Archive for July, 2010
Hey doctors, please stay
Sask to help medical school grads pay down loans
Saskatchewan needs doctors. The province announced yesterday that it would be providing $450,000 to help medical residents with their student loans.
The province’s funding covers interest on student loans for medical residents over an eighteen month period, while government looks into longer-term strategies to ensure medical residents are assisted while completing their residencies.
“Keeping Saskatchewan-trained medical residents working in the province is a top priority of this government,” McMorris said. “As part of our ongoing retention and recruitment efforts, we are pleased to assist medical residents during their residencies. We can be proud that Saskatchewan is leading the way among the provinces by offering this short-term funding.”
“Our top priority is Saskatchewan’s post-secondary students,” Minister of Advanced Education, Employment and Immigration Rob Norris said. “I’m pleased that we have been able to develop a solution to meet the Federal legislative requirements of the student loan program while supporting Saskatchewan’s objectives regarding the recruitment and retention of physicians.”
“Postponing repayment will allow residents to continue to lay down roots in the province that they will hopefully one day practise within,” Vice President of the Professional Association of Interns and Residents of Saskatchewan Sue Sidhu said. “We are all extremely grateful that the province has taken action so quickly.”
I’m not really sure what to make of this announcement. Doctors need financial aid? Then again, the life of a resident can be miserable. Its not just the long hours, but the pay. To be sure, full fledged doctors aren’t exactly starving, and should be more than capable of handling their loans, even if they are brushing up against, and sometimes exceeding, $100,000. But for the first few years after graduation, when they are doing their residency, med-school grads earn salaries closer to those with arts degrees. In Saskatchewan the starting wage is around $47,000/year. So after spending eight intense years in university training for one of the most in-demand professions, med school grads can expect the same, or similar, salary as the sociology student who spent three years taking multiple choice exams and who probably has loan payments a third the size.
So there is a credible argument for loan payments to be reduced. But postponing repayment, as residents are still earning a salary, might be too generous.
What is more aggravating is the fact that provincial governments so often market what is essentially a bribe to keep doctors, or anyone of any use, within its borders as a student aid program. Any tuition rebate scheme falls into this category. Presumably the province is having difficulty keeping doctors from leaving after they complete their training. What’s to stop them from leaving anyway? If Saskatchewan is losing doctors to better paying jurisdictions, the province could always raise the rates doctors are paid per appointment. But, then the government would no longer be helping young debt addled grads, but established doctors who will already be earning an upper level income. Alternately, doctors could be fitted with ankle bracelets to keep them from fleeing to Alberta.
Are we tolerant enough, yet?
Reflections on the art of hating.
Sri Sri Ravi Shankar writes this week that teaching tolerance is as important as arithmetic. It would be tedious to analyze every line of this platitudinous ramble (he assumes that religion necessarily equals wisdom, for example, which is a pretty big leap in my humble opinion). But I do worry every time I hear people preaching the unmitigated value of tolerance.
Elsewhere, I have expressed my concerns about the unwillingness of Canadians in general, and university students in particular, to take stands on difficult issues. Maybe the problem is the incessant preaching of tolerance in the peculiarly modern sense that Ravi Shankar means it. Read his article for yourself, but I am pretty sure by tolerance he doesn’t just mean tolerating something (whereby one could condemn a belief one tolerates). He means accepting it,valuing it, maybe even celebrating it. Thus Ravi Shankar:
It is time to kick-start enlightened imaginations. Societal renewal has to be a collaborative effort of honest politicians, businessmen with integrity, religious leaders with credibility, visionary educationalists and social workers.
Well that all sounds nice, but it has nothing to do with living in the world. After all, how would we know who the honest politicians are in a culture where politicians only spout meaningless babble and refuse to answer questions? How will we find the businessmen with integrity when the founding premise of modern business is profit before all else? And religious leaders with credibility? Name six. What if no religious leaders are credible?
You see where I’m going with this. It’s all well and good to wax eloquent about accepting everyone and everything, until we realize that not everything is acceptable. We all love peace and happiness but we are going to have to really have it out with each other before we can agree on what those things mean and how we are going to get there. And it’s going to take a lot of messy fights.
A favourite tactic of my students is what I call “giving away the farm.” At the end of an essay, the student will write something like, “Of course, this is just my opinion, and any other opinion could be just as good.” Really? Because if your opinion is based on factual evidence and clear reasoning, it’s already a lot better than most. And if it’s not, then why did you hand it in? The student, of course, is trying to be broad-minded, because she has been led to believe that calling someone else wrong is intolerant. And so she has lost the courage of her convictions. And maybe convictions altogether.
My point is that some people are wrong sometimes, and it is okay to say so. In fact, it is absolutely necessary. As the great Ogden Nash once wrote, “Any kiddy in school can love like a fool, / But hating, my boy, is an art.” I’m not saying we should teach kids to attack or resent others based on the colour of their skin or where they came from, but at some point we have to teach kids to be able to do some hating. Hate the political spin that is killing democracy; hate corporate greed; hate religious nonsense.
Hate me, if you want (some of you have a head start!). Tolerate only to the point where you are not blowing things up and shooting people. After that, we have some really important fights to have.
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Your grades will drop
How universities and high schools are setting students up for disappointment
Scott Penner was a model high school student. With a grade 12 average of 93 per cent, and with math and science as his strongest subjects, he was poised to be a successful engineering student. That is, until he started at the University of Manitoba. Penner was not expecting to glide through university, though he “was still expecting to do fairly well.” Even by these lowered standards, his first year was less than encouraging. Not only was he receiving an uncharacteristic assortment of Bs and Cs, he failed first-year calculus, a prerequisite to continue on in engineering. “It was a bit of a shock,” he says.
Penner is not alone. The vast majority of students see their grades fall, often dramatically, once they get to university. What is sometimes called “grade shock” can have devastating consequences for students, as they struggle to cope with the fact that they are no longer at the top of the class.
Within the course of a semester dreams can be easily whisked away. “The business program or engineering program that they thought they were going to pursue [is] not an option for them anymore,” says Brock University economist Felice Martinello who recently co-authored a study on the changes in grades between high school and first-year university.
There are also financial repercussions. In 2008, Maclean’s surveyed the rate at which students who received entrance scholarships kept the requisite grades to maintain their funding going into second year. At York University, where fully 60 per cent of incoming students received an entrance scholarship, only 10 per cent kept their funding. At McMaster the rate was 21 per cent. At Ryerson, seven per cent.
