Photo by Christoph Oberschneider
Evocative Objects of Learning
Acknowledgements This collection of essays on evocative objects of learning was created by BEd students in the Faculty of Education at York University as part of the course, Inquiries into Learning. Students read and responded to essays collected in Sherry Turkle’s edited collection, Evocative Objects: Things We Think With (MIT Press, 2007). These essays were written as part of a course at York University. York University acknowledges its presence on the traditional territory of many Indigenous Nations. The area known as Tkaronto has been care taken by the Anishinabek Nation, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, and the HuronWendat. It is now home to many First Nation, Inuit and Métis communities. We acknowledge the current treaty holders, the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation. This territory is subject of the Dish with One Spoon Wampum Belt Covenant, an agreement to peaceably share and care for the Great Lakes region.
Order of Essays Foreword…………………........................Jen Gilbert Air Jordan…………………............................Elvin Lu Amusement Parks……….................Kyra Woudsma Arthur…………………………………...Anabel Ranga Baseball Diamonds…………………James Falconer Bescherelle……………………………………….…ML Biscuit Pooh………………………………Jeffrey Man Blue Bicycle…………………………Daniel Muromski Books……………………………….....................MAB Braces…………………............................Crystal Lee My Brain……………………………………,Zoe Myles Bus Tickets……………………………Ana Cojocariu Butterfly Diaries……………………Bidemi Keshinro
Caboodle…………………......................Erica Russo Camera………...................................Tiffany Truong Canoe………………………………….....Sam Layard Carina, My Mentor……….…..………Monica Cieslak Chả Giò……………………………..….…Anonymous Chair…………………………..….…..Sinat Mohamed Cookie Tin……………….,.………..…..Laura Colacci Couch……..……..………..……………..Bilal Hussein Criminal Minds…………………............Dante Alaimo Dreamcatcher……………………..…Rachel Di Pede Dress Up Chest………………..……Victoria Tavares Football……………............…..…..…...Sabri Soufian Friendship Bracelets……………..Lilyana Robichaud Game Boy Advance………..................Harpit Samra Gold Pendant Necklace….Natalie Sanchez Zepeda Grandpa’s Sailboat……….…..……..…..James Dyer Guitar....................................................Gregor Hemon Hannah Montana………………….Cassandra Chan Journal…………………………..….….Michael Celotti
Lego……………….,.………....….…….Keegan Durie Musical Teddy Bear……….A'aishah Abdul Hameed Nintendo DS Lite…………………..............Rivka Lee Piano……………………............….…..Julia Romano Puzzles………………..…….......Bassel Abdel-Qader Recipe Book……………............…..…..Caitlin Tiedje Running Shoes……………...............….Monica Bilici Scrapbook………........................Michelle Blanchard My Skates……...............................Michael Molinaro Steel Toe Boots……….…..……Jeevan Singh Lattar 1988 Suzuki RM80.........................Paul Pasquariello My 1st Thesaurus…………….….....Jennifer Pritsker
VW Scirocco………………………….Mark Branciere Xbox 360………………. .………....…....James Elder Yellow Bike……………..….....…....…Ashley Rooney
Forward When I planned the curriculum for this course, I was tired. A long year of COVID teaching had drained me. I didn’t want to spend another year staring at black boxes on Zoom. And, I was pretty sure those black boxes weren’t excited about the prospect of online classes either. But what can you do? We are living through a pandemic. So, I took a risk. I let myself reimagine one of the courses I was teaching. The last time I taught Inquiries into Learning, I tried assigning only novels. That didn’t go so well. This time, I focused on the assignments. I brought to the students a collection of essays I had previously worked with in a doctoral seminar. Evocative Objects: Things we Think With, edited by Sherry Turkle, brings together writing by scholars, scientists, and students who all reflect on childhood objects that shaped how they think about themselves and the world. In class, we responded to Turkle’s provocation. What objects were our company as children? What did those objects teach us? How have those lessons stayed with us, long after the objects have gone? We free-wrote together. We posted pictures on our course management site. We responded to each other’s writing. And then, after a few weeks, we composed our own essays using Turkle’s collection as a model. Those essays are collected here. Loss, joy, betrayal, ambition, love, fear, intimacy, suffering. The essays archive the complicated pasts novice teachers bring with them into the classroom. Those black boxes have become more than just names now– the assignment has taught me (again) that the best teaching happens because of what students bring into the room. Thanks to all of the authors here for sharing glimpses of those complicated pasts with us. Jen Gilbert December 2021
Elvin Lu Pugh (2009) writes about consumerism and its impact on children: Everywhere children claim, contest, and exchange among themselves the terms of their social belonging, or just what it would take to be able to participate among their peers. I came to call this system of social meanings the “economy of dignity.” (p. 6) My name is Elvin Lu, and my object is my first pair of Jordan brand sneakers, the Air Jordan XXI.
