Top 03
Five websites all students should bookmark
Study, research and procrastinate like never before!
Photo courtesy of kennymatic on Flickr
1) AbeBooks
There’s nothing worse than paying $100 for a book that’s going to make your life miserable (I’m thinking of you, Organic Chemistry). In some cases, you might think that you’re actually finding it interesting, but it’s probably Stockholm Syndrome. Once rescued from your hostage takers by the sweet December holiday break, you won’t want to see that book ever again.
That’s where sites like AbeBooks come in. You can buy used copies for a fraction of the regular price, or older editions that are even cheaper. In most cases, older editions are practically identical to new ones, except for a few diagrams. When you’re finished, sell the books back to the site.
Top 10 Weirdest Campus Clubs in Canada
From cheese to zombies, there’s something for everyone
Photo courtesy of Abode of Chaos on Flickr
Regardless of your school, you can typically choose from dozens of clubs to find one that suits your interests, whether it be sports, the arts, politics…. or cheese. After scouring the club listings of dozens of universities across the country, I give you my list of The Top 10 Weirdest Campus Clubs in Canada
10. 420 Green Club, Mount Royal University
The club raises awareness of Marijuana “so that our members can become more responsible users and get a better understanding of the real pro’s and con’s [sic] of using Cannabis, myths aside.”
Quebec government accepts McGill MBA tuition hike
School raised price by nearly 90 per cent
Photo courtesy of bagriton on Flickr
McGill University will be allowed to charge $32,500 this fall year for its MBA program after the university struck a deal with the Quebec government last week.
Before the 2009-10 school year, the program had cost only $3,400. Last year, they raised the price by nearly 90 per cent to $29,500, prompting the Ministry of Education to fine them $2.1 million for breaking regulations. Quebec requires universities to charge domestic (Quebec) students a uniform rate, which is currently just over $70 per credit for most programs. A typical 30-credit school year costs roughly $2,100.
The new deal redefines the program as a “specialized MBA” with a focus on international business and a “mandatory study trip abroad.” Specialized MBAs are not subject to the same strict regulations. Concordia offers an EMBA with tuition at $34,000. McGill and the HEC Montréal offer a joint EMBA that costs $72,000.
Some student groups have criticized the decision. The Fédération étudiante universitaire du Québec, the province’s largest student lobby group, and the McGill Post Graduate Students’ Society issued a joint statement describing it as a step towards two-tiered education.
However, another student group — McGill’s MBA Student Association — supports the school. They condemned the government’s fine and released a survey claiming that 70 per cent of students in the program supported the increase.
Line Beauchamp, the Minister of Education, wrote that McGill is not getting special treatment. “This isn’t an exception, because there are other institutions in Quebec that already offer programs with a similar status,” she said.
McGill’s new price may allow it to better compete with other schools. The University of Toronto charges residents $40,000 per year for its MBA program; the University of Western Ontario’s one-year MBA program has a price tag of $73,500 for Canadians.
Wilfred Zerbe, Memorial University’s Dean of Business, suggested in May that tuition fees there should climb too. Currently, Memorial charges MBA students $4,400 per year. He says the school could attract better students and offer more support with tuition fees closer to $10,000 per year.
Confucius Institutes break human rights rules
Profs working in Canada “must have no record of Falun Gong”
Photo courtesy of IvanWalsh.com on Flickr
A rule imposed by Confucius Institutes — an educational arm of the Chinese government that operates on at least eight Canadian campuses — breaks “all human rights codes in Canada,” human rights lawyer Clive Ansley told The Epoch Times.
The main CI website says that overseas volunteer Chinese teachers must have “no record of participation in Falun Gong,” a spiritual practice with roots in Buddhism and Taoism. China’s government vehemently opposes the practice and has arrested and killed many adherents, according to Amnesty International.
Barb Pollock, vice president of external relations at the University of Regina, told The Epoch Times that she did not know about the rule, but promised that her school’s agreements with China “have everything to do with academic freedom.” She also said that although teachers are selected by their Chinese partner, Hunan University, “what they teach [here] is our business.”