As grades have long been known to predict whether students will complete their program, significant grade drops may be contributing to dropout rates, suggesting that students coming in, even with an A+ average, may become discouraged and simply give up. In fact, the best evidence we have suggests that it is the highest achieving students that are most at risk for being disappointed in university.
In his paper, Martinello, and coauthor Ross Finnie, find–consistent with previous research–that on average students see a 10-point drop in their grades once they are in university. Using data from Statistics Canada’s Youth In Transition Survey, the study concludes that nearly half of all students surveyed saw their marks decline by one letter grade. About 23 per cent saw their grades plummet by two letters or more. Only 2.5 per cent of students saw their grades improve, and about a quarter maintained averages consistent with their high school marks.
But, what is novel about Finnie and Martinello’s paper, and pertinent for high school academic stars like Penner, is that the economists determined that “the highest achieving group (in high school) has the largest decrease in grades.” Students entering university with a 90 per cent or higher experienced a drop of 11.9 points. Students with high school marks in the 60-79 per cent range had only a 4.4-point drop. Prior studies tended to assume that even with a drop, that there was a linear relationship between high school and university grades. Finnie and Martinello’s research challenges that assumption.
“You’d think that maybe, oh, it’s the weaker students, that once they go to university, they’re really going to get killed, but it turns out that’s it’s the 90 plus group,” Martinello says.
Recent trends suggest that the challenges of grade shock are only going to become more widespread. That’s because students with average entering grades, in the B or B+ range, are slowly disappearing. And when all, or most, of the students come in with an A or A+ average, many will have nowhere to go but down.
At the University of British Columbia average entrance grades across the university are expected to be 87 per cent this year, a two per cent increase from last year, and up from 80 per cent ten years ago, and 70 per cent twenty years ago. Andrew Arida, UBC’s associate director of enrolment says higher entering grades are simply a matter of supply and demand. “Because students are presenting higher grades, we’ve had to raise our admission averages to avoid over-enrolling,” he explains.
Only a few years ago, UBC was admitting around 15 per cent of students with grades below 80. That number is dwindling fast. Although Arida didn’t have final figures for the fall, he says only a “small number” of students will get in with less than an A. Students entering the two largest faculties, science and arts, will need a minimum high school average of 86 and 85 per cent respectively.
Similarly, the University of Waterloo increased by seven per cent this year over last, the number of entering students with an average of at least 85 per cent.
Schools like Waterloo and UBC, already considered prestigious, are joining an elite club of universities that are inaccessible to all but the highest achieving students. With an average entering grade of 88.9 per cent, Queen’s University rarely admits students with less than an A average. At McGill, the median average entrance grade for Canadian students is 92 per cent.
The lie of the tight-knit community
Why living in residence might not be worth $10,000 a year
When I was finishing high school, my biggest priority in choosing a university was to get out of the house and experience life in residence. Various pundits of higher education, family, friends, teachers, and counsellors, all touted the importance of experiencing that aspect of university life. You will learn as much outside of the classroom as inside of it, they insisted, provided you leave home and live in residence. Craving the perceived independence, freedom, and the idea of living down the hall from my entire group of friends in a “tight-knit community,” I swallowed their arguments whole and shipped off to Toronto.
Having now lived it, I am somewhat less enthusiastic about the value of moving away for university. In very tangible terms, I don’t think the benefits of living in residence are worth the $10,000 a year that pay the average university’s fees for room and board. Of course, I had some great times living in residence at U of T this past year. There were great parties, incessant socializing, and the comfort and convenience of not having to cook or clean.
But there were equally great parties living at home during high school, and my non-res friends at U of T can come down to campus whenever they feel like. Relative freedom from cooking and cleaning also likely exists for most of us at home. And incessant socializing, it turns out, gets old pretty fast, and can be a huge drain on one’s productivity and motivation to trying new activities rather than just chillin’ in the quad with the same dozen acquaintances.
An emphasis on the distinction between acquaintanceship and friendship is important. I think it’s fair to say that most of us enjoy real friendship with a handful of people, and that beyond that, social groups tend to consist of mere acquaintances–people with whom you are friendly, but don’t share the same depth of connection as you do with a real friend. Life in residence immerses you among acquaintances, which can certainly have its benefits in terms of honing social skills, becoming more open and accepting of differences, and so on. But it is likely mistaken to assume that living in residence will provide you with an instant, enormous, “tight-knit” network of friends.
Like in high school, people will always have their differences, and cliques still exist. The benefits of immersion into university life, such as the oft-cited creation of a “tight-knit” community, deserve to be scrutinized before you (or your parents) drop $40,000 or more over the course of your undergrad.
UWaterloo president next Governor General
Updated: David Johnston to takeover in September
University of Waterloo president, and legal academic, David Johnston has been named to succeed Michaelle Jean as Governor General. The Queen has given her blessing, and a formal announcement is expected Thursday. Johnston will officially accede to the position when Jean’s tenure ends in September.
Johnston, 69, was born in Sudbury, Ont., and is currently the president of the University of Waterloo. He also served for 15 years as the principal and vice-chancellor of McGill University.
He is a highly educated legal expert, and has studied at Harvard, Cambridge, and Queen’s University in Ontario.
To find the best choice for governor general, Prime Minister Stephen Harper set up a special committee led by Kevin MacLeod, the Canadian Secretary to the Queen and Usher of the Black Rod for the Senate — the most senior protocol position in Parliament.
The committee ruled out sports, entertainment and arts figures, deciding that the next governor general should be well-versed in constitutional matters and parliamentary procedure, in case Canada finds itself in an extended period of minority governments.
“They felt that he would be a good referee because of his legal expertise, but also because of his integrity, backbone and common sense,” Fife told CTV News.
Upate: Johnston’s appointment has been confirmed.
Prof suspended for using rape metaphor
Lecture on Machiavelli leads to accusations of rape advocacy
A United States Naval War College professor was placed on paid leave after he used a rape metaphor in a lecture given in May. A portion of the talk was posted on You Tube, under the heading, “US Naval War College Professor Advocates Rape.” The 3:40 min clip shows Karl Walling, at one point, adopting Machiavelli’s voice to describe how the 16th Century philosopher argued that political leaders with courage and cunning, or virtu (personified as male) should force the unpredictability of life, or Fortuna (personified as female) to their will.