I still remember sniffing the shoes for the first time and being impressed by the smell of the leather like it was yesterday. I remember pressing my thumb into the insole, feeling a certain springiness that I found impressive, and telling my dad that these were the pair I wanted. I also remember the steep price for a pair of kid-sized shoes, one hundred seventy-five dollars. However, my dad’s friend worked at the shoe store, and we got the shoes for half price. They were the Air Jordan XXI, the latest in a series of collectable basketball sneakers designed with the greatest basketball player ever in mind. They were my first pair of Air Jordans, and my last. When I laced them up for the first time and went to school, I immediately felt the stiffness of the thick leather and the inevitable creasing of the toe box. When I walked onto the schoolyard that day in grade six, I felt like the coolest kid on the playground. My friends made
Elvin Lu sure to compliment them, and promptly ask about the price. One friend wore white Phat Farm shoes, and the other wore AND1’s. Both were some of the most popular sneakers among kids into hip hop music and basketball at that time in history. Yet, my Jordans were the freshest and most expensive of them all, and I felt great about that, until my shoes were scuffed for first time that day. That was the first lesson that those shoes taught me. Nobody else will appreciate and care about your own possessions as much as you do. Well maybe your parents would because they paid for the object with their hard-earned money. I recall being so angry that I punched the boy who accidentally stepped on my shoes, and felt no remorse when he let out a cry of pain and demanded an explanation for my sudden violence. At that point, the Jordans the only pair of sneakers that I wore, so I should not have been surprised that they became dirty and worn so quickly. I played basketball everyday at recess, afterschool, and at basketball practice in those shoes. I remember being upset when my shoes could no longer grip the gym floor properly and the leather was torn from hours of use. Not surprisingly, I desired another pair of new and expensive shoes, which was a wish not granted by my father. At the time, I was disappointed that I would not be receiving the latest and greatest shoe, but in hindsight, it was for the best. If my dad granted my request, a cycle of buying the newest expensive object, using it in excess, then wanting the next new expensive object would begin. Today, lessons that stemmed from that first and last pair of Jordans are firmly implemented into my values and beliefs about how I should live my life. First, while shoes can be a fashion statement and an essential component of an outfit, they are also intended to protect our feet from the rough and dirty outside terrain. Therefore, sullying of shoes should not cause outrage, but should be accepted as a fact of life. If one would like to keep certain shoes in decent condition for a longer period of time, they should simply wear them less frequently, and check the weather report prior to choosing shoes to wear. Next, consumerism in our society causes many people to always covet the new and exciting product. People buy the product, feel excitement about it for a short period of time then the hype dies down and the product ceases to seem special. When this happens, without failure, a new version of the object appears and demands to be purchased. This traps consumers in a never-ending cycle of continuously chasing the feeling of having the newest iteration. With that in mind, I strive to purchase products that are not trendy or driven by hype but are valuable to me because they are made to last and bring me enjoyment that is unrelated to the opinions of others. Finally, an important lesson that I learned because of my relationship with my Jordans affects how I interact with my peers today. The friends that are worth making and keeping are the ones that appreciate you for who you are, and not what you wear or what you look like. Consequently, I wear what makes me feel good and not because others compliment me or desire pieces of my outfit. I never thought a pair of expensive basketball shoes could have such a profound effect on my life, but I am glad that it did, and I am grateful for that.
I am a first-year student in the Bachelor of Education program in the intermediate/senior division. My teachable subjects are Health and Physical Education, and Biology. I have lived in the Greater Toronto Area for my entire life. My hobbies include skiing, trying new foods, and watching shows that can make me laugh and cry in the same episode. I have a dog that is a
Elvin Lu mystery (my brother adopted him from a rescue, so we don’t quite know) terrier mix, named Geordi (Geordi La Forge), and he is near and dear to my heart.