In June, the University of Manitoba rejected the idea of a Confucius Institute on campus. The University of British Columbia has also declined. But more than 320 exist worldwide, where they offer credit and non-credit courses in language and history.
China says that the funding of CIs—$150,000 initially and up to $200,000 per year after that— is meant to promote cultural understanding. But along with the money, schools have signed constitutions that say that “institute activities must … respect cultural customs, and shall not contravene concerning laws and regulations in Canada and China.”
Terry Russell, an Asian Studies professor at Manitoba, says that such rules compromise academic freedom, because academics are dissuaded from discussing Taiwan, Tibet, Falun Gong, or the Tiananmen Square massacre. That could result in an unrealistically positive view of China among the students who pass through the credit courses they offer in Canada, he says.
The grading system needs a rewrite
Professor Pettigrew proposes an entirely new system
Photo courtesy of j / f / photos on Flickr
A few years ago, a colleague told me that when he was a TA, he was told never to give a grade below 45. The reason was that students earning a very low grade would dig themselves into a hole and wouldn’t be able to pass the course. At the time, I scoffed at such a practice. After all, it’s unfair to give a student who did next to nothing a 45 when another student who just fell short the same 45. And what if the student doesn’t turn in the paper at all? A 45 for nothing?
Another way to view this problem, as Douglas Reeves has argued, is to note that the standard A, B,C, D, F grading system over-punishes missed assignments which get graded at zero. Actually, it’s worse: any serious failure is systemically unfair because the F range is, compared to other grades, huge.
Still further, the traditional scale forces professors to grade with a very narrow range. Most papers are somewhere between D- and B+, a range that uses only thirty points (50-79) out of one hundred.
The solution is to revise the percentage system to equally distribute grades over the whole range from zero to one hundred. We change to old system:
A=80-100
B=70-79
C=60-69
D=50-59
F=0-49
to a new system:
A=80-100
B=60-79
C=40-59
D=20-39
F=0-19
Now, I’m not suggesting that a failing paper that used to deserve a 40 under the old system would now pass. What I mean is that the paper that deserved a 40 under the old system would now be given a 16 in the new system. The numbers are different but represent the same thing, just as 0 Celsius is no colder than 32 Fahrenheit.
The new system means that one disastrous failure or one missed assignment in an otherwise decent performance doesn’t cause a student to fail the whole course. For instance, imagine a student, Mishrump Middleton, who has four equally-weighted assignments in his course and earns a C- on the first three but fails to turn in the last one.
Mishrump is no Rhodes Scholar, obviously, but he probably doesn’t deserve to fail the course. But, under the old system, Mishrump gets a 45 as his final grade — an F — and fails because that single zero drags him down. But under my system, Mishrump gets a 30 which, remember, is now a D and so still gets credit for the course, which, intuitively, he probably deserves. Put another way, Mishrump gets the equivalent of the old 55 instead of the old 45 because the grades are more logically distributed.
But how can I use my new system? I can’t simply give a C- student a grade of 40 and expect everyone else at my university to know that what I mean by 40 is not the same as what they mean by 40. And even if I could get my whole university to switch over to my system, it might be confusing to others if Cape Breton University’s transcripts showed a middling student with a 45 average instead of a 62. The whole country will have to make the switch.
In the meantime, I have a solution for my own classes. I will give students letter grades but calculate their grades using my new scale. Then, at the end of the course, I will translate those grades back into the standard percentages. It will be more work, but it beats giving every failing paper a 45.
Top 10 highest paid university officials in Canada
Click to see who made more than $1-million last year
Here are the Top 10 highest paid university officials in Canada, ranked by their base salaries.*
1. David Johnson
University of Waterloo president (now Governor General of Canada) — $1,041,881
2. Moriarty William
president of the University of Toronto Asset Management Corp. — $697,020
3. Amit Chakma
vice-president of the University of Waterloo (but president of Western as of July, 2010) — $500,000
Continue reading Top 10 highest paid university officials in Canada
Jane Austen is unreadable
Not all English professors like Pride and Prejudice
Photo courtesy of daniel.julia on Flickr
Every once in a while someone asks me what I think about a certain novel or play and I remark that I haven’t read it. And they seem shocked. Or disappointed. I’m an English professor, after all. How could I not have read that book?
