Gasp

In Victoria it seems that leaves don’t turn red. They turn pink. Fall is always the most beautiful time of year…a brief window when leaves turn all shades of yellow, orange and red. Really, the trees are just holding their breath till the days get warmer. We gawk at them while they suffocate.

From The Moment I Could Talk I Was Ordered to Listen

Why can’t I remember our conversations? Did I never talk?

Foot in Mouth or Tongue in Cheek?

Yesterday during a budget proposal simulation, when asked why my group decided to cut funding to an economic diversification board for Quebec without making cuts from a similar board for Atlantic provinces, I likened making cuts to the Atlantic Canada board to cutting the third leg off a three legged dog.

Highly offensive…I know.

Elephant Graveyard

O.M.G.

I have no other way to exclaim about this than that. My apartment is the elephant graveyard for moths. I’m so sick of moths flying in here and dying. I’m so sick of having to apprehensively scoop them up on my dust pan (fearing that they will magically come to life and fly at my face) and take them outside. I can’t stand moths.

It May Be Years Until the Day

My dreams will match up with my pay

It’s days like this I have to say thank God…in the best way possible

V for

I’ve always been a pretty firm believer in the fact that most people learn all that they need to get by in life by the time they finish grade six. Basic operations, an understanding of basic sentence structure, and in Canada an introduction to French gives you pretty much all that you need. Also, given that our newspapers and most media outlets don’t use language that is beyond an 8^th grade level anyway, you could probably understand major issues and be pretty well versed in current events (if you cared enough to find out about them). So as happy as I was with the quality of my education up to grade six, one thing always baffled me. Ever since I started attending school in Canada, every year in math we would have a whole unit on estimation. I did it twice the year we immigrated because I was in grade three for half the year and grade four for the other half. They would always show us a picture of rows of corn and asked us to estimate how many ears of corn that the field would yield. Twenty thousand? Sixteen hundred? Fourteen? I never understood how one could come up with a number that was anything other than a complete shot in the dark and even though the teacher would always tell us there was really no such thing as a wrong estimation, I was sure there could be. Clearly, if I told my teacher that I thought there were four ears of corn in the picture I would be wrong.

Initially, this led me to make several attempts at actually counting the corn in the picture. But eventually, when my friends would skip off to recess after completing their work and I would be sitting inside trying to count the corn on my (badly) photocopied worksheet, I started to realize that my method wouldn’t do. So finally, I began to take advantage of the ‘Never wrong’ principle of estimation. The estimation unit of my math class suddenly got a whole lot more exciting, mainly because I realized as long as I stayed away from ridiculous extremes, the teacher really couldn’t tell me I’m wrong. So from then on, I used to finish my estimation work in a matter of minutes and with the time I had remaining I would do two things; gloat about how I had finished before everyone else and simultaneously feel guilty for ‘cheating’ and wonder if I was somehow I was setting myself up for failure by doing it. I think now, in grad school, it’s safe to say it hasn’t kicked me in the butt.