The Robertson Family fantasy
March 29, 2013
Speaking of political humour, the Robertson Family is sweeping the TV world with their Louisiana reality show Duck Dynasty. Just occurred to me: I have yet to see a black face in any episode, even when there are crowd scenes. Here I thought everybody was getting hooked on the simple virtue of a Baptist minister’s extended family. Now I’m beginning to suspect it’s this fantasy white world where there’s a 12 gauge solution for any beavers and snakes which get in their way.
On the other hand a quick look online showed that some white supremacists are furious over the presence on the show of Willie and Korie Robertson’s adopted South American son, whom they describe as black. What??
Anyway, there are lots of websites detailing the family of Willie and Korie Robertson. Initially childless, they adopted Lil Will at birth. Then twins John Luke and Sadie came along. Teen-aged Rebecca stayed on after living with the Robertsons during an exchange from Taiwan. Then there’s the youngest girl, Bella.
So maybe the show’s success is because it’s been co-opted by viewers who project their own prejudices upon it, but it doesn’t look as though that’s the Robertsons’ doing.
The fantasy which pervades the episodes remains that of a large, loving family, joined at the table each evening for a meal while Phil says grace. Not bad T.V., actually.
UPDATE, 27 February, 2014
On a hunch I bought Phil Robertson’s autobiography “Happy, Happy, Happy” and read the first two chapters to my 87-year-old mother. She was hooked by Phil’s homespun tales, and read through the rest of the book quickly, with evident enjoyment. That’s the first secular book I’ve ever seen my mother read.
Sap run, finally, I hope.
March 25, 2013
40 litres of partially-boiled sap had sat for two weeks since the last run, and the grad students in the Queen’s Biology Department were eager to visit the bush Saturday as part of their celebration of Roz’s completion of her Phd. Trouble was, a wicked north wind chilled the woods so that only the buckets on the south side of sheltered trees would actually run.
So I lugged the two, 25 litre covered pails from the shop to the shack, then heaved them up onto the counter. Which promptly collapsed under the weight. Oops. One pail punctured. Poured the sap into the pan. No real harm done. Turns out lag bolts, however sturdy they may look from the outside, must be longer than 1″ if they are to hold 1/4″ steel angle irons to pine 2X4’s. Four longer screws solved the problem and the large oak boards, freshly planed for the occasion, became a bottling counter once again.
With a limited quantity of fluid in the pan I had to time the finishing boil quite carefully, or I’d run dry and face the ignominy of adding tap water to my hard-earned maple syrup. But the fire added cheer to the sugar shack, and soon everyone was gathered round, quaffing mugs of Canada tea and shooting portraits of each other through the steam. Visitors make Canada tea by sneaking over to the tap on the pan for a bit of vigorously boiling sap drained over a tea bag. The sugar content of the sap was a little high today — Roz renamed it “diabetea” — so Charlie dusted off a chrome kettle from behind the stove in the shop and boiled some water to dilute the sugar. This worked.
An expedition to the bush produced much activity and many pictures, but only a little sap. Nonetheless, we had a good afternoon and the crew headed off to Elbow Lake for a dinner party. The pan survived to boil another day.
Sunday’s run was again hampered by the north wind, though it looks as though things will get serious today and through the rest of this week. Now, if I could only find my BRIX meter to test the sugar content of the syrup….
Photographer Robert Ewart was along:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/rewart/sets/72157633074672159/
Ice out records 1945 to 2012: Little Rideau Lake
March 22, 2013
The record is kept by Lucille Mulville, the matriarch of the family farm at the head of the lake in Westport. It appeared in the March 21, 2013 issue of The Review-Mirror. It’s just too valuable not to distribute online, so here goes.
Rod
Update, 5 April, 2019: The following ice-out dates are for Newboro Lake.
2013 April 16; 2014 April 26; 2015 April 19; 2016 March 31; 2017 April 10
Best wishes,
Rod Croskery
Standardized tests are the enemy of learning.
March 19, 2013
Over my teaching career I drafted and marked writing tests at the Ministry level and administered a stream of reading and writing tests in schools. Large-scale standardized tests are a useful tool for realtors and the tests sort the cohort somewhat for universities and colleges, but they are the enemy of learning for students.
As a lark I used to train my senior English students to deal with badly-written multiple-choice tests. Instead of a lecture on a play or novel I would assign them a multiple-choice test I had prepared, mark it on the spot, and then over the course of a class or two invite the students to try to persuade me that individual questions on this grossly imperfect test should be thrown out on some grounds, thereby reducing the bottom number while allowing their gross marks to stand. Thus an 18/30 might become an 18/24, or even 20, if the class had clever and alert members. This technique worked on a couple of levels: kids learned to work as a team to a common purpose, they had a license to challenge the teacher’s authority in this area, they could pave over a weak mark with effort, and they quickly learned how to trace the thought processes behind individual questions on a multiple-choice test. I believed then and now that multiple-choice tests are a great teaching tool. They’re just a lousy way to assign marks. I refused to count an individual multiple-choice test for more than 1% of a course.
