Yeah, I know, I haven't posted in ages. It's been a heck of a couple of weeks between one last choir concert of the season, all hell breaking loose with my Grandmother, and then of course the G8/G20! I only made it out to a little bit of one of the protests, because I've been struggling to find a balance between political convictions and cultural ( Read more... )

Well. As I said earlier, this movie is so good and so relevant that I think it ought to be mandatory. As in, I think it ought to be mandatory viewing in all North American history classes while they study the "settlement" period of Canadian and U.S. history. Heck, it should probably be part of all studies and discussions of contemporary ( Read more... )

Right. So my Mother applied to the doctoral program in my department, Humanities, and quite reasonably expected to be accepted. She is nearly a straight A student. Her *lowest* mark at York is a B+, and the rest are all As and A+s. And her marks from her prior graduate and higher undergraduate work at U. of T. are all As and A+s. Her masters ( Read more... )

Well the NDP, all deities bless them, were able to hold up the passing of that bill to force us back to work! It still hasn’t been passed into law yet! Unfortunately though, they’ve held it off as long as they can and it’s due to be passed tomorrow morning (Thursday January 29th). Needless to say there’s going to be a rally at the legislature to ( Read more... )

Well, as you might have been expecting (although I admit I was hoping for a miracle), the university rejected our offer. They said, basically, that they could not accept any of our proposals, even though we’d streamlined our demands down to sixteen key points and lowered some of them significantly (although we’re still holding firm on the key ( Read more... )

(Also written at Strike Headquarters on my note-taker a few hours later, also being posted retroactively ( Read more... )

(written on Friday at Strike Headquarters on my note-taker and being poasted retroactively ( Read more... )

I’ve been meaning to post this since last week as a follow-up to my post on what’s wrong with our mainstream conceptualization of work, but things have been really crazy lately! The university has called for a forced ratification vote (thanks to an anti-labour legislation brought in by our erstwhile Premier Mike Harris), which means that they’ve ( Read more... )

These thoughts were partly further inspired by that book, Rich Dad Poor Dad, that I talked about a couple of posts ago. But they’ve also come from thinking about the strike in which I’m currently engaged, and about why the work of our TAs and contract faculty is so badly undervalued by our government and the university executive, and even by the ( Read more... )

I've been thinking about this a lot because of the strike ( Read more... )