Here’s the part that likely led to Walling’s suspension:
“What does a leader do when the b**** won’t put out? I do not mean to be vulgar, but rather to get to the heart of the matter from Machiavelli. If Fortuna will not cooperate, then make her do so. Real men, real leaders do not take no for an answer. Fortuna, said Machiavelli, is a woman, and when it is necessary if one wants to hold her down, to beat her down, moreover, she will like it.”
Walling, who was forced to apologize for the comments that form part of a 17 page essay says that the clip was taken out of context. For instance, towards the end of the paper, Walling criticizes colleagues who have been seduced by Machiavelli’s realpolitik approach to government: “Blinded by the Jedi master’s insights into the necessities of power, far too many members of my own union have failed to see the obvious: Machiavelli’s political logic was the logic of gangsters, the logic of Don Corleone.”
In a statement released to Inside Higher Ed, on online magazine, the College defended the suspension:
“The president of the college determined that portions of the lecture, which included degrading language about women, were inappropriate and entirely unacceptable . . . The college has policies in place prohibiting the use of inappropriate language, viewed this as a serious matter and took appropriate corrective action. The professor apologized to the college community, was placed on administrative leave, and removed from the lecture schedule for the remainder of the academic year. He also received a letter of caution, which he has publicly made known. College leadership met with students and faculty to reiterate that the language was inappropriate. The Naval War College, like the Navy, values the contributions of its diverse community and expects all members of our organization to adhere to the highest standards of professionalism.”
However, as Inside Higher Ed helpfully points out, even the more controversial comments in the essay, the ones posted on You Tube, represent a pretty standard interpretation of The Prince. From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
“Machiavelli reinforces the association of Fortuna with the blind strength of nature by explaining that political success depends upon appreciation of the operational principles of Fortuna. His own experience has taught him that ‘it is better to be impetuous than cautious, because Fortuna is a woman and it is necessary, in order to keep her under, to beat and maul her.’ In other words, Fortuna demands a violent response of those who would control her. ‘She more often lets herself be overcome by men using such methods than by those who proceed coldly,’ Machiavelli continues, ‘therefore always, like a woman, she is the friend of young men, because they are less cautious, more spirited, and with more boldness master her.’ The wanton behavior of Fortuna demands an aggressive, even violent response, lest she take advantage of those men who are too retiring or ‘effeminate’ to dominate her.”
Walling did not fabricate the rape metaphor. Machiavelli did. Still, Walling’s use of the B-word, at least from the College’s perspective, might have been pushing it.
Cheaters beware: Big Brother is watching
The University of Central Florida videotapes test-takers to combat cheating
Students of the University of Central Florida better be clever if they hope to fool the system and cheat on exams. The school — which the New York Times describes as “the frontier in the battle to defeat student cheating” — features a testing centre where students are videotaped while writing exams. If something suspicious is spotted, the camera zooms in on the student and a computer system records what part of the exam she is currently working on. (The exams are all taken on computers.)
If monitoring isn’t enough to creep out the civil libertarian in you, associate dean Taylor Ellis’ ominous pledge to track cheaters down may raise hairs on your arms: “I will never stop it completely, but I’ll find out about it,” he promises would-be fraudsters.
I believe him. Ellis has banned chewing gum during exams as it could cover up the sound of text messaging or other covert operations. All scrap paper is date-stamped and collected at the end of the exam. If you must wear a cap, it must be on backwards so you can’t hide notes under the brim. And the computers are recessed into desks to prevent students from secretly photographing the screens (although, admittedly, I have no idea how that would help).
In recent surveys, some 61 per cent of 14,000 American students asked admitted to cheating on tests or assignments, according to the New York Times. Yet Ellis claims there have only been 14 suspected cheaters of 64,000 exams taken at last semester at Central Florida, which says to me that he’s either incredibly successful or incredibly unsuccessful.
Like any particularly nasty virus, students adapt fast, and a plethora of websites to help students cheat and share homework are cropping up as fast as Turnitin.com can update its algorithms. On Course Hero, students can share notes, past exams and homework assignments. On Cramster science and engineering students can find solutions for homework assignments from 77 textbooks.
Brain food II: Smart aid for Africa
If you unleash some of those hundreds of millions of minds you help Africa and you help the world.
The other $20 million the Prime Minister announced today at Perimeter Institute may be the smartest and boldest investment a Canadian government has made in development assistance in decades.
It’s $20 million over four years to support Perimeter director Neil Turok’s African Institute for Mathematical Studies, which the cosmologist has branded as his Next Einstein initiative. Turok’s South African, and his idea is simple: there is no good reason why the next Einstein or Newton or Stephen Hawking shouldn’t be a young African man or woman. That continent is many things but of course one of them is a massive untapped human-capital resource: if you unleash some of those hundreds of millions of minds you help Africa and you help the world.
Turok has put everything he has into the notion by launching the first AIMS school in Capetown and planning to build a network of such schools across Africa. He told me about his plans in this 2009 interview. They’re almost unbelievably shoestring operations by the standards of Perimeter: Turok told me it takes about $1 million a year to run one of the places. And the payoff? Students educated at home for one-fifth the cost it would take to educate them at Cambridge or UBC. Staying home to tackle local problems. With a network of contacts among other AIMS grads from across Africa, a built-in antidote to the factionalism that helps hold so many of those countries back. Taught by bright young scholars from home and abroad, and able to plug into that global knowledge network just like any scholar.
The second AIMS in Abuja, Nigeria opened in 2008. Now things get harder. Dakar, Senegal is next, in 15 months: a francophone country with far less-developed physical and social infrastructure than Capetown and Abuja. The (new) (not-in-the-spring-budget) money Harper announced today will help in this crucial next phase. And how significant is this modest $20 million over four years to what Turok’s trying to accomplish?
“It’s the largest single investment in the Institutes ever, by a factor of twenty,” Turok told me today.
Really? Yes, or close, exchange rates being what they are lately. The president of Senegal recently pledged 1 million euros as host of the next AIMS. And Google gave the project a $US1 million grant last year. The Harper government has given it all a mighty push, especially because it may inspire copycats. As one person familiar with the AIMS project pointed out today, can you imagine France letting another country take the lead in such a spectacular fashion on a development project in francophone Africa?
AIMS isn’t the only so-called “smart aid” project in Africa. The Nelson Mandela Institute’s African University of Science and Technology is another; the Mandela Institute’s Funmi Arewa attended yesterday’s announcement. David Strangway’s Academic Chairs for Africa project, still more ambitious, is another.