References Pugh, A. (2009). Longing and belonging: parents, children, and consumer culture. Retrieved from https://hdl-handle-net.ezproxy.library.yorku.ca/2027/heb.33868.
“The universe cannot slide into stasis. It must reach a climax and then begin again. The universe is orgasmic, not “happy”, not “tranquil”. Its job is to achieve peaks, not plateaus and flat lines. If you have peaks, you necessarily have troughs. This really is a rollercoaster ride. It’s inevitable. It’s built into reality. Existence is made of sinusoids, the archetypal rollercoasters, permanently cycling between peaks and troughs. If God is the ultimate peak (zero mental entropy), the Big Bang is the ultimate trough (maximum mental entropy). Do you have the courage and fortitude to be a God? Remember, it’s a rollercoaster ride. You must be ready for the troughs. There are as many snakes as ladders. Everyone’s trying to drag you down.” ― Thomas Stark, The Stairway to Consciousness: The Birth of Self-Awareness from Unconscious Archetypes
AMUSEMENT PARK RIDES Kyra Woudsma
Kyra Woudsma
A picturesque day, the sun shines bright, children run through the green grass fields and hot air balloons fill the sky with kaleidoscopic colourful shapes. It’s mid-august, the annual Harris Park rib-festival and hot air balloon festival are in full swing in London Ontario. As a family, we share a platter of ribs, one of our traditions. Barbeque sauce drips from my fingers onto my shirt, I can remember my mom’s laugh as she said “Well, you’ll blend in with today’s perfume ode de festival, the newest scent on the market.” It’s one of those smells that will always transport me back to this day, the smell of kettle corn, funnel cake, BBQ ribs and cotton candy, scents that hang heavy in the air. A girl who looked about 7 years old, the same as me at the time, sat across from our family. She appeared to be quite content laying down and joking with her parents about the objects she could find in the clouds, for me this only held my attention for a few minutes. I was more interested in the older kids who were racing off to The Zipper. Quite confidently, I asked “Dad, do you think we could go on that amusement ride?” To which my dad said, “We can go check it out, but you might not be big enough yet, so I’m not making any promises.” YES, I thought. This is my moment. My dad and I walked to the line of The Zipper. It looked intimidating, each metal, cold cage would host 2-3 people. The cage would flip and spin around on its axle as the entire ride would also turn horizontally and vertically in circles. I wanted to prove to myself that I could handle this, that I was mature, even if my body was small. I wanted my dad especially to recognize me beyond my age. We were ushered into the cage and strapped in. As soon as the ride started, my dad and I both knew this was a bad idea. I could convince myself that I was mature enough for this ride, but my physical body could not convince the metal cage of the same thing. I was too small; the seatbelt was not designed to accommodate someone my size and within moments it was clear that the only thing preventing me from the cage’s abuse were my father’s arms. While fearing for my life, it was clear that my dependency on parental protection was still greater than my need to be autonomous. “STOP THE RIDE, STOP THE RIDE!” My dad was screaming at the top of his lungs, as I banged around like a rag doll in the cage. Sobbing uncontrollably, my father’s cries were received and the panicked operator halted the ride. When the cage door opened, it revealed a slightly bruised and traumatized child in the arms of her father. I had hoped to have stepped out of this cage with a new sense of self and autonomy. Instead I was left fearful and questioning. Had I been fighting against the natural world? Physically I was defying gravity, in a man-made metal tornado. Mentally was I pushing myself too far, too fast? Unconsciously, westernized ideals inform how we engage in the world. We had assumed that everything was safe. A white, middle-class family goes into an amusement park and the potential risks are not considered. My family was operating under a lens of privilege, where the systems in place are meant to support those within it. An operation like the one at Harris Park has government mandates, policies and procedures that are meant to ensure the safety of its participants, how could a ride be unsafe? This continued to evoke feelings of fear in my world. How was I supposed to trust the systems meant to protect me? It took many years before I could look at any ride, without welling up with tears. I felt immense loss and fear. The Zipper had been my first encounter with the thrill of adrenaline and feeling close to death, in a place that was supposed to be safe for exploration and fun. Although, in hindsight the experience was not life and death in a purely physical sense, but mentally, it simulated those feelings and questions. It also promoted feelings of self-doubt. If I wanted to conquer a new challenge would I be able to do this without my dad’s arm waiting to catch me if I fall? As a young curious teenager, I started revisiting the idea of amusement parks and rides when the grade 9/10 band had an upcoming trip to Canada’s Wonderland. I can remember scoffing at the name ‘Wonderland,’ and in teenage fashion, thinking what’s so wonderful about lending yourself over to a death trap? It wasn’t the amusement park itself that pulled me in, it was the peer pressure from friends. “Come on Kyra, it’ll be fun, don’t be a baby, this can’t hurt
Amusement Park Rides
you” one of my friends insisted, as we stood in front of The Fly, a metal coaster, deceptively small, but speedy at 80km an hour. This time, I didn’t have my father’s protection. It was a true test of self; can I conquer this anxiety surrounding defeat and harm from the unknown. I have never screamed so loud in my life then on that first drop. It was glass shattering material. I can remember seeing my friend beside me cover her ears in horror. My scream started from the pit of my stomach out of fear and erupted into laughter shortly after, relief, I can do this. This moment transformed my self-image and propelled my maturity as a young person. The amusement ride flipped its narrative and proved to me that I can be the autonomous being my 7-year-old self had dreamed of. That I can push myself to survive through teenage pressures of conformity and inclusivity, while maintaining who I am.
