Willomwist's Wanderings

So starting in second grade, the U.S. has these statewide tests to make sure schools are actually teaching something to their students and prove that my tax dollars are being used wisely.  Seriously, I pay nearly $3000 in property tax for the fine, upstanding school to which I send my son.  I always expect the floors to be tiled in gold or something when I visit the school, but school floors haven’t changed much since I was a kid.  What do educators have against a little colour anyway?

The tests are called Terra Nova (which is latin for new world, thank you Mr Lynde!) and I just got Vaughan’s results in the mail.  Vaughan is under the impression (from which I have never disabused him just because it amused me so,) that all of the tests were sent to the president of the United States for marking.  Actually, I might have hinted at the truth by telling Vaughan that I didn’t think the president of the United States could write the second grade Terra Nova tests, much less grade them.  Nonetheless, Vaughan believes George W marked his tests.  He’s a bright kid.  He tends to ignore my sarcasm.

And now I can prove that he is a bright kid because the Terra Nova people say that he is smarter than roughly 91% of Pennsylvanian second graders.  His Cognitive Skills Index is 122 to the national average of 100 — better, even, then two-thirds of the all the seven-year-olds in the whole state who score between 84 - 116 on the CSI. 

Interestingly, his lowest scores were in analogies and contextual verbal reasoning.  Analogy, for those lacking in test-taking terminology, refers to the ability to transfer information from one subject to another.  You know, understanding relationships:  A is to B as C is to __.  Contextual verbal reasoning is the ability to draw conclusions based on ideas.   He still scored higher in both areas than about 65% of Pennsylvanian second graders but, let’s face it, the kid is just too darned literal.  What was his highest score?  Quantitative reasoning of course.  He scored in the 97th percentile.

Happy July 2 everyone. 

No schedule, no plans, no money.  Just sleeping in late and trying to regain motivation against encroaching inertia.

Do NOT go here.  It is both free and highly addictive.  You will waste hours and hours of your life, neglect your family and lose all track of time.  It’s a terrible, evil, insidious game.

Happy Summer Solstice everyone!

 

I was born and raised in a GM town.  Oshawa has always been the city that ‘moto-vates’ Canada.  In fact, the home of R.S. McLaughlin (the Henry Ford of GM Canada) is a decaying museum near the centre of town.  Everyone in Oshawa either knows someone who works at one of the GM plants or works there themselves.  If you don’t personally work at GM, your job most likely depends on GM anyway because Oshawa is set up, generally-speaking, to service GM workers.  They spend their paycheques on food, shelter and various sundry other items and activities that keep the economy rolling.   Think of us as just a step or two away from the infamous Flint, Michigan.

 On May 16, the autoworkers union ratified a deal with GM which made considerable concessions in return for a little job security.  GM committed in writing to maintain the truck factory for the life of the two-year agreement and to mandate the factory for a new generation of smaller, lighter trucks to be introduced around 2011. 

The truck factory employs about 2500 hard-working folks.  Imagine their surprise when GM announced yesterday that it was closing four North American truck and SUV plants, including the one in Oshawa!  Citing changes in the global oil market, Rick Wagoner, GM CEO, said that the plant would be closing in 2009 with no plans for future mandates (that’s asshole-speak for ‘permanent’ in case you were wondering.)  GM spokesmen, Stew Low, says that it’s hard to estimate the impact this closing will have on employment in Oshawa.

Really?  Because, I don’t think it’s so difficult.

In a nutshell, GM lied to 2500 autoworkers.  There’s no way that it didn’t know about the planned closures on May 16 when it inked the collective agreement with its employees.  Canadian Autoworkers president, Buzz Hargrove, admittedly not my favourite human being, has decried the move as a shocking and illegal betrayal and vows to fight it.  He wants the federal government to ban sales of GM trucks elsewhere if the closure goes through.  I’m not holding my breath for that to happen, and I’m not sure a boycott would help their cause in the long run, but I’m pretty sure that the Canadian government should intervene because GM has publicly acknowledged that the truck factory in Oshawa is highly productive.  I doubt there’s much the government can do though.  There has to be something illegal about the blatant bad faith.  The whole thing smells like a cheaper, developing country shift to me.