Sometimes I try to explain that while I have not read Great Expectations, I have read David Copperfield, and Bleak House, and A Tale of Two Cities, and Oliver Twist, and A Christmas Carol. Can we talk about those? And then I make a mental note to try not to admit to not having read anything ever again.
It’s hard for academics to admit to not knowing things because knowledge is our trade. Carpenters frame walls, plumbers connect pipes, professors know everything about their respective fields. Except, of course, that they don’t. And can’t. There are always things we ought to know, or that people assume we ought to know, but never got around to. You can, of course, steer the conversation away from such lacunae, or, more shamefully, pretend to know things you don’t. When I was a graduate student, I gave a conference paper about Arthur Miller’s autobiography. Unfortunately for me, the room was filled with Miller experts and one of them asked me about how the issues I dealt with in my paper were handled in After the Fall, a play I had not read. I panicked for a moment and then stammered something about not having considered that angle until the moderator stepped in and saved me. Still, not having read everything that Arthur Miller ever wrote is far from my worst secret. I have one that is much worse.
I have never read a Jane Austen novel.
It’s not for lack of trying. I made a real effort in first year with Pride and Prejudice, but I found it insufferable. I tried again a few years later with the same result. Last year I had a spirited conversation with a colleague who convinced me to have a go at, I think, Northanger Abbey, but it, like Pride and Prejudice, had the paradoxical effect of making me anxious and sleepy at the same time. Austen is witty without being funny, like Oscar Wilde’s inane big sister, and I just can’t stand it.
Thankfully, I’m not the only one who feels this way. Though he might have been kidding some of the time, Mark Twain liked to take shots at Austen. “Any library is a good library that does not contain a volume by Jane Austen,” Twain wrote, and he once expressed a gruesome fantasy about digging her up and giving her a good beating. I know the feeling.
The worst part is that this summer I asked my students to write about how a notable work of literature has been adapted to film. There were only four students in the class, so I pretty much let them choose whatever book and film they wanted, provided I would be able to get my hands on both. You can probably guess where this is going.
The first essay is on Pride and Prejudice. So now I have to read it. I’m not that shameless.
There’s something worse than physics on the MCAT
Hint: it’s not chemistry.
Photo courtesy of Nic's events on Flickr
Ever since I started studying for the MCAT, I’ve been worried about the physics section.
Apparently it’s just an irrational fear. Whenever I’ve brought it up here in my blog, most commenters have assured me that the physics questions are so basic, Forrest Gump could answer them all correctly and have enough time left over to start narrating his life story to the person sitting next to him. Which, of course, is why everyone who writes the test gets a perfect score on the physics section.
It turns out I might have been worrying about the wrong section. Apparently the lowest-scored section on the MCAT isn’t the physical sciences. Or biological sciences. It’s the verbal reasoning section.
According to this chart from the AAMC, verbal reasoning had the lowest mean score among test takers in 2010. The physical sciences, which consists of general chemistry and physics questions, had a mean score of 8.3. The verbal reasoning section had a mean score of 7.9 (this is on a 15 point scale). And Examkrackers claims that the average score on verbal reasoning is a 61 per cent.
For some reason I always thought that verbal reasoning was the section that most people could expect to score decently on. Perhaps it’s because, unlike the physical or biological sciences, there isn’t any specific background knowledge required.
But after looking at some practice problems, I think I’ve realized why it’s the toughest section. Most of the questions were apparently designed by Confucius, with some editorial input by Yoda and Master Po.
For instance:
1. According to the passage, an image is a versatile tool that:
A) is always visual, never abstract.
B) can be either abstract or visual.
C) is always abstract, never visual.
D) is neither visual nor abstract.
That leaves me with a new hobby for this summer. Instead of whining about physics, like I’ve been doing for the past couple months, I plan to whine about verbal reasoning instead.