My students treasured these testing sessions. They frequently reported back from university that those “arguments in your class” had given them a leg up on those who had not had the practice. Turns out my test questions were no worse than many they encountered in their programs next year. When it came down to it the lessons about multiple-choice were pretty simple: treat the test as a game and listen for the marker’s voice.
But in the English department the real value we were able to add was in the writing skills our students developed while at our school. As a department we read and re-read every word the kids wrote. They wrote multiple drafts, outlines, and polished essays. We stayed with the students at all stages of the writing process because that was what worked. We could watch their growth. We assumed as early as 1984 that any meaningful writing in these kids’ lives would be on keyboards, so I converted a series of classrooms to computer labs and as a department we embraced the computer as the central writing tool, even for examinations.
We still look back to assignments such as Define truth. as the ones which taught them how to think, and thus how to adapt. The open-ended task was the valuable one.
In your turn in a one minute seminar to the class tomorrow, account for Hamlet’s reaction to Ophelia in Act III, scene i. Take care to ensure that your explanation is unlike that of any classmate who has spoken before you in the circle, but please do not resort to a tale of alien abduction.
Understandably no one came late, and for the record, thirty plausible interpretations for Get thee to a nunnery, Go! are quite possible from a bright class. Kids love the challenge of coming up with magnificent wrong answers.
Large-scale standardized tests measure only convergent thinking performance. With nothing but standardized tests we’d still be in grass huts. Convergent thinkers don’t invent.
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Afterword: At dinner recently our companion told me of the problem her elderly father faced in preparing for his first written driver’s test at the age of 80. Coming to Canada with a grade 2 education as a young man, he had never learned to read in English. She struggled in attempts to prepare him for the questions, then despaired. He stubbornly went ahead and wrote the thing, and to her enormous surprise, passed.
She asked him how he did it.
“I picked the longest answer to each question.”
Again, standardized tests are great for realtors. Suburban house prices rise and fall on the strength of provincial school ratings based upon math and reading tests, but any learning students actually do is generally in spite of the test, not because of it.
Polaris Ranger shootout: 2WD vs 4WD in snow
March 10, 2013
Yesterday Tony brought his 2003 Ranger 500 to the farm and drove it around the trails in the woods I had established with my Massey Ferguson 35 and winch for hauling out logs. The wide body on full-sized Rangers may be a pain to fit onto a trailer, but the wheels fit nicely into a tractor track through deep snow. In anticipation of sugar making activities I had dragged the blade on the winch through the trails where the snow was very deep to provide ground clearance for the Rangers. Tony’s new to offroad driving so he wasn’t as impressed as I was by the 500’s ability to navigate sections that had stuck my 2004 2WD Ranger TM during the previous week.
Then we used the 500 to do something none of my toys could handle: move sugar-making equipment from the basement of the stone house up to the sugar shack. The 500 could move around in/on corn snow that had left the TM royally stuck. Just for the record, a standard 3/8″ dock line of the sort I use in summer is not strong enough to tow a Ranger when it won’t go any more on its own power. I stretched one past its breaking point twice with my Bolens 4WD tractor, then went with a prefab towing line out of yellow nylon which worked fine.
The first thing I tried with Tony’s Ranger was a slide down the hill. Why not? At full throttle off the top of the hill by the brick house we planed 600 feet down the slope until I could pick up a tractor trail back to the barn. Tony was a bit wide-eyed during the descent, but the machine worked fine in the granular snow.
After loading the gear in the deep corn around the south side of the house the 500 couldn’t back up the slope to get to the driveway, so I just booted it back down the hill and picked up the previous track across the field and up by the barn. It was an exhilarating ride for two guys, a dog, and a precious and fragile bit of kit, the boiling pan.
Eight 16 litre pails of water made another trip. Well, nine, but one didn’t have a lid, so Tony only filled it 2/3 full. Away we went. It was still more than half-full when we got to the shack. We didn’t get wet because of the rear windshield/stern cover. Pretty good ride with a partial load. Interestingly, with the extra 300 lb in the bed the 500 didn’t plane over the corn snow. The back wheels had to dig their way through. The 30 hp engine seems well suited to the chassis in tough going. I remained in high range throughout these adventures, of course, with the throttle pegged to the floorboards.
This week I plan to keep the 500 in the shed as a tow-truck and gather sap with the TM as long as it will do the job. If previous experience is any indicator, it will get through the syrup season just fine, floating over soggy turf which would bury heavier vehicles — even my little compact tractor, while carrying 14 pails of sap or up to nine volunteers per trip.
The TM is only 90% as capable as the 500, but its drivetrain is so simple I think it’s a better choice for multiple, inexperienced drivers.
Time to hang a few buckets
March 8, 2013
All winter I have numbed my mind with one downloaded TV series after another, waiting for the day that winter ends, that day when the first spile thunks into the first maple, and the gentle tap-tap-tap grows in the bucket.
Yesterday everything got stuck in the snow. It just wasn’t time yet. Today started even worse with the Ranger stuck on the lawn in front of the shop, but then as the sun reached its peak, it was time. I loaded up and drove back to the woodlot over streetcar ruts cast in the snow by repeated passages of the Massey Ferguson.
