Archive for Nicholas Kohler
Really bad advice
How guidance is failing our students
Photo by Andrew Tolson
From the 21st Maclean’s University Rankings issue—on newsstands now.
Until mid-July, 25-year-old James Douglas pretty much had his life planned out. A fourth-year political science student at a major Canadian university, he anticipated finishing his degree at the end of the summer semester, in August, and graduating with his B.A. this fall. Douglas was in touch with several prospective employers in Toronto, his hometown, as well as in Ottawa, and had allowed the lease on his apartment to lapse. Then he received the phone call that upended all of that.
The call came from the registrar’s office, and informed Douglas that his application for graduation had been turned down. At issue was a three-credit course taken early in his career that his academic adviser had sworn up and down could be put toward his degree as an elective. Not so, the registrar’s office now said. At his entreaties, university officials dug into “some dusty book with fine print on p. 709” and pronounced the course in question as unfit to count toward his poli-sci B.A.
What makes a great teacher
You can engage a room of 500 students: know the material cold, and know how to share it
PHOTOGRAPH BY ANDREW TOLSON
In 1986, to recognize the importance of university teaching, the Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education and 3M Canada created the 3M National Teaching Fellowships. Since 2006, Maclean’s has proudly been the program’s media sponsor. Over the next several weeks we will be profiling each of the 10 winners, starting here with English professor Nick Mount.
It is a rare warm day in what has proven to be a punishingly cold Toronto winter. It is a Friday afternoon—a Friday afternoon before a long weekend. In essence, it is the sort of afternoon for which the playing of hooky was invented. So why is Nick Mount standing on a stage before a sea of first-year students—hundreds of them, piled like waves up the sloping floor of a University of Toronto lecture theatre? “I’m actually,” admits Mount, “shocked you’re here.” He spends the next two hours reminding the class of 450 students why they are.
The topic today is the Chris Ware graphic novel Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth. The course is Literature for Our Time, a primer that encompasses all of Corrigan, Virginia Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness To the Lighthouse, and Toronto novelist Andrew Pyper’s literary noir The Killing Circle. Mount’s close reading of Corrigan, an anti-hero parable of fathers and sons that ends ambiguously with a Superman figure swooping angel like upon the protagonist and carrying him away, is as careful in its attentions as Mount had been with either Woolf or Vladimir Nabokov’s dense, disturbing Lolita.
Suddenly, Mount projects a garish image onto a large screen above him: it is the cover of another comic book, Smooth ’n’ Natural, a clever homage to the blaxploitation B movies of the 1970s. It is uproariously funny. Mount identifies its creator—he is a student, Brian McLachlan, sitting in the hall, totally surprised that Mount knows who he is or what he does. “Did I just embarrass the hell out of you?” asks Mount, who on the contrary, with a magician’s trick, has suddenly summoned the spirit of his theme—Literature for Our Time, the way poetry and fiction really do respond to the world—and housed that spirit in the shape of one of his own students.
“It’s something I learned from Northrop Frye,” says Mount, an expert in 19th-century Canadian romance novels, referring to Frye, the world-renowned U of T literary theorist. “Frye says that romance is the genre that’s best at revealing the wishes of a society—and its fears. An experimental avant-garde novel by some guy wearing a beanie in a café in Yorkville is about his anxieties. But if you read a popular novel, romance or genre fiction up against the culture of their time, they can have really interesting things to say about what that culture worried about, what it hoped for, what kind of heroes it wanted.”
Each Friday, Mount, who’s 47, favours grey stubble over full beard and pairs dark suits with wine-coloured, open-necked shirts, steps onto that stage and holds that mirror up to his 450 students. Somehow—through humour, knowing asides, but above all through a grasp of the material so complete and fluid that it tends to conceal the dozens of hours of prep he dedicates to each lecture—Mount makes the experience intimate. “It’s like I’m just talking to a friend about the book I’ve just finished,” says 18-year-old Alisa Lurie.
It’s not just that he’s passionate about the material (he’s been known to choke up describing how the poet Sylvia Plath placed mugs of milk in her children’s cribs before committing suicide), or that he knows the material cold. These are the basics. Mount recalls that one of his own profs—Patrick Grant, back at the University of Victoria—“broke every rule in the good teacher’s rule book. He read from dusty notes that were clearly 10 years old, he never made eye contact. And I learned more in that class than any other in undergraduate because the guy knew his stuff. And he knew how to share it.”
The new head of the class?