Eager readers will already have raised two obvious counter-arguments. One is that $20 million is chump change next to the billion and then some that was pledged for maternal and child health at the G8. Well, sure. But on the scale of Turok’s project, which I hope I’ve been able to sketch for you, it’s hardly trivial. And as Dambisa Moyo and the evidence of your own eyes tells you, some very large fraction of traditional subsistence aid to Africa has gone utterly to waste over the last half-century when it hasn’t actually managed to make things worse. The failure of traditional aid is of course no guarantee that a different kind of program will succeed. Rather, it’s an argument for prudent investment to ramp up a highly promising project to a wider scale. Sort of like today’s announcement.
Second, of course, is the you-can’t-get-there-from-here argument. I’ve heard it at length from a European diplomat who’s spent serious time in African universities: have you seen some of these places? They don’t need physicists. They need bed nets, drainage ditches and wheat.
This argument made Abba Gumel laugh out loud when I rehearsed it at Perimeter this afternoon. He’s a Nigerian who runs the Institute of Industrial Mathematical Sciences at the University of Manitoba. He called the bed-nets-before-string-theory argument “totally wrong” and said that what’s made the developed world develop was scientific advancement. “Take that away, and Canada would be a developing country.”
Your mileage may vary. Anyway now we’re going to give this other thing a shot. “Canada is famous as a country with a big heart,” Turok told the crowd after the PM spoke. “It’s fast becoming famous as a country which is smart.”
Brain food I: the post-doctoral trap
Post-docs stand to take a substantial tax hit
Let’s take Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s announcement today at Perimeter Institute in two parts.
The PM announced $45 million over five years (that’s kind of like $9 million a year, but not quite because there’s a ramp-up from zero to full cost) for 700 so-called Banting Post-Doctoral Fellowships. There was some chatter on Twitter that this is a re-announcement of something that was in the spring budget. In fact, I said as much myself. The opposition Liberals quickly sent me the same talking point. But I’m not one for dwelling on such things. When governments announce the allocation of funds they’d earmarked in a budget, to me that’s essentially just a confirmation that the budget meant something real. And indulging in games of “he announced it before!” is one way to avoid discussing the merits of the actual policy.
So on to the actual policy. The federal science and technology strategy as it has evolved through the governments of Mulroney, Chrétien, Martin and Harper is by now so elaborate that it’s getting into areas most people won’t even be familiar with. What the heck is a post-doc? Of course Wikipedia has an answer, but it’s essentially a way station between graduate research — Master’s and doctoral-level scholarship — and a full career in science. The Banting post-docs seek to attract the best fledgling researchers from Canada and abroad and launch their careers well. At $70,000 a year, they’re quite generous.
But here’s the thing. The spring budget also announced a decision on a question that’s been hanging over the many hundreds or thousands of pre-existing post-docs for years now: will their income be taxed the way yours and mine is? Perhaps not surprisingly, the budget said “Yes.” If this is a problem, it is so for only two reasons. First, hundreds of post-docs haven’t been paying income tax on their fellowships before this year. And second, graduate student awards remain tax-free.
The Ottawa Citizen‘s Tom Spears explains it better here than I’ve seen it explained elsewhere. The upshot is that students who have slaved away for petty but livable wages as PhD-level research assistants now stand to take a substantial tax hit for the crime of graduating to the next level of their academic career. Or that post-docs who paid no income tax last year will now pay tax — making these exquisitely well-trained but economically vulnerable citizens, many of them young parents, the only class of Canadians who were hit with a substantial income-tax increase this year.
And finally, it means today’s announcement of a small number of fancy post-docs was financed entirely by taxing all pre-existing post-docs (as well as the recipients of the new Banting awards themselves).
The association representing Canadian post-docs has been ringing the alarm bells over all this. Of course the temptation is to write that off as so much special-interest pleading. But when even as stern a fellow as Jack Mintz echoes these concerns, it’s worth more attention than the government has given it.
Obviously there are both horizontal and vertical fairness issues to be weighed here. Huh? I mean that arguably a post-doc shouldn’t be protected from taxation while a plumber or schoolteacher or newspaper reporter of similar income level has to pay the taxman. That’s horizontal fairness. But vertical fairness means you don’t penalize someone by hiking their taxes arbitrarily, and the peculiar career path of scientific researchers ensures that most of them will face a tax hike at about the time many of them start a family and decide how ambitious they want their research careers to be.
What needs to be done is to reconcile these two legitimate fairness imperatives and the tensions between them. That’s one reason why we need a national conversation about the future of our knowledge economy. With, like, all hands on deck, from feds to provincial governments to university administrators, teachers, granting councils, business, what have you. The good news is that the feds also announced that, or something like it, in the spring budget:
“To ensure that federal funding is yielding maximum benefits for Canadians, the Government, in close consultation with business leaders from all sectors and our provincial partners, will conduct a comprehensive review of all federal support for R&D to improve its contribution to innovation and to economic opportunities for business. This review will inform future decisions regarding federal support for R&D. The Government is currently developing the terms of reference for the review.”
The prime minister had nothing to say about that today. Not a problem. Tomorrow’s another day. When he does announce this review, the question won’t be Is he re-announcing something from the budget? but rather, Is this well-designed and helpful?
No I won’t be a family lawyer
Too many squabbling spouses
In my waning days as a crime reporter, one of my favourite things to do upon encountering a homicide detective was to tell them that I was leaving journalism to go to law school and then, when they asked me what kind of law I wanted to practice, tell them I wanted to be a defence lawyer. Some of them actually swore at me, while others managed to restrain themselves to turning purple. Oh, the fun we had.
While my response was a joke it was sort of premised on the good ol’ “cops-don’t-like-defence-lawyers” assumption, in a way, the bigger joke is asking any incoming law student what kind of lawyer they’re planning to be.
Most incoming law students have vague notions of what kind of law we think we’re interested in: environmental, business, tax, whatever. Truthfully, in my case, I do think I want to go into criminal law of some kind, but asking someone before they even start law school what kind of lawyer they want to be is kind of like asking a kid in middle school what they want to be when they grow up, in that perceptions of an occupation are drawn not from its study or practice, but mostly from having observed it from the outside somehow.