Canada’s Best Teachers: Leslie Reid
This scientist proves that good communication makes great lectures
3M Fellow Leslie Reid
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. Ten university faculty members are recognized each year for their educational leadership and exceptional contributions to teaching. Maclean’s On Campus is profiling all 10 of this year’s winners. For our final profile, we look at Leslie Reid, a professor of geoscience at the University of Calgary.
Most 3M fellows will tell you that they were inspired by a specific teacher when they were younger. Leslie Reid will tell you that she is mainly inspired by her students, whose feedback — occasionally harsh feedback — is constantly improving her lectures.
“When I was a student, I had a hard time connecting in classes where there wasn’t two-way communication,” says Reid. “So I have striven to create learning environments where students have a voice.”
Those student voices have told her that they learn best with topics like climate change, earthquakes and volcanoes — the really awe-inspiring stuff that geoscientific principles help to explain.
But even less thrilling topics are made awe-inspiring with Reid’s techniques. To explain the concept of geologic time concept she weaves seemingly-infinite amounts of climbing rope through row upon row of students, asking them to hang on. The rope has flags every-so-often, which identify important geologic events and show the distances between them. The visual representation is hard for students to ignore; it’s literally in their hands.
But that rope between students symbolizes something else about Reid’s tactics — she makes students interact with each other. Curtis Morrison, who took three of her classes, says she was able to coax the entire room into a group discussion almost every single class.
That would keep things interesting. “It’s always fun when a lecture on plate tectonics gets derailed into a heated discussion about what to do if an earthquake shock was to hit the lecture theatre,” says Morrison. He says another way that she encouraged group discussion was by remembering nearly every student’s name, which can be a challenge in classes of up to 200 students.
Reid’s communication is aided by another quality too — she has “an infinite supply of patience for an infinite supply of questions,” says Morrison. Some professors are only interested in questions from budding geologists, but not Reid.
“Rocks are not for everybody,” admits Morrison. “But if you sat in on one of [Reid's] lecutres, you would probably learn more than you ever thought possible about the marvels of the earth.”
You might also learn that the best teachers are those who encourage feedback and discussion.
Canada’s big universities ranked by endowment
How much money has your school saved?
McGill student courtesy of Evan Shay on Flickr
Who are the top 10 highest paid university admins in Quebec?
More than 43 admins make more than $200,000
Late last week, there was controversy after it was revealed that a Université Laval vice-rector had received a 30 per cent pay increase without proper approval from the university’s board. Le Soleil reported that Éric Bauce received the increase on a temporary basis when he took over a sick colleagues duties, but continued to be paid the higher wage even after she returned to work. The National Assembly was told Bauce received a salary of $246,000.*
But a salary that high is not as much of an anomaly as it may seem. In 2008 – 2009, the most recent year for which complete numbers are available, there were 43 university administrators in Quebec with base salaries of more than $200,000 a year, according to the National Assembly’s Culture and Education Committee. The majority of them worked at three large universities in Montreal, with 13 at McGill, 12 at the Université de Montréal and nine at Concordia. Those three schools were home to all 10 of the highest paid administrators in the province.
But bigger student populations don’t necessarily mean more money. The Université du Québec à Montréal, the province’s second largest university, doesn’t have any administrators who are paid more than $200,000. Laval and the Université de Sherbrooke each have only three. And although McGill pays the highest wages, it’s only Quebec’s fifth largest university by population.
In addition to base salary, many senior administrators also receive other benefits, sometimes worth tens of thousands of dollars. Universities are only required to disclose the total dollar value of all perks given to an individual, so details can be hard to find. But some schools have revealed more information. At Concordia, for instance, the president is entitled to housing and car allowances as well as memberships in private clubs.
Here is a list of the 10 highest paid university administrators in Quebec based on documents filed with the National Assembly last fall:
1. Heather Munroe-Blum, McGill principal – $585,481 (base pay of $356,174 plus $229,307 in perks and other compensation.**)
2. Richard Levin, McGill vice principal, health and medical affairs and dean of medicine – $548,929 (base pay of $496,921 plus $52,008 in perks and other compensation.)