Kyra Woudsma is a teacher candidate at the University of York, Toronto Canada. She completed her undergraduate degree in Waterloo Ontario, in Social Development Studies and Fine Art. She is an aspiring young artist and plans to share her passions with future students and with the community she resides in.
Kyra Woudsma
References Images sourced from stock site - https://unsplash.com/ Stark, D. T. (2019). The Stairway to Consciousness: The Birth of Self Awareness from Unconscious Archetypes. United Kingdom: Lulu.com.
Amusement Park Rides
ARTHUR Anabel Ranga
From a very young age, I can recall watching Arthur every day at exactly 4 o’clock on TVO Kids. My sister and I would come home, grab a snack and sit down to once again become wrapped up in an adventure with Arthur and his friends. To say I grew up on this show is an understatement. Arthur felt like a part of me. As soon as I flipped on the show, I’d be welcomed with the sound of rebounds on a drum signalling the beginning of the theme song. Following this would be a cheery, upbeat song reminding me to believe in myself. Along with this were visuals so bright and vivacious. There would be animals acting like humans, wearing clothes and having conversations. Although the show was a cartoon, nothing could be more real to me. I cannot exactly pinpoint the moment I knew Arthur played such an important role in my life. It just felt like it was always there from the beginning. As stated earlier, I watched the show from a young age and continued to do so religiously throughout most of my elementary school life. One of the main reasons why Arthur was so significant to me was because it helped me to grow up and transition from an immature child, who always depended on her parents, to a more grown-up, independent individual. Watching Arthur and his group of friends (Buster, Francine, “the Brain,” Muffy and Binky) navigate through life and everyday challenges helped me learn how to deal with those myself. Arthur showed me that there was a huge world outside and I had to learn how to handle it. Not only was Arthur a transitional object for me, but it held a special place as it connected me to my parents and sister. There were not many shows that I can remember my parents and I watching together when I was younger. However, I have vivid memories of watching Arthur with my parents and them specifically requesting for my sister or I to put on an episode. Even as I got older and would not watch it with my parents (as they were busy with work) I still felt a connection to them, as I knew that they also loved the show. On another note, the show connected me with my sister in the sense that I sometimes felt like the relationship with Arthur and D.W. (his little sister) was exactly that of my sister and I. The fact that my sister would often call me D.W. definitely added to that, but I could also see our relationship reflected in the show. Therefore, I felt a connection between watching Arthur and being close to my family. I believe that it is because the show kept me company during my formative years that it made me feel very safe and understood. Being able to relate to the characters on such a close level and have similar struggles to them made me feel that I was not alone in this journey called life. One day, I particularly remember feeling angry about something that had happened earlier in the day. I was trying my best to hold my feelings inside, but I felt like I was going to explode. That same day I watched an episode of Arthur in which Francine faces numerous obstacles and holds her anger in each time. Finally, she allows herself to let her anger out and feels much better at the end. Watching the episode made me feel so much better about myself because I was able to relate to Francine. I was genuinely happy to know that this feeling I was experiencing was normal and that I had to talk to someone to let go of the anger, rather than holding it in. Looking back, Arthur was a simple show, yet it had such a power to make me feel like I was going to be alright and would make it through life no matter what. The show allowed me to be hopeful and to not be discouraged when life became difficult. In essence, the show allowed me to become a confident, mature person. It allowed me to see that I am actually much stronger than I think. Through watching each episode, which had a moral as well as educational aspects, I was able to think for myself by using these characters and their situations as a reference. Ultimately, the lesson I learned from watching Arthur for all those years was that growing up is not going to be easy, but I’ll get through it. As funny as it may sound, to this day I continue to reference episodes from Arthur and how he handled it. This only goes to show how this object has and continues to evoke feelings of safety and understanding in me.