As I was handily reminded in an e-mail today from UVic law, first-year law students have less than no choice in the courses they take. I don’t know what it’s like at other schools, but I don’t even get the tiniest say in my schedule, it’s going to be all picked out for me. In second and third year there’s more choice but by then, presumably, first-year classroom experiences will have a much bigger influence on course selection than the vague notions I currently hold about different types of law.
But then again, maybe not. If there’s one kind of law that I can’t imagine myself practicing, ever, it’s family law. One of the last stories I worked on as a reporter was a bizarre house explosion in Edmonton’s north end. The couple who lived in the house, both of whose bodies were found when the wreckage cleared, had a long and acrimonious court history, an excellent summary of which can be found here. On the day we got the hundreds of pages of court filings this couple had made against one another, I spent hours sitting at my desk reading the heinous accusations each levelled against the other over the course of months. It was literally gut wrenching to read and I found myself physically anxious and nauseated for the rest of the day, simply from reading court transcripts. On the back of each of these, in a cute little sans-serif font, was a stamp with the words “The Family Law Centre,” with a little four-person stick figure family smiling out from the middle.
So, no family law for me. And, according to this story, even though the profession surely has noble aspects, apparently not much in law school or the real world is poised to change the mind of anyone not drawn to the field:
Lawyers who practise family law say it’s a rewarding job that helps people solve problems. But for an increasing number of lawyers, negative perceptions of the field — that it only involves squabbling spouses, bitter custody disputes, and dividing meagre assets — appear to be pushing them toward work that seems quieter, safer, and more lucrative.
Harper drops in on Stephen Hawking
PM announces 70 post-doctoral scholarships
Stephen Harper dropped in on famed cosmologist Stephen Hawking on Tuesday bearing scholarly gifts — a new post-doctoral scholarship for Canada. The prime minister announced 70 fellowships a year will be awarded, with a total value of $45 million over five years.
“We must invest in the people and ideas that will produce tomorrow’s breakthroughs,” Harper said. “The Banting post-doctoral fellowships will give scholars in research institutions across the country the support they need to explore and develop their ideas to the fullest.”
Hawking took up residence at the Perimeter Institute for theoretical physics last month and will continue his work through July. Harper thanked Hawking for coming to the institute and praised him as an “inspiration” to Canadian scientists. Hawking was to have visited the southwestern Ontario institute last summer as a research chair but illness forced him to cancel. The research institute is a public-private partnership that receives funding from the Canadian and Ontario governments as well as individual donors.
The author of “A Brief History of Time” retired from Cambridge University in England last year at age 67.
Harper also announced $20 million to help establish five science, math and technology centres in Africa. “This is a revolutionary approach to development,” the prime minister said. “It aims to nurture the brightest minds in Africa.”
The Canadian Press
Go ahead sleep in
Giving students 30 extra minutes to start their school day leads to more alertness in class, better moods, less tardiness, and even healthier breakfasts
Giving teens 30 extra minutes to start their school day leads to more alertness in class, better moods, less tardiness, and even healthier breakfasts, a small study found. “The results were stunning. There’s no other word to use,” said Patricia Moss, academic dean at the Rhode Island boarding school where the study was done. “We didn’t think we’d get that much bang for the buck.”
The results appear in July’s Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine. The results mirror those at a few schools that have delayed starting times more than half an hour. Researchers say there’s a reason why even 30 minutes can make a big difference. Teens tend to be in their deepest sleep around dawn — when they typically need to get up for school. Interrupting that sleep can leave them groggy, especially since they also tend to have trouble falling asleep before 11 p.m. “There’s biological science to this that I think provides compelling evidence as to why this makes sense,” said Brown University sleep researcher Dr. Judith Owens, the study’s lead author and a pediatrician at Hasbro Children’s Hospital in Providence, Rhode Island.
An Archives editorial said the study adds to “a growing body of evidence that changing the start time for high schools is good for adolescents.” The fact that the study was in the exclusive setting of St. George’s School in Middletown, Rhode Island, doesn’t necessarily weaken the results. Owens acknowledged that there might be more hurdles to overcome at poorer, public schools, including busing schedules, parents’ work hours and daycare for younger siblings.
While these issues have killed many proposals elsewhere, some public high schools including those in Minneapolis and West Des Moines have adopted later starting times. Mel Riddile, an associate director at the National Association of Secondary School Principals, favours later class times for teens but said most districts oppose it. “It’s about adult convenience, it’s not about learning,” he said. “With budget cuts, it’s going to make it more difficult to get this done.”
Many parents and teachers at St. George’s were opposed but reluctantly agreed to the study after a presentation by Owens, whose daughter was a junior there. Overall, 201 high school students completed sleep habit surveys before and after the nine-week experiment last year. The results were so impressive that the school made the change permanent, Moss said. Starting times were shifted from 8 to 8:30. All class times were cut 5 to 10 minutes to avoid a longer school day that would interfere with after-school activities. Moss said improvements in student alertness made up for that lost instruction time.
The portion of students reporting at least eight hours of sleep on school nights jumped from about 16 per cent to almost 55 per cent. Reports of daytime sleepiness dropped substantially, from 49 per cent to 20 per cent. First-period tardies fell by almost half, students reported feeling less depressed or irritated during the day, health centre rest visits dropped substantially; and the number of hot breakfasts served more than doubled. Moss said the healthier breakfast probably aided classtime alertness.
Recent graduate Garrett Sider, 18, used the extra time for sleep. He noticed kids took part more often in morning classes with the later start time. “It was a positive thing for the entire school,” he said. The study was designed to look at changes in sleep habits and behaviour and didn’t examine academic performance. It also lacked a control group of students who didn’t experience a change in school start times — another limitation. Still, the researchers said the results show delaying school starting times is worthwhile.
The Canadian Press
Hey, you’re going to be a lawyer, take a look at this
First-year lecture halls aren’t filled with legal experts, they’re filled with people as doused with nervous sweat as I presume I’ll be
I started thinking about going to law school almost exactly two years ago. At the time, I was working as the court reporter for the Ottawa Citizen and was starting to find the fit between myself and journalism a bit off. At the same time, I was being paid to observe the daily lives of Ottawa’s criminal lawyers and, as so frequently happens when anyone starts to become disenchanted with something, the next most proximate alternative started to look seriously appealing. I did love going to the courthouse each day and observing all manner of trials, so eventually it just made sense to set myself on a path to actually practice law myself, instead of being employed as a constant observer.