3. Judith Woodsworth, Concordia president (Woodsworth was forced to resign last December) – $392,875 (base pay of $350,000 plus $42,875 in perks and other compensation.)
4. Luc Vinet, U de M rector (Vinet’s term ended June 1, 2010) – $362,230 (base pay of $339,031 plus $23,199 in perks and other compensation.)
5. Kathy Assayag, Concordia vice-president, advancement and alumni relations; president of the Concordia University foundation (Assayag left the university for “personal reasons” in September 2010) – $334,323 (base pay of $283,785 plus $50,538 in perks and other compensation.)
6. Michael Di Grappa, Concordia vice-president, services (DiGrappa left Concordia to take a position at McGill in late October, 2010) – $330,042 (base pay of $240,179 plus $89,863 in perks and other compensation.)
7. Rima Rozen, McGill assistant vice-principal, research and international relations – $317,553 (base pay of $226,933 plus $90,620 in perks and other compensation.)
8. Jean-Lucien Rouleau, U de M dean, medicine – $316,174 (base pay of $311,489 plus $4,023 in perks and other compensation.)
9. Peter Allan Todd, McGill dean, management – $310,137 (base pay of $308,129 plus $2,008 in perks and other compensation.)
10. Marc Weinstein, McGill vice-principal, development and alumni relations – $306,185 (base pay of $264,762 plus $41,423 in perks and other compensation.)
Photo courtesy of Duckie Monster on Flickr.
*An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated Éric Bauce’s salary. On Campus regrets the error.
**An earlier version of this article lumped together all non-salary compensation as “perks.” A more accurate description is “perks and other compensation,” because this figure includes royalty payments, bonuses, housing allowances and car allowances.
The surprising benefits of paperless grading
Printer? Who needs a printer?
This past year, I took on another bold experiment: papers without paper. I got the results I expected, and found some advantages that I hadn’t.
You might think that printed papers were long gone, but they have endured despite their inherent difficulties. The process of working with paper essays is complex enough when things go right, but aggravating when they don’t: your printer is out of ink. Then you can’t find your professor, so you put it under his door, only to learn later that his office has a rug and your paper has been lodged under said rug for two weeks. And when he does finally hand it back, you happen to not be in class, so you don’t get it back anyway. You see the point. We need something simpler.
And all that paper adds up. Consider ENGL 200, the intro to lit course here at Cape Breton University. There are typically five or six sections of this course offered annually with around 40 students per section. That’s minimally 200 students who write five papers a year. Let’s say each paper averages five pages in length (probably more given Works Cited pages and so on). So each student produces 25 pieces of paper, times 200 students, that works out to a cool 5000 pieces of paper annually. That’s only one course at just one small university.
So paperless grading offers an obvious advantage from the start. It saves reams of paper.
But does it simplify the process? Colleagues at other universities warned me that online assignments would introduce too many complexities. They and their students have to navigate a complex online system with passwords and formatting and what-not.
But I decided to avoid all that and keep it simple. Students just e-mail the assignment to me directly. I evaluate it with notes added via MS Word, save the thing in PDF format and send it back. It really is simple, all things considered.
But it is the other consequences of grading electronically that I find most interesting.
For one thing, I think my electronic feedback is better than my old hand written scribbles in the margins of papers. Unlike my handwritten scrawl, my typing is clear and legible, and since I’m not scrambling to fit in what I want to say into a few inches, I can provide fuller explanations. In some cases, I even provide web links to other sites that provide more information on grammar or history that’s relevant.
Further, since I can edit my own comments, I can stop and rephrase a comment when I didn’t like the original wording I had chosen. On paper, I was sort of stuck with it.
Another advantage is that even after I send the paper back to the student, I retain a copy for my records. That way, if a students turns up at the end of the year saying she did five papers but only got credit for four, I can check my email folders to see if and when the paper came in. Similarly, I can check to see if it was graded and what the grade was and so on. After all, mistakes can happen, but this way they can be easily corrected.
