The Classroom Conservative

Signs And Wonders

The Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce believes that, by 2012, a litre of gasoline could cost $2.25.  I would be surprised if it took that long to get there, and having reached 2012 we might look back on $2.25 with some longing.  I have been interested in the subject of peak oil and escalating hydrocarbon demand for about five years now, and I have only costed gasoline as far as $3, assuming that domestic demand would ebb long before.  But with no way to imagine where state-subsidized foreign supply and demand might go, I think that all bets are off.  Things have changed.

   

My daily commute is less than a half-hour, and I can get two weeks from a tank of gasoline.  I am not sure why a fellow like me who needs 25 litres a week for personal use should pay the same price per litre as someone who, by choice, through lifestyle, needs 100 litres.  In any case, while I live very close to necessary retail outlets, I still find it prudent to try to combine chores for single journeys.  Most evenings, I do not get away from the office until after 6pm, and so I sometimes take a weekday morning to catch up on some things.

   

Yesterday, I drove over to the vendor who installed my air conditioner.  I bought the most eco-friendly model, I promise, and I now solemnly vow to use it only to keep the temperature in my house from creeping over, say, 26 degrees celsius at the height of our summer drought.  But one of the appealing features of the unit is that it comes with a cover.  Our climate is dusty and windy, and a clogged air conditioner, I am told, presents a real maintenance concern.  In any case, the installer didn’t bring the cover, but he had seen it in the shop.  Well, the woman working there told me, matter-of-factly, that they had no covers and no covers even exist.  She suggested I have one custom made at a canvas shop.

 

My second stop was at the water store.  There was a time in my life that I would have found “water store” funny, but it too is a scarce resource now, is it not?  There are a number of places to buy water nearby, but I wanted to have a chat with the manager of this shop about the bisphenol in the water bottles we use.  Unfortunately, the store is understaffed, and the manager has to make deliveries; he shuts down when he hits the road.  The sign he leaves says, simply, “I have had to step out.  I will be back in 30 minutes.”  The problem with this sign, and all signs of this type, is that you have no way of knowing if it was posted 25 minutes or 25 seconds ago.  So, no joy here, either.

   

Just before clocking on, I dropped by the record shop because Billy Bragg has a new disc.  It might represent nostalgia on my part, as I have not been wild about a new Billy Bragg record for more than 10 years, but he meant enough to me in my formative years that I still fork over twenty bucks when prompted and think of when Bragg and a little portable amplifier changed my life.  I could not find the album, and the clerk (who had never heard of Billy Bragg) consulted a computer to tell me that the store received only two copies, both of which were lost somewhere in the back.

   

I am not sure what all this means, other than the fact that I wasted a couple of bucks in gas and got nothing but indigestion.  But I think it illustrates just how much things have changed.  I think it demonstrates how deliberate I have gotten: how concerned I am about energy use, how concerned I am about what my water bottle might contain (other than water, of course).  It also speaks to the deplorable state of consumer culture: how difficult it is to get decent service, how precarious is the conspicuous consumption that defines our economy.  And in these matters, too, I don’t think we have seen the end of dramatic changes.

In Praise Of Final Examinations

“Everybody don’t like something,” the wag once sang, but it appears that virtually nobody likes final examinations.  It is final examination week here at the University of Lethbridge, and I feel like Bill Kilgore in Apocalypse Now loving the smell of napalm in the morning.  The smell here is fear, and I continue to maintain that fear is good for you.  “Examinations are good for the soul,” Tom Evans once told me.  He was my medieval history professor at Memorial University, and sadly it is one of the only things I still remember from medieval history class.  Professor Evans was right, too.  I loved the challenge of the examination: the chance to show, under pressure, what I knew and that of which I was capable.  I particularly liked writing in the large examination rooms.  It felt like competition, and I fed off the anxiety of other students.

   

I am not proposing a “one size fits all” solution for every situation.  In my courses, we spend fourteen weeks examining fully a series of related topics, and I relish the opportunity to ask my students questions that require them to draw on material from across the whole semester.  This is their best opportunity to show me what they have learned, how they can piece together material to demonstrate mastery of a subject.  In other disciplines, one topic directly builds upon another, and so the final examination is the only real opportunity to ask the questions the semester has been building towards.

   

Institutional objections to final examinations come from people who point out, rightly, that students thrive when given many different opportunities to demonstrate their learning.  That is why I make sure that students have the chance to prepare a term paper, as well, something they can work on beyond the pressures of the exam room.  It is also possible that the topics covered across the semester are related but still align in a way so that regular assessment at set intervals is the more practical model for testing.  Personally, this would never work for me, and I think it might be the exception rather than the rule, but I would never question a colleague’s right to arrange things in this way.

