A Teacher Blogs

I stepped out onto the sidewalk in front of our home to say goodbye to my wife Blanche as she was leaving for work. And to answer her questions about how to drive my smart fortwo -- it's quirky. As she drove off, I spotted two men with fliers approaching the house, chatting. They parted, and one made his way up our front walk with me quietly in pursuit, hackles raised. He was on the porch reaching for the door-knocker, as I climbed the steps. "What's up?" I asked, trying not to sound as suspicious as I felt. I was allowing for the possibility that he was from the City, perhaps advising me of work being doing in the neighbourhood.  He held out one of his fliers for me to see: "I wanted to let you know about a website...." Big as light, the word, "Bible," was on it. It's all I saw. That and a metal case he was holding that looked like it might contain a receipt book. "You saw the sign about the fliers coming up the walk,...

For the bulk of my career as an elementary educator, I was a teacher-librarian in the public schools. In my training as a teacher and librarian, combined with my previous work as a community college teacher in the nineties, I became very committed to equity and diversity. Simply put, in my belief, a school library ought to reflect the diversity of the school and community... and then some. Here's an example of what I mean, when I say, and then some. In all my years in elementary education, I have encountered one child whose family celebrated Kwanzaa .   One.   But just as I would have multiple books about Eid or Christmas or Diwali, I always made a concerted effort to have two or three titles about Kwanzaa on hand in the library. I didn't have them just in case in I ran across a child whose family celebrated the holiday; I also had them because children like to read about the lives of other children. Muslim kids sign out books about Easter. Hindu and Sikh kids re...

CBC: Language school blogger writes about homophones -- then he's fired   Timothy Torkildson during better days at Nomen Global Language Center, in Provo, Utah. According to Dictionary.com , a homophone is "a word pronounced the same as another but differing in meaning, whether spelled the same way or not, as heir and air." Or bare and bear . Or waste and waist . When I first heard the story of Timothy Torkildson's firing from Nomen Global Language Center -- that's a language school -- in Provo, Utah, for advancing "a gay agenda," I thought maybe his boss Clarke Woodger had conflated homophone with homophobe , the word for a person who fears or hates homosexuals and homosexuality .  Apparently not -- he just got stuck on the homo part. Mr Woodger had to look up the word homophone when he read in a blog Mr Torkildson was hired to write for the school, where the latter was also in charge of social media. According to an intervi...