Please feel free to write to GM to express your shock and dismay.  I am certain that GM would care if the paying public mobilized.  And if you’re American wondering why you should care about jobs in Oshawa, Ontario, they are also closing two American truck plants - in Wisconsin and Ohio.

Happy June 3 everyone. 

I have to confess that this has been one of the weirdest Springs I’ve ever expereinced in Philadelphia.  Tom observed the other day that we’re going to make it to June without air conditioners (of course, he wasn’t going to be home this weekend, otherwise I would have air conditioners on right now and we would not have made it to June at all!)  In truth, we had the heater coming on until a couple of weeks ago.  I’m used to going straight from heaters to air conditioners around here, but I’m used to doing it a lot earlier is all I’m saying.

So, it’s hot.

Of course, you will all remember, we don’t have a pool anymore.  Let’s not go into that now.  So, the kids are all playing with the sprinkler in the backyard and it isn’t even noon.  They’ve rigged some Indiana Jones-style rope swings on our little tree out back and are swinging through the water.  I can’t get our regular rainbow sprinkler to work properly though, so they’ve had to make due with a much less powerful ring sprinkler.  From the noise outside, I’m going to assume that they’ve adapted well enough.

Remember sprinklers?  Why were they so much fun?  We used to run through the sprinkler at my Grampy’s house.  He had a big backyard.  I was what my American allies would call an inner-city kid, so I didn’t have any yard to speak of - just a little postage stamp garden surrounded by hedges that separated our postage stamp from the neighbour’s postage stamp.  Half of the garden was taken up by a slap patio on which we had a bbq and a picnic table. 

Of course, we had an entire townhouse complex in which to run around.  My friend, Lisa Murphy, and her band of siblings lived in the far back, my friend, Kelly Gooding, lived on the left-hand perimeter and I lived up front.  Our gang was between 10-15 kids on any given day.  We played manhunt, using the green transformers as home base.  We also used to play catch with tennis balls across the entire parking lot.  It’s a wonder we didn’t destroy any cars, but my throwing arm was to die for because of those games of catch.  In the winter we would play king of the castle on the giant mounds of snow left by the big ploughs in the parking lot.  We’d all stand at the top and sing our favourite songs until someone threw a shoe at us. (Ok, no one ever threw a shoe at us, but we were cussed at more than once.) You know the Eurythmics song, I Need a Man?  When I was 11 or 12, that was my favourite song. 

I dont need no heartbreaker
Fifty-faced trouble maker
Two timing time taker
Dirty little money maker
Muscle bound cheap skate
Low down woman hater
Triple crossing double dater
Yella bellied alligator…

 We had a nasty gully nearby where we could catch tadpoles and frogs.  We played a lot of road hockey, using chalk to draw the goal net on the side of a big industrial garbage bin.  Our school yard had two baseball diamonds and a football field, so we hung out there a lot too.  There was a big park with a big hill/cliff that led down to a little runoff creek.  We risked our lives on the tarzan swing and, in the winter, we tried to jump the creek with our tobaggans.  Remember GT Snowracers?  My sister got one for Christmas one year.  They suck for creek-jumping.  Not because they couldn’t jump the creek, but because the landing was murder on your crotch! 

There was an athletic clubhouse at the park where some local organization sponsored parties every Friday night.  We called them PCP parties - pop, chips and parents.  But they were a good time anyway.  The second week in June was Fiesta.  It’s a multicultural, citywide party during which the local clubhouses were turned into pavillions that represented various countries.  Our clubhouse used to be the Carribbean and we would have to sneak in to sample the rum.  The German pavillion in the east end was always pretty good too.  In the winter, we skated at the rink - Friday nights had loud music and lots of kids, Sunday afternoons were for families.  Sometimes, if we were feeling ambitious, we’d ride our bikes up to Somerset pool.  It was cooler than the Civic if only because it was outdoors and cheaper.  Coming home always sucked though because it was mostly uphill and any refreshment you had gained from swimming was used up pretty quickly.  There was this cool tree with purple-black berries in a yard along the way and you could hide inside the hanging leaves and eat the berries if the people who owned it weren’t home to chase you off.

My childhood actually makes me kind of sad for Vaughan.  Back yards are overrated.

Happy June 1 everyone.