A controversial bill gives Alberta parents more of a say in school
Soon after the Alberta Tories began discussing how to revise the province’s human rights legislation early this year, Lindsay Blackett, the cabinet minister stickhandling the issue, received a visit from an interfaith delegation of religious leaders—evangelicals, Anglicans, Mormons and Muslims—led by Frederick Henry, the outspoken Roman Catholic Bishop of Calgary. Henry, who in the past has been less than shy about discussing such things as the future of Jean Chrétien’s eternal soul, laid out for Blackett the group’s concerns about including sexual orientation in Alberta’s Human Rights Act—and particularly how the topic would be dealt with in schools.
He argued parents should have more of a say in shaping sex-ed curricula, which he and others fear may encourage homosexuality and contravene parents’ own values. As it stands, Alberta children get lessons on the changes of puberty in Grade 4, the perils of blood-borne diseases like HIV in Grade 6, and “safer” sex in Grade 9. Though sexual orientation isn’t specifically addressed in the curricula set out by Alberta Education, the teachers’ union website encourages teachers to create “safe, caring and inclusive environments” by including the topic. In talking with Blackett, Henry sought more control for parents. “We felt it’s high time that there be some attempt on behalf of parents to push back, because many of their rights are seemingly being ignored,” he says.
It’s always tricky to figure out how much social or moral education is just right and how much too much. Alberta is the first province to wade into the issue by giving parents what amounts to a veto. Even here it happened by accident. An update to the province’s human rights law was overdue: more than a decade ago, the Supreme Court’s ruling in Vriend vs. Alberta called the legislation unconstitutional because it failed to include sexual orientation as a ground for discrimination. And many on both the left and right hoped the Tories, under Premier Ed Stelmach, might excise Section 3, which deals with publications “likely to expose a person or a class of persons to hatred or contempt” and has led to controversial human rights cases.
Then Blackett did the unexpected. His Bill 44 added sexual orientation to the act but kept Section 3 intact. More mysterious still—and to the delighted surprise of social conservatives—he included provisions granting parents the right to remove children from lessons in which teachers plan to discuss religion, sexuality and sexual orientation—the only provincial human rights legislation to do so. Specifically, the bill permits mothers and fathers to pull kids out of sex-ed classes, though not from academic classes where, say, evolution is taught. And it grants them the power to file human rights complaints against teachers and school administrators who don’t notify them in advance of these topics.
University of Lethbridge – Coulee Junction Café
CJ’s is bright, scenic and friendly. But the food? Bring your own.
The University of Lethbridge boasts some of the most stunning views in academic Canada, and its cafeteria, at the south end of the Arthur Erickson-designed University Hall, is no exception. Here a bank of windows looks out upon the city’s coulies – rippling, khaki-coloured gulches that clamber up out of Oldman River. Hence the eatery’s name, Coulee Junction, or CJs. Eat here, by all means: it’s bright, scenic and friendly.
But wait, did I forget to mention the food? Bring your own.
That or stick with the Fresh Inspirations Salad Bar and the selection of ready-made sandwiches and salads from CJ¹s refrigerated Simply To Go corner. Our salad, with a refreshing cucumber-dill dressing atop real boiled eggs, carrots and brocoli, was rudimentary but functional. Ditto the croissant ham and swiss, an old standby with a surprisingly good sweet mustard, a fresh roll, spinach and nice tomato.
Stay clear, however, of the rice stir-fries, which a cook will render into goop before your very eyes; if consistency is not a priority, the tasteless shrimp, in this case, and oddly aromatic celery, ought to be enough to command evasive maneuvres. So too the sweet-and-sour sauce, which is either a balance of flavours so perfect that it becomes invisible or – more likely in our view – a red-coloured placebo.
An order of oven-fried cod parmesan, available that day from the International Entrées counter, reignites an old conviction that fish and cheese combinations should remain as taboo as sibling sex (a side of rice, meanwhile, tasted like grandfather¹s closet, and the carrots were ghastly).
The River Rock Grill’s cheese burger was flavourful but greasy. The chicken souvlaki, served in a spinach wrap, was too luridly green and brashly orange for our taste – it’s for good reason David Lynch never became a chef – and the fresh onions tended to over-awe the ensemble; still, it served its purpose.
Finally, a brownie cake – at least, this was our interpretation of the effort – was of a mood-altering sweetness, and would likely be deemed illegal in the state of Alabama. In Alberta, however, the firecracker snap of the desert’s multicoloured sprinkles made us feel as though we were 18 again; then we immediately crashed and consulted the Internet for Keith Richards-approved remedy.