Fast forward through the LSAT prep and the test writing and the score release and the application process and the waiting for the acceptances and the acceptances and all the other gauntlets that literally every other potential law student faces, gauntlets not insignificant but not particularly important right now, and I was at the point where I started to tell people that I was leaving journalism and going to law school. At which point, a strange and panic-inducing phenomenon started cropping up in my life: people started treating me like I was already a lawyer.
Not all the time, obviously, and no one was hiring me to take their cases or anything, because I don’t know anyone that criminally stupid. But as soon as people heard I was quitting to go to law school, friends and colleagues started asking me my opinion on various legal issues that would crop up in the news. At one point, my editor at the Edmonton Journal, the last place I worked, dropped some parole documents that had come in on my desk and asked me to look over them. Now, I was a crime reporter at the Journal, so reading parole docs was a regular part of my job, but on this particular occasion he specifically asked me to do it because I was going to be a lawyer.
All of these tiny incidents, even if it was just being introduced to a new person as “This is Laura, she’s going to be a lawyer,” has sent me into the same paroxyms of fear and has inspired a lightning-fast soliloquy from me that goes something like this:
“Oh, no. No, no, no, no, no. I don’t think we should say that I’m going to be a lawyer. I mean, yes, I’m going to law school in the fall. I did get into law school, that is true. But I mean, right now, I’m not even there yet. I don’t even have a class schedule. And then I have to pass, like, all my first year classes. And second, and third. And between those years, I have to get jobs that are related to the law. And then after that, after all that, I have to article and pass the bar and…”
And then I would sort of pass out or curl up into a tiny, sweating, hyperventilating ball.
What scares me about all these weird interactions was not the reminder of the metric ton of work I’m facing in the next three years or the distant, looming title of lawyer, the one that comes with many derisive looks and lame jokes. It’s the idea that, because I’ve decided to go to law school, I should already know a bunch about the law. It’s the same feeling I had as a 17-year-old on the first day of Journalism school, when I looked around the lecture theatre at Carleton that held more people than my hometown and was convinced that every other 17-year-old there had already edited a newspaper or scribed a Globe and Mail focus piece or was a direct descendent of William Randolph Hearst.
I was wrong then, and I’m pretty sure I’m wrong now. First-year lecture halls aren’t filled with legal experts, they’re filled with people as doused with nervous sweat as I presume I’ll be. The internet is filled with discussion threads of panicked people in my position asking upper-year law students what the best things to read in the pre-law school summer are, and the answers are almost universally the same: nothing. Relax. The next three years will be filled with law books and case briefs, so take this time to do nothing.
So, okay. I’ll try to relax. I’ll be okay.
I think
Student leaders against Israeli Apartheid
Speaking for you, using your money
This weekend’s Pride Parade in Toronto was one of the most controversial in 30 years. The issue concerned a group called Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (QuAIA), and whether it would be allowed to march in the parade.
In late May, the answer was “no.” Fearing a loss of city funding and private sponsorship, Pride Toronto decided to play a game of semantics and ban the words “Israeli apartheid.” In a statement released June 7, Pride Toronto said “the use of the words ‘Israeli apartheid’ made participants feel unsafe.”
Then, just over a week ago, Pride flip-flopped, announcing it would “no longer restrict language in the Parade.” Either Pride Toronto suddenly decided that “Israeli apartheid” doesn’t make participants feel unsafe, or it capitulated to pressure. You decide.
If we can put the embarrassing flip-flop aside; should QuAIA (or the words “Israeli apartheid,” if you want to play that game) been banned in the first place? I still can’t make up my mind. (Sorry, I know that doesn’t make for quite as compelling a read.) On the one hand, public dollars are feeding the parade. It seems fishy to use tax money to fund a potentially ostracizing message, especially at an event centred around inclusiveness. On the other hand, free speech should be upheld as a cherished right. Censorship can be a slippery slope, especially when a selected few are given the authority to decide what is and is not appropriate. But despite my wavering in that respect, I have made up my mind on one aspect of the parade and it concerns how student union leaders chose to participate.
Though I am certainly no expert on issues in the Middle East, the irony of QuAIA did not escape me. QuAIA members marched along the parade route Sunday, proudly chanting, “Israeli Apartheid, you ain’t fine, you ain’t got no alibi, you ugly!” despite the fact that Israel is the only country in the Middle East that supports gay rights. Nevermind. Marchers boasted signs that read, “Israeli Apartheid is worse than South Africa” and “My Pride Includes Free Speech.” (Do you think that sign was recycled from the Ann Coulter event at University of Ottawa? No?) But all that didn’t irk me much. Indeed, QuAIA members aren’t speaking on my behalf, and though I didn’t agree with every poster board message, I watched placidly as they walked by. But then came the Ryerson/George Brown student float.
Yes, the music was pumping and the sun was just glorious, and there they were—students acting as my representatives—adorned in shirts boasting that their pride is “Against Israeli Apartheid.” Funny, I don’t think I’ve read enough on Israel to merit an opinion tee (I say that half joking). So why are my paid student representatives making a decision for me? And worse yet—why are they flaunting it on my behalf?
I have no problem with John Doe the individual advocating for whichever cause he desires. Nor do I have a problem with John Doe the public figure openly aligning himself with a position, however controversial it may be. I do, however, find issue with Mr. Doe, my representative, choosing a side on a polarizing issue, far removed from his mandate as a student advocate, and doing it on my dime.
I can already hear the response; “That’s government, kid. Get used to it.” Maybe so. And of course, this student union behaviour isn’t new. But when student fees are collected by a student union, I expect them to be spent on education issues. If nothing else, it seems careless from a strategic perspective for a student government to align itself, both fiscally and ideologically, on an issue that so severely divides its voting population, especially when the issue has little to do with education. City funding went to the Pride Parade as a whole, not specifically QuAIA. Student fees, on the other hand, seemed to be used to advocate a certain position.
At the very least, student leaders could have taken a sharpie to the “RSU” on their shirts. A city mayor advocating a certain position doesn’t speak for all municipal citizens in the same way a VP Student Life speaks for a university’s student body.
Here’s hoping the money for those student tees branded “Against Israeli Apartheid” was out of pocket, not out of student fees. Now, who’s up for a unicorn ride?
