http://www.nugget.ca/2015/04/28/trojans-heading-to-reach-for-the-top-competition
The six-member team defeated Chippewa Secondary School’s team Monday afternoon in their only meeting at West Ferris.
http://www.kenoradailyminerandnews.com/2015/04/28/author-engages-young-readers-with-stories-from-the-heart
Beaver Brae Grade 7 and 8 students got a chance to interact with one of their favourite literary role models at a special presentation on Tuesday, April 28.
Tuesday, September 17, 2013
Trojans heading to Reach for the Top competition
The six-member team defeated Chippewa Secondary School’s team Monday afternoon in their only meeting at West Ferris.
Actually, the two teams are the only ones in North Bay at this time, but that didn’t faze the members of the winning team. It means they’ve got several weeks of practise, and the chance at several more games, before their season is over.
Kieran Adamson, the unofficial captain of the team, competed at the provincials last year for West Ferris.
“It was an amazing experience,” he said. “We just wanted to keep on playing.
“It’s not always about winning. It’s the chance to play more games.”
Reach for the Top was, at one time, one of the biggest competitions between high schools across the province, with games airing weekly on TV. Unlike Jeopardy!, the questions are drawn from various categories, ranging from Disney villains to math to astronomy, and almost anything in between.
You need fast reflexes to buzz in before the opposing team, although sometimes this strategy falls short. More than a few players buzzed in before the reader – West Ferris teacher and coach Mark Robertson – had finished the question, only to learn the question wasn’t close to what the player had expected.
“Sometimes you get a bit of a feel for what might come up,” Adamson said.
Robertson, who’s been involved with the team for the past five years, says the secret is getting players who have a wide range of interests.
“We try to steer people in certain directions,” he said. “It makes no sense if everyone knows their capital cities,” while other subjects come up dry.
The West Ferris team practices several times a week, playing trivia games over their lunch period.
“We really don’t know what questions they’ll ask,” he said, although they can anticipate some.
Last year at the provincial championship, for example, one of the big categories was famous last words. That category came up more than a few times during the various games the team played.
Alec Taylor specializes in movies.
“They do ask a lot of questions about old movies,” he said.
Last year he was stumped on some of the questions, so since then he has been reading up on classic movies, everything from plots to signature lines.
Returning to the championship, he said, is “amazing.
“We really wanted to go back. It’s just so awesome.”
He figures he’ll spend the next couple of weeks reading up on his movies to get prepared.
Allison Porter, the only female on the team, likes literature and composers, catching a few questions during the three games the two teams played Monday.
She only joined the team last year after seeing the members practicing.
“It looked like a lot of fun,” she admitted.
West Ferris defeated Chippewa 280-200 in the first game and 250-180 in the third, with Chippewa winning the middle game 200-190.
The provincial championship will be held over the Mother’s Day weekend in May.
pj.wilson@sunmedia.ca
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Author engages young readers with stories from the heart
Beaver Brae Grade 7 and 8 students got a chance to interact with one of their favourite literary role models at a special presentation on Tuesday, April 28.
Over the past 21 years, Canadian writer Eric Walters has authored 98 books for young adults, translated into many languages and read by students around the world. Titles on display at the school library, include War of Eagles, Shattered, Stranded, Wounded, Beverly Hills Masala, Power Play and Juice, just to name a few.
“Kids love him. He writes to their age group, Grade 4 to 8, and his stories especially appeal to boys,” school librarian Jocelyn Laffin said. “The students have been preparing for his visit since June by reading and rereading his books. The library purchased multiple copies because I knew interest was so high. All the stories he writes, he lives it so it comes from the heart.”
Laffin credited Pope John Paul ll librarian Shawna DeGagne for inviting Walters to Kenora and speaking with students at both local high schools and all the elementary schools this week.
Walters engaged his young audience right from the start by sharing the stories behind the stories of many of his novels. He demonstrated how he forms characters from encounters with real people by singling out a boy and a girl student from the audience and fictionalizing a connection between them much to their embarrassment and the amusement of their peers.
Walters was quick to point out that in addition to being a writer, he is also a parent of three grown children, all university graduates. He has worked as a social worker in crisis response at hospital emergency rooms and as teacher in Toronto.
