A Teacher Blogs

One of Pete's many friends in the music business was Johnny Cash -- the fabled Man in Black . Cash himself had been a bit of an outlier in the country music establishment. No doubt, some eyebrows were probably raised  when he married June Carter, whose legendary family were country music's royalty and pioneers of recorded music for the masses. Cash had a fierce independence musically. His songs were the brooding homilies of a man who chose his own path and vision, and who wrestled with his demons. I'm unaware if Johnny Cash ever stated publicly his views on the Vietnam War while the US was still involved, but this song provides some clues.  Stylistically,  Singing in Vietnam Talkin' Blues is pure Woody Guthrie, who, coincidentally, had taught Pete how to perform talking blues . Cash's two final verses surely are a departure from President Nixon's aspirations to "peace with honour." Certainly, nowhere in the tune does Cash invoke the necessity...

Pete Seeger's iconic long-kneck five-string banjo with its enduring message. Pete Seeger's defiant appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee hurt not only his prospects for appearing on television, but also prevented him from getting bookings in major concert halls in the US. Pete continued to tour and work where he could. International audiences were more obliging, as his music was known around the world. He had a unique arrangement with Folkways Records, which allowed him to record whenever inspiration struck. Many children's songs would be added to his repertoire as he even toured summer camps for kids around the world.  This young audience would grow up and pay money to see him perform on college campuses. Still, Pete was denied access to US television during the second folk boom of the early sixties. A touchstone moment in the sixties folk boom was the 1963-64 television show Hootenanny , which featured popular folk and pop artists of ...

A departure from my usual politically-charged fare -- sort of. I've been a guitar player and folk music lover for more than four decades. More recently, I took up the five-sting banjo. Music has been my companion in my teaching journey.  And so has the wonderful spirit of Pete Seeger.  So let's write about that. Im sure his biographers have struggled with how to begin to tell the story of Pete Seeger . The choices are endless. He was the son and step-son of accomplished musicians -- in particular, his father, Charles Seeger , was a pioneer of ethnomusicology. Pete would follow his father's path, albeit less academically, hopping freight trains with Woody Guthrie ; recording and transcribing all-but-forgotten music on the backroads and in the backwoods of America with Alan Lomax ; popularizing the twelve-string guitar (introduced to him by Lead Belly ) and the five-string banjo; pioneering the long-kneck banjo; singing and playing for any audience that invit...

A particular Catholic blog that has caught my eye over the last couple of years is Everyday for Life Canada , written by veteran educator  Lou Iacobelli . There are two reasons I read it: Unlike many blogs in this arena, which simply link out other materials with a bit pithy commentary, Mr Iacobelli's entries are original essays. These range from personal reflections on faith to thoughtful explanations of the inner workings of the vast complex that is the Roman Catholic Church. The other reason I read it is that Mr Iacobelli was my eleventh-grade English teacher in 1976, just shy of forty years ago, at De La Salle College in Toronto. Mr Iacobelli was among a handful of teachers who provided me with an arena in which I could thrive. Having little interest in hockey or football in a school that excelled in both; being among the very few non-Catholics in the all-boys collegiate; and showing absolutely no talent for maths or sciences, to which the school's curricular scale...

This afternoon I stopped by the Thorncliffe Park community in East York to take in the latest parent protest against the  Ontario Ministry of Education Heath and Physical Education curriculum .  If I had to guess, I'd put the crowd at four- to five-hundred -- gathered in front of the local public library before making their way around Thorncliffe Park Drive towards the neighbourhood elementary school.  I grew up in that neighbourhood in the sixties and seventies, in a building not 500 yards from where the rally and march began. The cluster of high- and low-rise apartment buildings, perched above the Don Valley, is home to tens of thousands of people many of whose children attend the largest K-5 school in North America. Many locals worship at a nearby mosque nestled amongst numerous stores and restaurants that serve Halal products. Languages most commonly spoken other than English at home are Urdu and Gurarati in the predominantly South Asian community...

Ben Levin at his plea hearing. Source: The National Post newspaper. This past week brought news of former Deputy Education Minister Ben Levin's guilty plea  in connection with a series of charges related to child pornography. The details of his case had not been known, apart from charges of making and distributing child pornography, as well as counselling an undercover officer online to perform sex acts on a child. The actual statement of facts heard in court on the day of the hearing is vile beyond description -- from the sharing of imagery depicting a child victim to the jaw-dropping revelation that Mr Levin told an undercover officer (posing as a mother seeking stories of sex with children) that he had used his own daughters for gratification with his wife's support. If there is any saving grace, police found no basis for this latter fiction; however, Levin's closest family are left to suffer in the knowledge that they were used as background characters in his play...

Source: Morocco World News Anyone who devotes time, as I do, to tracking the progress of equity, particularly as it pertains to gender and sexuality, in public education notices familiar patterns in the language of its detractors. Whether the discussion is about the Equity and Inclusive Education Strategy (2009) , The Accepting Schools Act of Ontario (2012) , or the 2015 updates to Ontario's  Health and Physical Education Curriculum (shelved since 2010), the peculiar phrase  normalizing homosexuality repeats itself. In my secular existence, it all seems very strange to me. Talk of normalizing homosexuality -- acknowledging sexual diversity, as I would have it -- sounds like normalizing gravity. Some examples below, emphasis mine: Charles McVety “This is part of a militant homosexual agenda to normalize homosexuality in everyone’s mind and thereby promote homosexuality,” he told the National Post last April. “If we teach our child...