For the planet, well at least Ottawa

Green.

That's usually the term used for any effort to reverse the erratic uncontrollable planet trashing set forth in the last century. I love it. It's so easy to do, and often you save yourself trouble and money. Just a bit of education on the subject and jumping on board is easy.

Our school board here in Ottawa has professed itself "Green" but has trouble delivering it in, you guessed it, the underprivileged non suburb school; my school. A great Teacher has taken it upon herself to get us all involved and I applaud her efforts. In a week, we planted a new tree, recycled FOR THE FIRST TIME plastic bags and /encouraged the use of mugs. Yeah, mugs. The ones we clean and use again. All we had to do was bring it, and you beverage of choice was 75% off. Stroke of genius. Now we're on our way to recycling plastic bottles, which isn't par in our "green" school board, along with the plastic bags. Our main impediment: It's not in the janitor's collective bargaining agreement. Obviously doesn't matter since I'm sure this bird will figure its way out of its new raincoat.

In Ottawa, I remember this summer that I carried my now empty plastic bottle around the market for over an hour, looking for a place to recycle it. Shockingly, the food court of the Rideau Centre, a main shopping attraction for tourists, had nowhere to recycle bottles. Figures. In the garbage were mounds of bottles and cans waiting to go to the dump to rest for a million years or so.

It's gonna be a long road, my career just started, but here goes educating my students on the environment. By the way, we should call it not "the environment" when it's clearly "our environment" since we live in it.

To Our environment then.

Living la vida loca

Nothing to do with Ricky Martin, pop culture attracts attention


Recently I have discovered that trying to do everything at once only pays off for so long. Eventually, we (or I) succumb to our brain's maximum capacity of 8 short term tasks; though my girlfriend claims to have much more capability in the field. Nevertheless, let's take it easy.

Teaching does ask me to multitask, and so do obviously many other fields and that’s ok for keeping me on an edge. However this year I have chosen to take upon myself additional tasks which are absolutely flooding the schedule. This post isn't about that exclusively in my world, but in that of my students.

Once, it seems, you came home from school and played street hockey or played some other game outside until dinner. Later, you were forced to interact with your parents, brothers, sisters or friends. That's what kept us relatively human. Now, as I get to observe, we, the younger generation, spend more time interacting with a piece of plastic with electricity running through it than anything else. Yet, vending machines with their evil Coke and Chips are to blame for the giant tsunami of fat people ready to take over North America. Hold on a minute and get something right. If you're a parent, and your kid doesn't play outside REGULARLY, there is a problem. Of course, I mean those in capacity physically to do so. Enough rant, let's see the positive.

It's a hard choice to make, letting go, but it's one worth considering. Many initiatives have been put forth by the powers that be to get us active all over again. All I think is necessary to do, is to simplify the whole process. Start young, take the kid away from the Disney movie and give him, or her, a simple set of blocks. I know I kept myself busy for hours with them and it made my imagination grow while teaching me important lessons in gravity; it always wins. Simple things like that work their way outside and the process fixes itself. That way, your kid can eat chips or drink unhealthy pop because he's burning three times that amount of calories in one game of hide and seek. I am not a parent, nor pretend to be. But I have been a kid. And my fondest memories of my childhood have nothing to do with the amount of goals I was able to score in NHL95. All of us were kids once, let's return the favor.

Back to multitasking. On top of not going outside, we as a community in general tend to pile ourselves on with tasks. Society doesn't ask this of us, because, well we are society and we don't want it. This is something we do to ourselves and our kids. School plus hockey plus soccer plus competitions plus homework was always possible. But it was never possible with iPod, TV, Internet, texts, YouTube, streams, games. Since energy consumption is the problem that's growing, my first paragraph would settle it all. Not my stroke of genius, just the obvious.

This blog was all over the place, the next should have more structure, I must be rusty.