He started writing professionally while working with a class of 28 marginalized students, mostly boys, deemed unreachable by other teachers. They liked to make up stories so he redirected their creative energies into writing about things that affected their lives. Walters was inspired by the experience and it resulted in his first novels; Vista High School and Stand Your Ground.
Drawing from his own life, work, travels and reading, Walters presented a slideshow to illustrate how many of his experiences have found their way into print.
His books Tiger by the Tail and Tiger Trap followed a project where he brought live tigers to schools to introduce to students. He’s also co-authored a series of books on basketball with professional players; Three on Three, Full Court Press and Boot Camp. In Visions he relates the tale of two young Arctic explorers and their encounter with an Inuit shaman. Cat Boy tells of how students come to the rescue of feral cats in Toronto and Hunter relates the same story as seen through the eyes of one of the feline rescues.
In Between Heaven and Earth, Walters recounts his ascent of Mount Kilimanjaro along with his youngest son. At the summit he planted the flag of the Toronto District School Board where he was writer in residence for three years.
Africa holds special interest for Walters who sponsors an orphanage in Kenya with proceeds from book sales supporting programs, including the distribution of thousands of pounds of food and supplies monthly.
My Name is Blessing was inspired by a young African boy born with a physical handicap who struggles for acceptance by his society.
Alexandria in Africa is the story of a privileged teenage girl from the west who develops a social conscious through her encounters with African villagers who have very little but are willing to share what they have with the fair-haired stranger.
Today is the Day is an illustrated picture book that recounts a group of African orphans coming together to celebrate the birthday they’ve never known and receive the birth certificates that validate their existence as people. The book will be on bookstore shelves this summer.
Reg.Clayton@sunmedia.ca
twitter@RegClayton
Tuesday, September 17, 2013
(45,147 views)
A new record set yesterday for hits for this site in 24 hours, 355. Something triggered it, I'm not sure what it was. It must be the whit and charm that's finally coming through, yes? Ok, maybe not. Maybe the bombshell statement about unions and deals with employers and collective bargaining agreements? If you read all 40 posts, if anyone has been brave enough, you'll actually see that it isn't the first time I mentioned it.
The occasional teacher says he was working in an office of the Government of Canada at the time on short-term contracts. It was around 1992-1993. The feds had a huge budget deficit and a lot of debt to pay off that they had inherited from previous governments and they had to bring in huge cuts, the Chretien/Martin cuts I call them. One of the things they did was change the requirements to qualify for an employment insurance, E.I., claim which made it more difficult to qualify for a claim which led to a large surplus in the E.I. fund. Then they took that surplus and applied it to the deficit and debt, I think it was $25 billion. Then they laid-off thousands of civil servants and eliminated 60,000 positions in the federal civil service from about 1993 to 1998. He says he remembers it quite clearly because he was trying to get a job in government at that time because his degree was in political science and administration. And to make it worse from his point of view Mike Harris and the PC's came in in 1995 and added to the cuts in Ontario. Anyway, he says the department he was in, not in Toronto, in another city, ran a competition to see who would get laid-off.
He says he thinks the competition was completely unfair. It was a written test with three sections. If you failed one section they didn't bother marking the next two. Obviously if you did well on the first section you would be ok but if you didn't you were out. The questions in the first section were exactly based on the work being done by people in a certain department so they passed just fine but people working in another department didn't know that work so they didn't know the answers to those questions. Does that sound rigged? Of course. 27 people were laid-off including the occasional teacher, one of them had been there for 10 years on short-term contracts.
So the situation for getting another job was looking pretty grim at that time because of the recession of the early-90's so he figured he didn't have anything to lose, he'd ask for a grievance over the competition for being unfair. He asked the president of the local to file a grievance. She said ok but it might not go through. He said he didn't think he had much to lose. Three weeks later she phoned him and told him to come in for the results. She told him that his grievance was not going ahead. She said it wasn't going ahead because there was no clause in the collective bargaining agreement, (cba), to use as the basis for the grievance. That's when she told him about unions being willing to negotiate weak cba's to reduce the number of grievances because previously unions got very strict cba's and unions and managers spent all their time dealing with grievances and they spent a lot of money on them because you need a lawyer to deal with them because they are legal documents and they have to conform to the Ontario Labour Relations Act or the Canada Labour Relations Act. That's when unions and employers made the deal to have weaker cba's in exchange for managements agreement to hire family members of full-time employees as a type of trade-off. And the occasional teacher says that's part of the reason why there is so much nepotism in unionized shops.
