Father Puts a Wire on His Autistic Son, Records Teachers Bullying Child

The video below is a powerful story about a father pushed to his limits in trying to protect his son. The title of this post more or less explains it, give the video a watch and it will quickly become clear how serious the situation was and is for this man's child.

Quick Comment: Quebec Students Attracted to English

Teachers in Quebec are wondering why so many students in the province decide to switch to English after high-school. They've actually commissioned a study to try and determine the reasoning behind the mysterious phenomenon.

Quick guess: it's because they want to make money.

Granted I'm just hypothesizing without any real facts to stand on, but the correlation between things young people want and cost seems pretty clear. It makes sense that young people would want to have a decent grasp of both French and English since bilingualism is unequivocally an opportunity providing asset. Unless you want to pigeonhole yourself in a career that is exclusive to Quebec, learning English is just a good way to give yourself options. To me the statistics don't signal a general departure from French language/culture, as the Quebec teachers seem to see it. Rather this says that Quebec youths are cognizant of the realities of Canadian business and don't want to be sold short. They want to speak English so they can compete with the rest of the country instead of becoming isolated in an insular province.

What riles me is the predictable reactionary call to extend mandatory French schooling past high school. Of course any validation of the English language is immediately a threat to Quebec culture and should be regulated out of existence. It's not as though that logic is exactly what creates a turn towards English at the earliest opportunity possible. The only thing accomplished by prohibiting English teaching is to hold back Quebecois youth from being able to work at the same level as the rest of the country. It's regressive thinking that is outdated and foolhardy and it does nothing to improve matters for the province of Quebec.

Max Rambles: Not Dead, But Different

I'm going to start this post by listing a few of the things I have done since August 5th:

1. Quit my job, thereby eliminating my primary source of funding and free time for blogging
2. Travel extensively for pleasure, including my first trip to New York City
3. Feel guilty about neglecting this blog
4. Ignore many, many emails
5. Pack up all of my worldly possessions and drive them 1,792 km (that's 1,113.5 miles for my American readers) to relocate to Halifax, Nova Scotia
6. Live through a hurricane
7. Begin law school

So yeah, it's been kind of a busy month. There were always things I wanted to blog about, and I felt like I should put up a post explaining my absence, but time just seemed to get away from me. It's really easy to keep up a regular posting schedule when you're getting paid to sit in front of a computer for nine hours a day, most of which you spend doing nothing. But when you suddenly find yourself with a lot free time and the simultaneous need to prepare for a significant life change, blogging fall kind of low on the priority list. Anyway, so that's where I've been. Now lets take a moment to discuss where I'm going.

I'm starting law school. That's kind of a daunting proposition, but I'm really looking forward to it. Despite the fact that everyone tells me how first year law is going to kick my ass, I think I'm going to be able to handle it. That said, I figure it will take up the vast majority of my time and mental energy. So where does that leave Max Rambles?

The short answer is I'm not sure. I want to say I'm going to keep posting, albeit less often than I used to, but I can't make any promises. I can say that I am going to try to post once a week at a minimum, even if that only amounts to a short post linking to something cool I saw on Geekosystem once every seven days. That much I should be able to manage.

So that sort of gives you all an idea of what I've been up to and what I'm hoping to do with this page in the coming months. For now I guess we'll just see where it goes and hope for the best. Who knows, maybe law school will turn out to be super easy and I'll start blogging like every day again. More realistically I'll probably end up doing my best to get one post up a week, and most of them will be short and to the point. Kind of contradicts my titular propensity to ramble, but hey, I'll do what I can.

Thank you all for reading thus far, and I hope you keep coming back. More than that I hope to post things that keep you coming back. I'm going to aim to post something new every week on, say, Sunday evening. Yeah, that seems like the most realistic proposition. Anything beyond that Sunday evening post (ha!) I'll consider a bonus, and I leave it to you to judge whether or not it actually is one.  Please do let me know.

On this whole 'National Post' debacle...

For those who haven't heard, on January 26 the National Post put out an editorial decrying Women's Studies. The piece is a response to news of the 'death' of the program at institutions around the country. The NP editors discuss how the academic field is not disappearing from schools but is rather "being renamed to make [it] appear less controversial." The article then outlines the ways in which Women's Studies has purportedly damaged society since its inception in the late 1970s.

Roger Ebert vs. film fans

Just a quick link right now, I wanted to share Roger Ebert's response to the backlash against his Transformers 2 review. I don't want to touch upon the film anymore, and frankly he doesn't seem to either, but his points about education are great. The best bit, however, is this comparison between sports fans and movie fans that I wholeheartedly agree with. I couldn't even begin to estimate the number of times I feel compelled to apologize for the fact that I studied culture in university when discussing film, television, etc.

I think it's ridiculous, and that those without the same kind of background in theoretical models and modes of thought don't necessarily have to agree with me by any means. No one has to agree with me. But to outright discount my opinion and those of theorists because they are "pretentious" or "thinking too much" is infuriating. The worst is when I have to hear these things from my ostensibly more educated friends, those who are often in university themselves, though not because they have any sort of respec for the institution or values they're paying for.

Sigh, at this point I'm more just venting about a few specific people I ahve in mind, so I'll stop. Here's the quote I wanted to point out, followed by a link to the post on Ebert's blog. Check it out, it's a good one.

"A reader named Jared Diamond, a senior at Syracuse, sports editor of The Daily Orange, put my disturbance eloquently in a post asking: "Why in this society are the intelligent vilified? Why is education so undervalued and those who preach it considered arrogant or pretentious?" Why, indeed? If sports fans were like certain movie fans, they would hate sports writers, commentators and sports talk hosts for always discussing fine points, quoting statistics and bringing up games and players of the past. If all you want to do is drink beer in the sunshine and watch a ball game, why should some elitist play-by-play announcer bore you with his knowledge? Yet sports fans are proud of their baseball knowledge, and respect commentators who know their stuff."

http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2009/07/i_am_a_brainiac.html