 

What of the students in all this?  What of their red eyes?  Their sleep deprivation?  Have I no compassion for them?  Certainly.  I am free, after all, to show all manner of compassion when I grade their examinations.  But in a world where the next challenge is just around the corner, I think the ability to stand and deliver is a valuable thing.  And having proven themselves to me in the relatively secure environment of the classroom, I would like to think that my successful students have the confidence necessary to take on anything.

Rick Mercer Is The Man

Over the past week or so, there has been, on the pages of Canada’s national newspapers, considerable debate over the future of the CBC.  I never tire of these articles.  On the whole, I prefer the less reverent coverage in The National Post; it seems at though The Globe and Mail imagines we watch and listen only to the CBC, as though its television critics are issued a set of rabbit ears when they get the gig.

   

Robert Cushman published today a spirited defense of elitism, but I very much appreciated his recent discussion of Canada’s ageing comedy institutions.  Programs like Air Farce and 22 Minutes are not comedies as much as they are too gentle satires, of course, and satire is a difficult thing to maintain.  It is, essentially, a conservative gesture, at least in the way I understand conservatism: the critic believes that, on the road to a better future, we somehow got off track.  While the progressive has to imagine some new solution (and stand by it), the conservative satirist can dwell on what has gone wrong.  That gets a little old, of course, especially as the satirist becomes part of the establishment.  Take, for example, my countryman Rick Mercer, late of 22 Minutes and host now of his popular, eponymous RMR.  The Post critic has little time for Mr. Mercer’s current incarnation, but I remember him best as an angry young man from Show Me The Button, I’ll Push It and I’ve Killed Before, I’ll Kill Again performed at the Arts and Culture Centre in St. John’s.

   

Okay, okay: full disclosure here. I actually remember him from Avalon East High School Drama Festivals at the LSPU Hall (and other locations) through the mid-to-late-1980s.  After two years of spewing out nonsense lines from N. F. Simpson, I was given the lead in Michael Frayn’s Benefactors, opposite my real ex-girlfriend, as a man whose personal and professional life falls apart.  That is pretty heavy stuff for a seventeen-year-old, but while Mr. Mercer’s PWC troupe usually won all the competitions, I was given Best Actor that year.  I love to tell my students, “While Mr. Mercer parlayed that early success into an international performance career,” and you have to imagine my sweeping arm gestures in the classroom here, “I inherited all this!”

   

So, now, more than twenty years later, I am firmly part of an “establishment.”  I am a university professor and administrator, for goodness sake; I stand in my front yard and grumble about the “darned kids” of the neighborhood.  I do not see this as a problem, but perhaps Mr. Mercer does his present standing.  Part of his past effectiveness came from the look of shock and horror as politicians saw him coming, the manner by which he could manipulate their discomfort.  Now, obviously, once politicians determined that he was not an utter lunatic, they realized that there was fun to be had and street credentials to be earned by playing along.  This is how Mr. Mercer got to eat a hamburger with Jean Chrétien while Bill Clennet got a Shawinigan handshake.  I am not suggesting that playing golf with Anne Murray necessarily means that Mr. Mercer and RMR have “jumped the shark,” as I suspect Mr. Cushman believes, but there is only so long that you can play along with willing participants and pretend it is irony.  Rick Mercer is now the man, the kind of figure against which he once railed, mercilessly.  I do not pretend to know what he will do next season and in the years ahead, but I have always thought of him as a Steve Martin figure, someone who has explored many avenues beyond a “wild and crazy guy.”  I just would not expect to see Rick Mercer make dopey romantic comedies.

Jeffrey Simpson and Stéphane Dion

Writing in today’s Globe and Mail, Jeffrey Simpson suggests that Stéphane Dion might lower personal income taxes while financing “green initiatives” through an increase in the GST.  The Liberal Party I supported for fifteen years showed only a willingness to hold as much of my money as possible in order to sustain bloated social programs they used to buy votes.

   

If it is all the same to Mr. Simpson, I will accept the status quo in Ottawa, agitate for lower taxes wherever I can get them, and spend my own money making responsible choices: from efficient vehicles and appliances to solar and wind devices that will help me partner with the utility companies whose future depends on innovation.  While Mr. Dion and his colleagues still hope to trade trendy environmental slogans for power, I believe that individual Canadians will demand less meddling from the politicians whose cynical policies have, again and again, yielded only crises of sustainability.