University of Alberta – CAB Café
Little could prepare the intrepid diner for the travails of this brutal “café”
Little prepares the intrepid diner, newly landed in Edmonton, for the travails of the University of Alberta cafeteria. Located at points throughout the sprawling campus–we ate at CAB Café, in the basement of the Central Academic Building–they are industrial feeding machines, capable of efficiency but not delicacy. The results suck, combining national outlets like Burger King (probably your best bet, though good luck with your heart in a few years should you come to rely on it) with no-name fast-fooderies like Hot & Fresh Pizza 73.
At the latter, the server looked genuinely stunned at our request: a simple slice of Hawaiian. The petroleum-product cheese and grease made it initially tricky to unglue the pizza from our cardboard, V-shaped plate. Then a bite made us question the advisability of the project entirely. That unmistakable, arsenic tang of false tomato, the candy-store pineapple, beef jerky pepperoni and overall slovenliness–it all pleases not. Hot & Fresh? We doubt it.
A breaded veal cutlet with “potato” (french fries, actually) and “vegetable” (an unholy coagulation of green beans) from the Mediterranean Spice counter, generously slathered in “gravy,” made us consider actually resigning from our positions as food reviewers with Maclean’s rather than continue the horror. The meat, heavily salted, was likely not meat at all but some kind of substitute. The beans appeared to have been regurgitated by Oliver, of Charles Dickens fame, then preserved for our present delectation. The fries were waterlogged with gravy. We chose not to sample the mushrooms. A pasta concoction, meanwhile, from the salad bar, was like faux Hollandaise, solidified.
Only Wok’s Cooking, the caf’s Chinese stop, surprised–but only in comparison with the CAB Café’s other slop. A dark, thick, MSG-laden sauce, good for both noodles or for tarring a road, put the ummmmmm into umami (though we knew we would pay later in the form of the sweats and hot flashes). The noodles were gluey, but not inedible. The broccoli was real and wholesome, as were the onions, carrots and bean sprouts.
For dessert, a blueberry-poppy seed loaf, encrusted on top with icing and raw oatmeal, might have been better had the oatmeal not pierced the flesh of our gums. With luck, the antioxidizing action of the blueberries (pray for us they are real) may ultimately help us survive this meal.
3M Awards: our best teachers
These innovative and dedicated professors are Canada’s best
Baljit Singh, a professor of anatomy at the University of Saskatchewan’s Western College of Veterinary Medicine, laughs about it now—but during his first year as a veterinary student, he failed the very course he now teaches. “I always tell my students,” says Singh. “I use it as a very inspirational example. I say, ‘Look, this is what happened to me in my first year. And I ended up teaching anatomy.’”
Singh, the one-time academic bungler, has since gone on to receive numerous academic distinctions, and is one of 10 professors named this year to the 3M National Teaching Fellowship. The award was established 24 years ago by 3M Canada in collaboration with the Society of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education. Maclean’s has been the award’s media partner since 2006.
These new fellows join an elite club that now includes 238 professors. To win, it’s not enough to be merely a great teacher. “We’re looking for personalities, for people who are authentic, who are passionate—and Baljit is a great example,” says program coordinator Arshad Ahmad, a Concordia University business professor and a 3M fellow himself.
For all 10 3M National Teaching Fellows for 2009, click here.
Singh attributes his pedagogic success to the teachers in his own life. “They have built a fire in my mind,” says Singh. “This is the power of a teacher—once you are hooked up with an outstanding teacher, half the battles are won.”
The 3M National Teaching Fellowship rewards great teaching, and the teaching leadership required to share innovations with the broader educational community. Fellows are regularly brought together to exchange ideas, making the club an incubator for new teaching techniques. In June, they will gather in Fredericton; in November, this year’s inductees will attend a retreat at the Fairmont Le Château Montebello in Quebec. “We bring these people together to get to know each other as teachers and learn from each other,” says Ahmad. “There they are using their cutting edge stuff and sharing it, mentoring others to follow in those footsteps.” Here are a few that will be among them:
Glen Loppnow, Department of Chemistry, University of Alberta
“This is the extract from thousands of fireflies,” jokes Loppnow. Before a class of rapt first-year science students, Loppnow pours a beaker of bleach into a bottle containing the chemical luminol. The result, known as chemiluminescence—what a firefly does inside its glowing tail—transfixes his students. “No fireflies were harmed in this experiment,” Loppnow promises, before outlining how the energy of the chemical reaction has been converted into this blue, otherworldly light. That illuminating glow is a nifty metaphor for Loppnow’s brand of teaching excellence.