Montreal school evacuated after bomb threat
Exams are being rescheduled
Police have finished a search of Montreal’s HEC business school which was briefly shut Sunday following a call reporting a suspicious package. About 100 staff and students who were writing exams were ordered out of the two school buildings after police received call from someone claiming to have placed a bomb in the school at about 8:30 a.m. Nothing was found in the sweep and the school was reopened around noon. Exams are currently being rescheduled.
Canadian Press
Higher ed ‘traditionalists’
Survey reveals that arts students care less about employment, more about parties
In a previous post, I pointed out that when we consider what students are actually studying, concerns over the demise of the liberal arts are overblown. Students are not recoiling from subjects that have few direct lines to post-graduation employment. The social sciences and the humanities, that presumably underpin our democracy, have not been replaced by more utilitarian fields. Whatever the government’s lack of interest in funding the liberal arts, or in the increasing emphasis on marketable skills, the numbers of students graduating from the social sciences and humanities has barely budged since the early 1990s.
What I didn’t consider was why the liberal arts remain popular. It may be that commerce and engineering programs, for instance, have entrance requirements that make them inaccessible to the average student. If this were true then the thesis that the liberal arts have been replaced may have some traction. That is, if it can be shown that high achieving students have been increasingly less likely to major in English or sociology then they would have been in the past. Though there is some evidence to suggest this isn’t the case. For example, at the University of British Columbia, students entering the faculty of arts will need a minimum high school average of 85 per cent, suggesting even high achieving students are opting for the liberal arts.
Still, it might be the case that by providing a comparatively less exhausting path to a credential, the continued popularity of the liberal arts may have as much to do with finding employment as more professionally oriented programs.
A new survey, however, suggests that the liberal arts attracts students who are relatively unconcerned with pursuing employment. Last spring, Academica Group surveyed 150,000 students who were applying to more than 40 colleges and universities. The aim of the study was to determine what draws students to “specific institutions.” Liberal arts students, dubbed “higher-ed traditionalists,” were found to “place less weight on employment outcomes and even grad school placements than their peers in other programs, and are less concerned with co-op programs.”
Similar to applicants of other programs, students applying to arts place importance on the quality of faculty and resources but, “they place significantly more emphasis on library collections,” and “less weight on investments in the latest technology, high-profile research, and undergraduate research opportunities.” Liberal arts students were also found to give greater consideration to the student experience, such as whether the campus is attractive, the quality of the residences and “student diversity.” They are also more likely to be attracted to “clubs and social activities, and off-campus urban life,” while “being less concerned with recreational facilities or varsity athletics.”
What this suggests is that so long as there are students who view university as a pleasant way to spend four years, or as an interval between adolescence and adulthood, there will be a market for the social sciences and humanities.
Hey professor, got a quarter?
UAlberta profs lose office phones
Professors at the University of Alberta are losing their office phones as part of a plan to reduce departmental budgets by five per cent. So far, according to the Edmonton Journal, the lines have been cut in a number of liberal arts departments, including philosophy and English and film studies. Scandinavian languages professor, Chris Hale, wonders whether smoke signals and courier pigeons should be used as a substitute. “Most people, when I tell them this, they break down laughing,” he said. Professors who need a phone should be able to find one in faculty lounges and departmental offices, and tax credits are available for those who use a private cell phone. Still, profs might want to start stocking up on quarters so they can plug campus pay phones.
Canadians head to international math contest
Students confident of success
Six young Canadian math whizzes are ready to divide, add, subtract, multiply and conquer at a prestigious global competition, but they won’t be using their calculators at the contest. For high school students taking part in the International Mathematical Olympiad, rulers and compasses are allowed in the exam room. Calculators, however, are a no-no.
Canada’s sharp math minds are well aware they’re facing tough challenges ahead beyond mere number-crunching in their quest for a medal at the IMO. “Calculations are usually not a big part of the competition. It really is just pure problem-solving,” said Canadian team leader Adrian Tang, who took home a bronze medal at the IMO in 1998. “Everybody wants to make sure that it’s not a race through who can multiply these numbers quickly. It really is a true test of who has the best problem-solving skills.”
Canada will join more than 100 countries participating in this year’s IMO in Kazakhstan. The 51st annual event begins Saturday in the capital city of Astana. The first contest was held in Romania in 1959 with seven participating countries. It has since expanded to more than 90 countries from five continents. Toronto played host to the event in 1995.
Since Canada first started taking part in 1981, the country has received 17 gold, 40 silver and 68 bronze medals. This year’s Canadian team includes two students from B.C., one from Alberta and three from Ontario ranging from Grade 7 to 12. Robin Cheng, Hunter Spink and Chen Sun, who were silver medallists at the 2009 IMO in Bremen, Germany, are back on the Canadian squad, alongside team members Alex Song, Yuqi Zhu and Jonathan Zung.
Canada’s team is attending training camp at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ont., in the leadup to this year’s contest, where they’ll take mock tests similar to the complex questions they’ll tackle during the IMO.
The contest takes place over two days, July 7 and 8. On each contest day, students are provided with three problems that they are given four hours and 30 minutes to complete. According to information by Naoki Sato, a former Canadian IMO team member, that is posted on the Canadian Mathematical Society’s website, subjects are restricted to those from the high school curriculum, including algebra, geometry, number theory, inequalities and combinatorics and probability.
The host country receives up to six problem proposals from other countries. They then have to make a shortlist of about 30 questions. An international jury comprising a chief delegate or leader from each participating country together with the chairman named by the host country selects the final problems. “It takes a lot of insight and analytical skills for anybody to be able to solve these problems,” said Tang, a PhD candidate at the University of Calgary in mathematics. “I’ve been solving math competition problems for 12 years and I still encounter problems I cannot solve.”
Tang said grading is done on a point system, and the goal is to solve as many problems as possible. Even if they can’t, participants should try to make as much progress as possible. “For anybody to even make partial progress on one of the problems is an astounding achievement because it takes a lot of creativity, it takes a lot of talent to really understand what the problem is asking,” he said.
This year’s contest will be the swan song for Chen Sun. The 17-year-old from London, Ont., attended his first IMO in Madrid in 2008 and last year’s event in Germany. Sun has been immersed in the subject and competitions for years. He first attended the local “Math Challenge @ Western” program in the fourth grade. Sun said what distinguishes math competitions is the emphasis on problem solving and creativity and truly trying to figure out something that, at first glance, even the world’s best math students may not have any idea how to solve.