I am also toying with the notion of taking examples from old student papers and using them in next year’s class as instances of common errors. I cover common errors now but I think they might be more convincing if students can see that the error was committed by a real student. Of course, I would remove the original student’s name and any identifying information.
On the down side, my grading has to be done on a computer. It also means that throughout most of the year I have large numbers of papers in my inbox waiting to be graded — and I’m one of those people who lives to have his inbox empty.
So clearly, in addition to the joys of paperless grading, there are some terrors. These terrors are why some colleagues say they will never go paperless. Me? I will never go back.
Warning: your prof might be blogging about you
Blog showcases best of the worst student writing
Today I stumbled upon a pretty hilarious blog that showcases what have to be some of the most ridiculously bad examples of student writing out there. Shit My Students Write describes itself as “evidence of the true cost of educational funding cuts,” though doesn’t specify whether the writing quoted is the work of university or high school students. The site gives readers the opportunity to submit their own examples anonymously, so it’s hard to tell where they are coming from. Regardless, I have to give props to whoever was tasked with grading this work, and had the idea to share the worst of it online.
Here are some my favorite quotes posted on the site over the past few weeks:
“Macbeth couldn’t have loved Lady Macbeth because he was crazy and too busy hallucinating witches and stuff.”
“I could blame my results on other factors, like it was the day after Friday when I took it and I had just finished listening to Rebecca Black.”
“There are many different races of bagels.”
“It was started by some famous dead guy.”
“I felt so guilty because I realized I was aiding in the bedding of a criminal.”
“The colonists won because they were better, duh!”
“A mountain could be a symbol of the book. The mountain could represent the mountains.”
“Its not really plagiarism as it was exactly what I was going to write anyway.”
This should serve as a warning to students everywhere: not only will bad writing get you poor grades, it may also end up being mocked on the internet.
Canada’s best teachers: Billy Strean
This 3M winner emphasizes ‘full-body engagement’
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. Ten university faculty members are recognized each year for their educational leadership and exceptional contributions to teaching. Here we continue our series profiling all 10 of the 2011 3M Teaching Award winners, with a look at Billy Strean, a physical education professor at the University of Alberta.
If you ask Billy Strean what he teaches, there’s a good chance he will simply say “students.” The University of Alberta physical education professor takes great care to learn as much about his students as he can, typically learning all their names after only a couple of classes. “I find the students more interesting than ‘content’ and I find the process of engaging with the students to be the heart of the learning enterprise,” he says.
At the centre of that enterprise is what Strean calls “exhilarated learning.” The approach features three pegs. The first is “human connection” where Strean spends time getting to know his students and encouraging them to get to know each other.
The second is what he calls “full-body engagement,” or “the synergy of thinking, feeling, and acting.” Here he emphasizes the “mood of the classroom” by playing music, using humour, and employing experiential and group activities. To illustrate flow theory, for example, students may be asked to juggle in class.
Third, Strean “connects content to context.” What matters is not only that students learn the material, but that they understand why it is important. “When the focus is too heavily on the content, a pitfall is trying to ‘cover the material’ at the expense of uncovering meaning and building understanding,” he says.
Strean’s suitability for the classroom is unmistakable. Unlike most university professors, he earned a teaching certificate along with his bachelor of arts, and he has been coaching basketball, soccer, and a variety of other sports since he was 16. His doctorate is in sport and exercise psychology.
Strean’s enthusiasm for teaching combined with a charming personality, infectious smile and magnetic presence leaves his students more than a little taken with him. Shelby Stollery who took a third-year class with Strean called, “Structure and Strategy of Games” describes what she calls a “ridiculous enthusiasm.” He frequently opens classes with a dance, a joke, or by blasting baroque music.
“One day we played ‘historical basketball’ and started off by playing the original game with the original rules from the 1800’s,” she says. “We didn’t even realize how much we were learning because we were having too much fun.”
Another student refers to “the awesomeness that is ‘The Strean,’” while yet another calls him an “amazing human being.”