   

Government is insufficiently nimble.  The current cost of a loaf of bread demonstrates how politicians will throw available resources at whatever sounds good to the electorate, no matter how short-sighted it might be.  There is nothing efficient about ethanol.  All governments have done by creating an artificial crop demand is develop a new source of energy for our unsustainable transportation infrastructure.  Mr. Simpson writes about initiatives like high-speed rail, but does he really think that if politicians refuse to reverse themselves on nascent farm fuels policy, they will be willing to reverse themselves on an older commitment to cars and asphalt?

Bigots In Saskatchewan

It would stand to reason that there is bigotry in the province of Saskatchewan; bigots dwell in every constituency in this country, no matter how you divide our land.  Are there more bigots here or there or someplace else, as popular wisdom sometimes questions?  There is no reason to believe so.

   

Not being personally acquainted with the man, I was not surprised to hear that Tom Lukiwski professed homophobic opinions in 1991.  There are people voicing them all over the country right now, even as you read my words.  I was relieved to hear Mr. Lukiwski, now a Conservative Member of Parliament representing the good people of Regina, tell everyone that he no longer feels now as he felt then.  This should reassure his constituents.  But the sad fact is that his words have not, at least not according to those individuals quoted on CBC Radio the other night.  A “representative sample” of citizens from the Saskatchewan capital seemed to think that Mr. Lukiwski’s claim that “homosexual faggots… transmit diseases” represented for him a “core belief” that could not be changed.  As much as anything Mr. Lukiwski said, this opinion represents for me the very worst kind of bigotry.  It is as if these people do not believe that people can learn.  Why is it then that we fund education, the enterprise to which I have devoted my life?  It is as if these people do not believe that people can have, literally, a change of heart.  Think about that phrase for a moment: change of heart.  What could better represent an altered core belief?  Is this not what religion, for example, is all about?

   

These sorts of scandals are what define contemporary politics.  One can only imagine the glee with which Mr. Lukiwski’s opponents came into possession of incriminating material, material brought to light in this most serious game of “gotcha!”  I cannot object.  I believe that we all thought stupid things in our youth; some of us think stupid things now.  And if you are stupid enough to say something stupid into a camera, you have to be responsible for those words.  Just wait until the “Facebook” and “You Tube” generation comes of age: those folks will have lots for which to answer.  But having watched people answer for their youth, we must show the grace to believe them and to forgive.

   

Opponents of Conservative politicians like to talk about the beliefs that lurk beneath the surface of individuals who, it is claimed, behave in a moderate manner only because circumstances force them to do so.  I think that the charge that one’s soul does not match one’s actions is something that could be leveled against individuals of any political stripe.  But, at the end of the day, we are defined by what we do at least as much as by what we might sometimes feel.  When something like Mr. Lukiwski’s stupid, youthful statement forces him to affirm his true, current feelings for all to hear, one’s inside and outside are forced to reconcile, and these are the people most deserving of our trust.  It might be ironic to some, but I’d throw in my lot with Mr. Lukiwski before I would with someone who finds it impossible to believe that he could be a better man now than he was in 1991.

Initiative Not Necessary

My hazy memories of the job applications I completed and the interviews I had during my early years in the workforce suggest to me that employers used to value initiative.  Okay, it might be most important to be sure that the teenager you are leaving in charge of your storefront is unlikely to pocket everything in the till, but making sure that employees can problem-solve is important, too, right?

   

Virtually every interaction I have with a business now results in a confrontation with someone who cannot help me, someone who hides behind policy without thinking, or someone who refers me to someone else.  Having been stranded in Ottawa during a storm, recently, I awoke in the middle of the night to discover during some nocturnal surfing that my Air Canada flight had been cancelled.  I was on hold for more than four hours on the telephone only to find that although I had already checked in, I had not been rebooked on another flight.  The folks hosting our meeting were able to get me a seat on a WestJet flight to Calgary, and I soon found myself in a short line at the airport.  Again, I checked in early.  But there was no agent assigned to handle our line, and so it might well have been as long as the unfortunate collection of people waiting to be rebooked.  Not one of the agents handling those lines seemed to notice that our line was being neglected, even though it took less than two minutes to clear each of us looking to drop off a bag.  Eventually, I landed in Calgary, but WestJet does not fly to Lethbridge.  I wanted to use the last leg of my original booking to get me home on Air Canada, but it was seemingly impossible for the ticket agents to make this happen.  I was given a card with a 1-800 number and an email address and sent on my way to catch a cab to overnight in Motel Village.

 

Do we not expect employees to be able to step forward to represent the interests of their employers?  Are employees expected to do more than the automated systems that so often greet customers?  I would say that the ability to problem-solve and, in fact, take initiative is quickly becoming a lost art.