Loppnow admits he wasn’t always a great teacher. Had you caught one of his lectures a decade ago, he says, “you would have seen somebody whom the students considered mediocre and grumpy. I was rapidly getting a really bad reputation.” Caught up in the imperatives of research, Loppnow realized he was neglecting his real passion. “I was really denying my true self,” he says. “I really wanted to be a teacher.”
As a kid growing up in a tough neighbourhood in New Mexico, university didn’t appear to be in the cards for Loppnow. No one in his family had gone beyond Grade 12. But it was a high school English teacher, Susan Frye, who saw promise and encouraged him to apply to college. He got in, eventually doing graduate work at Berkeley and Princeton. Frye “changed my life,” says Loppnow. “That’s really the transition from my being a truck driver—which is what I thought I was going to be—to being a professor.” After the death of his father, Loppnow took an introspective sabbatical and realized what he needed to do to change his life—concentrate on teaching as much as on research. “I wanted to change students’ lives the way that my life had changed.”
University of Calgary – The Den
Sampling the chocolate chunk brownie was like eating the flesh of a diabetic
The Den, just downstairs from the Black Lounge—the other student union-run haunt—is in decor and atmosphere everything you’d ever want in a campus pub: a little rank (stale beer is my personal napalm in the morning!), a little dingy (cinder-block ceilings are big in Manhattan!), but it’s still cleaner than your dorm. Perfect, then, for a little booze-fuelled MIA action. And the food is some of the best, most reasonably priced stuff on campus.
The Den Reloaded, a classic half-pound burger featuring sautéed mushrooms, bacon and a good dollop of cheddar and mozzarella, tasted authentically of the grill (though the bun had wilted by the time it arrived at table and was too soggy for our liking). A spinach salad with goat cheese and strawberries benefited from that potpourri effect of rich cheese and wonderfully fresh, sweet fruit—film majors, you will find it as ephemeral as happiness in an Ingmar Bergman flick—but was too stingy on the orange balsamic vinaigrette.
The chicken Kiev, a special on this day, was an unfortunate H-bomb of herbs and multiplex butter. The innards exploded across the plate like ooze from an Alberta tailings pond. It was accompanied by hardy, green broccoli and a delightful barley risotto that was the best dish of the day.
Yet the Den did not fare well with its desserts. Mother taught us warm apple crumble should be crunchy, so lay off the microwave. New York cheesecake? Coated in a heavy treacle of fruity goo, it had the flavour and consistency of raw cookie dough. Sampling the chocolate chunk brownie, meanwhile, with its thin rivets of raspberry icing, was like eating the flesh of a diabetic. Sweet teeth stay clear!
Mount Royal College – Herb ‘n Market
This may be a food-court mecca, but a discerning eater can still do well
Mount Royal College is a food-court mecca. The school where former Alberta premier Ralph Klein sometimes teaches journalism, it is a place of Subways, Tim Hortons and Edo Japans—a fast-food chain that has as much business claiming its noodles bare a resemblance to the cuisine of the Chrysanthemum Throne as Klein probably has lecturing impressionable youth. But both Klein and the fast-food providers enjoy hostage audiences on this out-of-the-way campus. Still, the discerning eater can do well at the Herb n Market food court, a nicely varied selection of inexpensive meals cooked, for the most part, sur place, courtesy of food-services giant Sodexho (whose appearance in Morgan Spurlock’s Super Size Me we’ll leave unmentioned).
Find real ham on the bone, carved to order, at Stacks, a sandwich station that also offers grilled paninis lathered in a beguiling, if salty, red pepper-infused butter (we had ours with ham and asparagus). The crusts wilt quickly at Pandini’s, a pasta and pizza stop (learn from my errors and do not settle for what’s languished too long on the counter), though the marinara sauce is sufficiently zippy and the cheese provides a wholesome mouth sensation. We fared less well with the lasagna, a dish whose layers ought never to feel like cadaver skin.
At the unfortunately named Mein Bowl, the requisite experiment in Chinese food, real broccoli is available. The Kung Pao chicken boasted processed meat as tender as tofu—a turn-off, in our view—but earned points with its generous heaping of red peppers. Note to the kitchen staff: fried rice must be fried. For no discernible reason, the egg rolls were delicious, though freed of its fried skin the filling tasted not unlike Earl Grey tea.