High praise, but it all stems from Strean’s simple student-centred philosophy: “People don’t care what you know until they know that you care.”
5 McGill students head to the Commons
Candidates never expected to win
Following the New Democratic Party’s sweep of Quebec in Monday’s election, five McGill University students, who never expected to win, will be heading to the House of Commons. In fact, four of the five newly elected Members of Parliament spent the bulk of the campaign helping the party in Montreal, rather than door knocking in their own ridings. “I was putting my effort in the Montreal area because that’s where I thought I would be the most useful to the party,” Mylène Freeman, who won Argenteuil-Papineau-Mirabe by 8,000 votes, told the Montreal Gazette. Laurin Liu, who worked on Thomas Mulcair’s riding in Outremont, said she was “shell shocked” by the result, while Charmaine Borg is postponing plans to study in Mexico as an exchange student in order to take her seat in Ottawa. “I’m much more excited about this,” Borg told the Gazette. The other McGill students elected on Monday night are Jamie Nicholls and Matthew Dube.
Monday vote sees modest bump in turnout
61.4 per cent cent of registered voters cast a ballot
Canada’s voter turnout rate inched up slightly to 61.4 per cent in Monday’s election from 59.1 per cent in 2008. PEI voters were the most enthusiastic, with 74 per cent of registered voters casting ballots. On the low end, only 48.5 per cent of voters in Nunavut cast a ballot. The highest voter turnout in Canadian electoral history occurred in 1958, when John Diefenbaker won an election that saw 79.4 per cent of registered voters participate.
Canada’s best teachers: Fred Phillips
How accounting can be ‘exciting’
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. Ten university faculty members are recognized each year for their educational leadership and exceptional contributions to teaching. Here we continue our series profiling all 10 of the 2011 3M Teaching Award winners, with a look at Fred Phillips, an accounting professor at the University of Saskatchewan.
University of Saskatchewan accounting professor, Fred Phillips is rarely discouraged by the fact that students often view accountants as dull, humourless money counters. “In a lot of ways, it is to my advantage,” he says, before adding wryly, “The bar is very low.”
For him, accounting is not dissimilar to detective work. Financial statements tell a story and “that story doesn’t always go in the same direction as the cover story that people tell.” A solid grasp of accounting principles allows for uncovering what is actually going on in a firm. “It’s really a fun puzzle,” he says.
For years, Phillips used PowerPoint presentations in the classroom, but starting in 2009, he compiled all his lectures into video form. This solved a dilemma he had been facing. By making the video lectures available to students before class, time was freed up to discuss specific case studies—a valuable resource when studying a profession that demands “deep, contemplative critical thinking.”
Unfortunately, another obstacle arose. “The problem was that there weren’t a lot of suitable resources like this to draw on,” Phillips says. So he set about developing his own case studies. He produced videos highlighting well-known cases such as the fraud trial of former Computer Associates chairman, Sanjay Kumar, and the bankruptcy of Circuit City, to illustrate key accounting practices and principles. He then wrote his own hypothetical problems to present to his classes. Phillips enjoys helping his students learn: “It’s fun to help them discover where their perceptions are and are not on point,” regarding what accountants do.
Phillips’ approach does appear to be working. One of his students, Samuel Clarke, switched majors from arts to accounting, because Phillips helped him to see that the material was “exciting.”
Are youth voters behind the NDP surge in Quebec?
New poll data shows young voters aren’t any more likely to vote for Layton. It’s everyone else who is.
The NDP is surging in Quebec and many point to the party’s popularity among young voters as the reason why. Jack Layton’s progressive message, the logic goes, makes him stand out as a legitimate alternative to Gilles Duceppe among left-leaning voters.
But here’s a problem with that storyline: data from the Historica-Dominion Institute’s poll of young voters suggests there isn’t an NDP surge among Quebec youth at all. Its 2011 Inter-generational Study shows young Quebecers are no more likely to vote NDP now than they were in 2008. Back then, the party captured a mere 12 per cent of the vote in Quebec.
