend request.

My Mum seemed slightly amused by this development. “Your sister and I went to the mountains yesterday, but your Dad stayed at home,” she whispered on the phone in the kitchen, anxious not to be overheard in the living room, where he was tagging photos of a fly fishing trip. “He’s been on Facebook all weekend!”

We shouldn’t be surprised. My Dad is an old hand with the Blackberry – we regard it as significantly more important than his second kidney. He doesn’t just use it for e-mail, either. Way back when, he introduced me to the first Arctic Monkeys album by bringing up a BBC article on them during a family dinner.

But long after he had signed up for a YouTube account so he could save all those videos of shark attacks, he didn’t seem to have an interest in Facebook. I thought he saw it as a bastion of poor grammar, but perhaps it just flew below his radar.

Not so for many parents these days. Although Facebook used to be for kids-only (or at least those under 25), a haven for party photos and un-censored rambling, it’s slowly being sanitized. As parents enter the fray, photos are rapidly being un-tagged, language quickly cleaned up, and ‘girls of the world’ applications surreptitiously removed.

Students have been cautioned for years to remember that the internet is a public space. But the disdain of a future potential employer is no kind of motivation to be careful, compared to the more current, and more horrifying, prospect of my Dad browsing photos of me at “Beerjing 2008.”

Some parents are on Facebook to be snoops, it’s true, but most of the parents I have seen seem to just want to keep up with their kid’s lives, and maybe some of their own friends, too.

They leave messages commenting on profile pictures, telling their children they miss them, and occasionally finishing with an ‘xoxo.’

Now, my own Dad has a chance to do the same. Although I tried to talk myself out of the idea, eventually I did a light purge of my own profile, and sent him a friend request.

I knew I might have to be a little more careful in future, but I figured it would probably be a good thing, for my privacy and my career prospects.

He just accepted my request, and I’m looking forward to posting links to articles I know we’ll disagree on, and maybe some new music I think he’ll like. The best part is getting a peak at his newest photos long before Christmas rolls around. There’s four albums already, and it’s almost possible that he has better things to do than “creep” my profile.

And now, I’ve received another friend request. It’s from my Aunt. ‘Friend suggestions’ are popping up, flashing the faces of my Uncle, cousins, and family friends. And I’m not quite sure what I’ve unleashed.