Best of all, in that it did not leave us in an MSG-induced psychosis, was the Cyclone Salad station, a bar of fresh greens, proteins, bacon bits and dressings slapped together by a server according to taste. Ours, on a foundation of hardy romaine and sprinkled with sunflower seeds and a refreshing wasabi dressing, was the best part of our day.
University of Saskatchewan – Marquis Hall Cafeteria
“It’s prison food” said one student. We found no reason to dispute that
To pronounce the “Marquis” in Marquis Hall in anything like the French way (marquis, silent “s,” connoting nobility) is to mark oneself out as an outsider on campus. Markwiss, they say here, and it’s a good thing too, since no one should mistake the food in the Garry Room, which serves the nearby residences of Saskatchewan and Qu’Appelle halls, with anything of noble or superior taste. “It’s prison food,” one student complains, and we found no reason to dispute that judgment, even if the 1964-vintage building offers plenty of natural light and delicious views of the greystone Gothic campus.
But onward and food-ward. A serving of the kitchen’s garlic pork balls—deep-fried, with trans-fat aftertaste and that unmistakable bouquet of factory floor—was awful. A plate of pasta primavera, swimming in a packaged, paste-like roux with bits of tasteless carrot and deflowered broccoli (who knew green stuff could taste so unwholesome?), proved almost inedible. A rice side dish managed the Zen feat of white grains looking just like regular gohan but tasting like sawdust.
In the lasagna bolognese, at last, we found a tasty, generously portioned balm, with flavourful tomato and beef sauce and a passable melted-cheese roof. The jambalaya chicken was also not too offensive, with a nice little Creole heat. A side of corn, however, recalled the multiplex’s sickening I-can’t-believe-it’s-not-real-butter aroma. We were immediately diagnosed with diabetes after a bite of the Nanaimo bar, featuring a cracker base apparently made of real hardened artery. With the 10-meal-a-week plan going for some $2,600 a semester, food quality at the Garry Room is a disaster.
Yet, just a few doors down from Marquis, in the Arts Building—with a view of the stunning, castle-like Thorvaldson building—is one of the university’s many buffeterias, little gatherings of deli, salad and burrito counters dealing in the currency of ultra-fresh veggies and otherwise real food.
Though not on the meal plan, the fare is inexpensive, tasty—and a much better bet.
University of Calgary – The Alberta Room
Good, honest grub that only occasionally sinks to the culinary doldrums of university eating
The Alberta Room: such a grandiloquent name may leave you—Hey, you there, going through the remand bin at Goodwill!—wondering whether this is a place whose dress code and price range were designed for tuxedoed oil barons. Not to worry. The University of Calgary’s main dining hall, in a tent-like building called, imaginatively enough, The Dining Centre, doesn’t ask you to be anything you’re not. It’s just about good, honest grub. Only occasionally does the food sink to those culinary doldrums so much associated with university dining—a perhaps necessary echo of the Stalinist concrete ennui that surrounds the diner through the windows, i.e. the U of C campus.
Well-organized, with a constellation of food stations across the floor—grill, pasta trattoria, fruit and salad bar—diners have a lot to choose from.
To start off, a gourmet Swiss mushroom burger with fries. The latter aren’t exactly Belgian frites, but the burger is a delight––ful surprise—juicy, with all kinds of fresh tomato and run-at-the-corner-of-your-mouth dill pickle. A veal-stuffed tortellini amatriciana is less successful, with a consistency of dense cake and nothing more than pinhead de––posits of veal buried within. Though bland, it’s not altogether unsatisfying once we add a zing of freshly grated Parmesan. The accompanying spinach salad, with cherry tomatoes and cucumber, is delicious.
The bowl of fish chowder doesn’t exactly exceed expectations. A viscous skin, pallid colour and the vague sense that something has died beneath the surface adds to the effect. An apple lentil curry also missed the mark: at first one’s mouth embraced those earthy curried tones; a second spoonful was less curry, all earth. Side orders of parsley boiled potatoes and veggies still tasted of the cardboard they were packed in prior to freezing.
And so what if the server doesn’t know what a kaiser is? The made-to-order deli sandwich—ham and cheese on a toasted bun—was delicious, full of crunchy-fresh bell peppers. The fruit stick was less so. On the day we visited, this dessert and others fell into the “fish chowder” category: eat it just to say you have—and, for those of us who have lived in Quebec, to recall the engineering feats pioneered by industrial pastry chefs in that province, circa 1962.