The Historica-Dominion survey gathered the opinions of 831 youth aged 18 to 24, including 189 from Quebec. The NDP was the most popular party among young voters in Quebec, capturing 27 per cent support, while the Liberals got 23 per cent, the Bloc Québécois got 21 per cent, and the Conservatives came last with 8 per cent. (For more results from the study, including a look at which issues matter to young voters, read the next issue of Maclean’s.) Those figures are virtually unchanged from the Institute’s 2008 Youth Election Study, which found 27 per cent of young Quebecers leaning toward the NDP, another 27 per cent supporting the Bloc, 20 per cent behind the Liberals, and 7 per cent leaning Tory.
The youth numbers also mirror last week’s EKOS and CROP polls, give or take a few points. “That seems to indicate the rest of the population is catching up to the youth in considering the NDP rather than a youth surge,” says Allison Harell, a political scientist at the University of Quebec at Montreal. That may be good news for Jack Layton. If his support is more broadly distributed across age groups, she adds, it may translate into more votes on election day. Historically, only about a third of Canadian youth end up voting, compared to nearly two-thirds of the electorate overall.
The big question is whether the current NDP supporters—young or not—will change their minds before election day. Houda Souissi, a 21-year-old labour law student at the University of Montreal has already switched back to Duceppe after a brief dalliance with Layton. After scrutinizing the NDP record, she worries an NDP government could take away provincial powers. She’s also turned-off by Layton’s stance on the long gun registry. Most importantly, she’s wary of inexperienced MPs. “I don’t want to say they’re nobodies,” she says. “But outside of Outremont, we don’t really know who the NDP candidates are.”
Souissi’s worries may be moot come May 3. If the NDP’s surge in the polls translates into actual votes, the party’s Quebec candidates could be well on their way to becoming decidedly mainstream among voters of all ages.
UBC faces human rights complaint
Prof alleges she was denied job because of racial discrimination
The University of British of Columbia is facing a human rights complaint over alleged discrimination against a professor who is of Chinese descent. The complainant, Jennifer Chan, told the Georgia Straight that she has been subject to “systemic racism” throughout her tenure at UBC. She was first appointed as a postdoctoral fellow in the department of political science in 2001, and joined the faculty of education in 2003.
After being denied appointment to the prestigious David Lam Chair in Multicultural Education in late 2009, Chan filed complaints with UBC’s equity office as well as with the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal. “The David Lam Chair selection committee deviated from established faculty recruitment practice. It did not contact any external referees; applied shifting and unstated criteria during the search process; kept no factual record of the search process; and did not consider employment equity,” Chan said in a statement released to media this week.
The internal complaint has since been dismissed, and the Human Rights Tribunal is scheduled to hear the case on May 12. In a statement published by the Georgia Straight, UBC Scott Macrae said that the case was investigated “exhaustively,” and that “no discrimination” was uncovered. “The University has accepted those conclusions.”
And today’s lesson is…
What started as demonstration of where meat comes from ended with outraged parents and upset kids
In the town of Ratekau, what started as a fifth-grade demonstration of where meat comes from—and how it was prepared in the days before refrigeration—ended with outraged parents, upset kids, and a denouncement from state officials. As part of a curriculum unit on how people lived in the Stone Age, one parent (a farmer) volunteered to slaughter a rabbit for the class. Teachers voted in favour, but apparently didn’t inform parents or the principal. Some fifth-graders launched a petition to save the rabbit, but teachers seem to have ignored them. “One can’t collect signatures against a math test either,” one told the newspaper Lübecker Nachrichten.
In the end, 50 students voluntarily gathered in the school courtyard. They said goodbye to the rabbit; the farmer then hit it with a hammer, slit its throat, gutted and skinned it, and hung it to drain. It was later grilled and consumed. Parents complained, leading the state’s Education Ministry to denounce the slaughter as “educationally problematic.” “My point wasn’t to show children death,” the farmer told Der Spiegel. “We wanted to demonstrate that killing animals involves taking on responsibility.”
Photo: Getty Images