While some may immediately conjure images of calculations when their thoughts turn to the subject, Sun sees math and the contests as representative of much more. “For people who are fortunate to have experienced that in high school and maybe in university, they see this other side of math, this other side that a lot of people never got a chance to see, and it really is pretty cool,” he said. “There is really some nice stuff in it. It’s like an art form, almost.”
Tang said he was confident that Canada will do well. “They’re a great team with a lot of talent and it’s probably one of the best teams we’ve had,” he said. “I expect great things from the team, but at the same time, I also hope that they’ll have a lot of fun in Kazakhstan, meet people, learn about the culture — just whatever is available there.”
The Canadian Press
Do Native Canadians have special knowledge?
Celebrating indigenous knowledge obscures the real problems Native Canadians face.
In last week’s CAUT Bulletin, Penni Stewart celebrates Trent University for its commitment to “indigenous knowledge.” Trent, for instance, recently created a mission statement which
foster[s] an environment where Indigenous knowledge is respected and recognized as valid means by which to understand the world.
What might that mean, exactly? Philosophical quibbles notwithstanding, knowledge is generally understood as belief that is true and justified. Why does Trent need to specifically point out that true, justified beliefs about the world are valid?
The answer presumably lies in the fact that we are talking about “Indigenous” knowledge, here. But why is indigenous knowledge categorically different from other kinds of knowledge? If a thing is true and there is good reason to believe it is true, what difference does it make who believes it?
The key to all these questions, of course, is that Trent is not really talking about indigenous knowledge, but rather indigenous belief. They are talking about the folklore and customs of Canadian aboriginal people and suggesting that those beliefs are just as valid as other ways of knowing, such as, say, science.
From some perspectives, the Trent approach makes eminent sense. If you are an anthropologist and you are looking to study how cultures understand themselves, and how they see the world then, of course, indigenous belief is part of the vast tapestry of human culture. And if the ideas and traditions of indigenous Canadians have been under-appreciated, then well done, Trent, for giving that needed emphasis.
The trouble is, I don’t think that’s what they mean. Or, at least, I don’t think that’s all they mean. I think when they say indigenous belief is a valid way of understanding the world, they mean the actual, real world, and that’s where things get dicey. The traditions of Native Canadians may indicate that a dream about animals will tell the dreamer where those animals may be successfully hunted, and that may be a fascinating chapter in the way various cultures have understood dreams, but it does not make it true about the actual nature of dreaming. Some natives say that the cry of a loon indicates that a moose or deer is nearby. Perhaps it is true, but the fact that it is traditionally believed does not make it knowledge. All cultures have folkloric traditions whose assertions are, in many cases, untrue. The ancient Greeks believed that bees were created spontaneously out of decaying organic matter. In South Korea, it is widely believed that it is dangerous to sleep in a room with a fan on, because, some say, the fan chops up the oxygen molecules and makes them unbreathable. My mother told me that bare feet on a chilly floor would cause me to catch cold. That people believe it does not make it so.
At my own august institution, much has been made about a program in “integrative” science where “western” science, with its narrow view of the world is “enriched” by the “more holistic sciences” of native peoples. I used to frequently pass by a poster near the integrative science offices, that argued, for instance, that western scientists tended to name living things after lifeless technologies (the fiddlehead fern, for example), while aboriginals named things by relating them to other things in nature (snake plant — though apparently these proponents of “two-eyed seeing” have never heard of spider monkeys or leopard frogs or dogfish or sunflowers…).
This is not to say that indigenous belief might not lead to new scientific discoveries. Ancient cultures used white willow bark as a pain killer before we knew about aspirin. But if I have cancer, I want to know that a supposed remedy has been scientifically tested before I start a course of treatment — no matter how many generations have endorsed it.
But returning to Trent, we find that the University has not stopped at recognizing indigenous knowledge. In fact, native professors there can be exempted from the normal system of tenure and promotion. According to Stewart,
Candidates for tenure in indigenous studies at Trent can meet the tenure requirements as “a conventional academic scholar,” an “academic with a background in traditional aboriginal knowledge” (as is the case for many Elders), or as a “dual tradition” scholar. Traditional knowledge is recognized as knowledge usually acquired outside of the university and scholarly credentials may be other than advanced degrees or papers published in journals.
Am I the only one who finds that last sentence incredible? Without seeming to bat an eye, Stewart celebrates a discipline that dispenses with normal academic standards simply because they have “other” ways of acquiring and recognizing knowledge. But surely everyone has “other” ways of acquiring knowledge. Advanced degrees and scholarly research are prized among academics not because they are arbitrary keys to an exclusive club, but because they are ways by which one can verify whether the knowledge they represent is reliable.
We would not accept “other knowledge” if it came from most other groups of people. One might learn a lot about poverty in Canada by living through it, and that knowledge and perspective may be valuable, but being poor is not a substitute for a degree in economics any more than being old is the same as having a degree in history. Growing up in Quebec does not make you a sociologist of French Canadian culture any more than stargazing makes you an astronomer. We should do everything we can to encourage Native Canadians to pursue academic work, but pretending they have credentials they don’t have is not the answer.
There are some disciplines where practical experience may translate into the equivalent of a credential. A celebrated novelist may be hired to teach creative writing, for instance. But those are cases where there are specific skills to impart. Native professors aren’t there to teach you how to be a Native Canadian.
In any case, I suspect that many would discount my arguments since Native Canadians are a special case. They have a sacred connection to the earth, and a special spirit that allows them to divine truths that we Westerners don’t have.
I say it simply is not so. It’s a stereotype, even if a positive one, and one that European Canadians love to perpetuate. We love it because it allows us to seem to be helping Native Canadians without actually considering the problems or doing anything to solve them. We don’t have to help them if they are already better than us, right?
I have no doubt that the folks at Trent and CBU and elsewhere mean well, and, maybe occasionally even provide real benefits. But their rosy vision obscures the pressing issues at hand. After all, why should we worry about the high drop out rate of aboriginal Canadians if their own indigenous knowledge is just as good, or better? Sure, Native Canadians have a shockingly high rate of tuberculosis, but never mind that, we created a Research Chair that celebrates their unique traditions. Besides, tuberculosis is just a term made up by western science, and we know how limited their ideas are.
There’s a lot that needs to be done to help indigenous people in Canada. Canada has been ranked the third most developed country in the world, but if Native Canadians were a separate country, they would be sixty-third. Native Canadians need reliable access to clean drinking water, better education, help combating addictions and high suicide rates.
They don’t need to be told that they’re magic.