But what if you don't have family members pulling for you in that place of employment? You can end up getting passed over and passed over and passed over for people who have less experience and qualifications but they have the right DNA and that causes a lot of anger and frustration, so obviously this deal between management and unions has some flaws if you aren't family in that shop. And that's why he's telling people about what he learned, because he has been getting the shaft. He thinks unions should create a workplace where there is more equal opportunity and he thinks this is the myth or image that people have of a unionized shop but now they'll know the truth. It won't make him popular, though, will it?
A new record set yesterday for hits for this site in 24 hours, 355. Something triggered it, I'm not sure what it was. It must be the whit and charm that's finally coming through, yes? Ok, maybe not. Maybe the bombshell statement about unions and deals with employers and collective bargaining agreements? If you read all 40 posts, if anyone has been brave enough, you'll actually see that it isn't the first time I mentioned it.
The occasional teacher says he was working in an office of the Government of Canada at the time on short-term contracts. It was around 1992-1993. The feds had a huge budget deficit and a lot of debt to pay off that they had inherited from previous governments and they had to bring in huge cuts, the Chretien/Martin cuts I call them. One of the things they did was change the requirements to qualify for an employment insurance, E.I., claim which made it more difficult to qualify for a claim which led to a large surplus in the E.I. fund. Then they took that surplus and applied it to the deficit and debt, I think it was $25 billion. Then they laid-off thousands of civil servants and eliminated 60,000 positions in the federal civil service from about 1993 to 1998. He says he remembers it quite clearly because he was trying to get a job in government at that time because his degree was in political science and administration. And to make it worse from his point of view Mike Harris and the PC's came in in 1995 and added to the cuts in Ontario. Anyway, he says the department he was in, not in Toronto, in another city, ran a competition to see who would get laid-off.
He says he thinks the competition was completely unfair. It was a written test with three sections. If you failed one section they didn't bother marking the next two. Obviously if you did well on the first section you would be ok but if you didn't you were out. The questions in the first section were exactly based on the work being done by people in a certain department so they passed just fine but people working in another department didn't know that work so they didn't know the answers to those questions. Does that sound rigged? Of course. 27 people were laid-off including the occasional teacher, one of them had been there for 10 years on short-term contracts.
So the situation for getting another job was looking pretty grim at that time because of the recession of the early-90's so he figured he didn't have anything to lose, he'd ask for a grievance over the competition for being unfair. He asked the president of the local to file a grievance. She said ok but it might not go through. He said he didn't think he had much to lose. Three weeks later she phoned him and told him to come in for the results. She told him that his grievance was not going ahead. She said it wasn't going ahead because there was no clause in the collective bargaining agreement, (cba), to use as the basis for the grievance. That's when she told him about unions being willing to negotiate weak cba's to reduce the number of grievances because previously unions got very strict cba's and unions and managers spent all their time dealing with grievances and they spent a lot of money on them because you need a lawyer to deal with them because they are legal documents and they have to conform to the Ontario Labour Relations Act or the Canada Labour Relations Act. That's when unions and employers made the deal to have weaker cba's in exchange for managements agreement to hire family members of full-time employees as a type of trade-off. And the occasional teacher says that's part of the reason why there is so much nepotism in unionized shops.
But what if you don't have family members pulling for you in that place of employment? You can end up getting passed over and passed over and passed over for people who have less experience and qualifications but they have the right DNA and that causes a lot of anger and frustration, so obviously this deal between management and unions has some flaws if you aren't family in that shop. And that's why he's telling people about what he learned, because he has been getting the shaft. He thinks unions should create a workplace where there is more equal opportunity and he thinks this is the myth or image that people have of a unionized shop but now they'll know the truth. It won't make him popular, though, will it?