The sun angled down onto the bark of the maples. All I had to do was find the warm part of the tree, drill a hole, and out would drip the sap.
And so it did, thirty separate times that afternoon and twenty more the following morning. I tasted the first drops from each tap. Only two were sweet. The others tasted like bottled water.
Sap gradually becomes richer in sugar as the season wears on. The early stuff’s often only about 1% sugar. Later sap in our bush runs about 4%.
But like my grandfathers and their grandfathers before them, regardless of the paltry reward in sucrose, I felt in my bones it was time to hang some buckets and start to live again. That’s what sugar making is for.
The Next One: we can all hope*
March 6, 2013
William Watson ran a column in the Ottawa Citizen this morning on Tom Flanagan and George Orwell. He rattled eruditely along on the various Nineteen Eighty-four aspects of Flanagan’s self destruction until he ran out of space. Watson is a smart man and a good writer, so why is he wasting everyone’s time on such a puerile topic?
The thing I like the least about the Harper era is how rational thought in Canada has degenerated to an interminable discussion of a novel which appears on most grade 11 English courses. Without doubt Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four is a fine read, but Harper’s crew seem content to have mastered the propaganda lessons of an out-of-date dystopian novel, rather like the way Stormin’ Norman Schwarzkopf congratulated himself on successfully re-fighting World War II in the first Persian Gulf war.
When other challenges present themselves, an economic downturn, for example, the Harper machine leaped into action with stimulus spending targetted at propaganda gains. The signs came first.
A foreign adventure in Libya seemed designed to glorify our air force prior to more F-35 posturing which ended up owing no more to fact than did the exploits of Winston Smith’s fictitious Comrade Ogilvie.
I hope we’ll need to look to a more sophisticated book to explain The Next One.
*Sorry about the format of this rant. I’ve tried to repair it all day, and it keeps falling apart in memory. Six times at least I have put clever touches into the piece, only to have it revert to the original draft. And of course I can’t underline a title without catastrophe in this buggy program.
Sophie vs Baba
February 27, 2013
As a teacher I long ago learned that one of the best measures of a person is his or her immediate family.
As I grew to know their kids I usually had a pretty good idea of what to expect on parents’ nights. Given access to an empty classroom a surprising number of parents will gravitate towards the seat their kid normally occupies.
When one of my students particularly impressed me I automatically projected this respect upon his or her parents as well, as this kid was at least partially their creation.
Much of what we know about a political leader comes from the foils: staff and family members who show how they feel about their leader. Would we have admired Josiah Bartlet for seven years without his West Wing crew and family? Where would Barrack Obama be without the three beautiful women who share his stage? Justin Trudeau may be an enigma to many of his opponents who can’t see the substance in the man, but look at the woman who chose to marry him.
Sophie Gregoire is an impressive and loveable T.V. presence. When Justin trounced Senator Patrick Brazeau last spring, Sophie barged into the ring and none-too-gently embraced her man. I predicted in a column that the photograph showing the kiss marked the first step on a path which would lead the couple to 24 Sussex Drive.
But upon reflection I think the path goes back further to where the newlyweds joined their host for a zip-line adventure on The Mercer Report. The musical sound of her laughter stayed in my head. I remember thinking: “If Justin Trudeau can nab a great wife like Sophie Gregoire, he must be far more than a pretty face.”
In the 2015 election campaign Stephen Harper must expect to face the Justin-Sophie team and he will be hard put to compete with their sex appeal and warmth.
By the same standard I must raise my opinion of Liberal leadership contender Joyce Murray. Cued by a local newspaper article on National Newswatch this morning, I tracked down Baba Brinkman, a rapper who has made a video in a B.C. classroom in support of his mother’s campaign. That video is waaay better than it should be.
As his day job Brinkman raps about Darwin and Chaucer to theatre audiences. Rolling Stone has written about him. Graduate students love him. I watched his talk on TED to a group of teenagers, and he was very, very good. He has turned a Master’s degree in medieval literature into a successful career in hip hop. The Darwin Society organizers hired him as entertainment, but first had his lyrics peer-reviewed for scientific accuracy. In his videos Brinkman’s intelligence and wit shine through a basic decency which I can respect. He likes and admires his mother, so Joyce Murray’s stock goes up.
Of course Murray’s the proponent of co-operation with the Green Party and the NDP to get rid of Harper and bring in proportional representation. A financial article rates her the richest of the Liberal candidates from wealth earned through the family tree planting business. If Joyce planted trees to fund her university education she is one tough, determined lady.
Baba Brinkman’s momma’s-boy rap has elevated dark horse Joyce Murray into second place on my list.
Taffy
February 16, 2013
The trouble with a field-bred English Springer Spaniel is that he or she is unlikely to take a great photo every time the way a bench-bred Springer will. Our new canine overlord just had her ninth birthday. She has adeptly switched from an austere life in a kennel with twenty-four other dogs to a pampered existence with doting humans to wait on her nose and foot. But to a camera Taffy still looks funny.
So this afternoon I decided to try a short video to get a better look at the dog. I think it works as a portrait of a pretty neat little girl.
the Walnut Diary 