I recently found out that the first episode of Arthur aired in 1996. Coincidentally, my older sister was also born in 1996, which makes me think that this show was, in essence, created for us right when we needed it. How amazing is that? Anabel Ranga is a recent graduate from the Schulich School of Business where she earned her Bachelor in Business Administration, specializing in Finance and Operations Management and Information Systems. She is now an aspiring high school teacher and is in her first year of the Bachelor of Education program at York University. Anabel hopes to work in the Toronto District School Board, teaching business and mathematics. She believes that learning should be a fun and interactive experience and aims to cultivate that environment in her classroom. In her spare time, Anabel enjoys playing the drums and guitar, as well as watching movies.
“They keep coming up new all the time - things to perplex you, you know. You settle one question and there's another right after. There are so many things to be thought over and decided when you're beginning to grow up. It keeps me busy all the time thinking them over and deciding what's right. It's a serious thing to grow up, isn't it, Marilla?” ― Lucy Maud Montgomery, “Anne of Green Gables”
“The only church that truly feeds the soul, day in and day out, is the church of baseball.” -
Annie Savoy, Bull Durham
BASEBALL DIAMONDS James Falconer
THUNK The ball sliced into the right-field gap and bounced twice before skittering off the wall. I rounded first hard but eased into second as I saw the third-base coach holding up both arms. It was a stand-up double. I felt a pulse of satisfaction in my chest. Baseball was a monumental part of my childhood. I was enraptured by both the beauty and the grit of the game, possessed by quotidian dreams of glory. A baseball diamond is a portrait of refined beauty, with its closely cropped emerald turf and clean chalk lines, shimmering in the mist of sprinklers through the dry summer heat. So many memories eddy and swirl of those boundless days around the park, years spent watching my brothers play before stepping out into the field myself. These recollections belong to the vastness of childhood, not a different time but a wild and open world, utterly distinct from the clearly defined demarcations of adult responsibility in which I now reside. I welcome this shift, the strength to care for others, but I know it comes at a price, the heedless freedom of youth. More than anything, I loved to hit. I can still feel the heft of that bat in my hands. It wasn’t wooden like the greats used, but aluminum. I remember the grace and power of the swing of that bat as it arced toward a fastball cutting across the outer edge of home plate. I still see some of my old bats from time to time, when I go back to the house where I grew up. They lie in the corner of my mom’s garage, dusty and discarded. No greater exaltation came than when the bat connected with the pitch right on the sweet spot. It leapt with kinetic energy unmatched by anything else I knew. No feeling was as deflating as the whiff of the bat through the pitch, followed by the umpire's signal of strike three. I was out, left to shamefacedly amble back to the dugout where my teammates would
tell me to keep my head up, I’d get ‘em next time. I quickly cheered up as a resounding chant went through the dugout, “WE WANT A PITCHER, NOT A BELLY ITCHER.” The idyllic fun of those early days gradually grew into the drive to compete and excel. Even team competition became secondary to individual achievement as parents, and sometimes players, began to think about American scholarships or the MLB draft. I never loved baseball more than when I was eleven years old, but the peak of my playing came when I was sixteen. Competing at the provincial championships in an 18-under tournament, I hit six home runs and garnered the tournament MVP. I was on track, it seemed. I didn’t quite have the raw talent to make it to the big show, but I could probably get a full ride down south and maybe even get drafted in the lower rounds. Only, I didn’t know if that’s what I wanted anymore. Adolescence was a confusing time for me. I struggled with shyness. I felt a lot of anger at the world, not for myself but for the inequality and injustice I read about in Noam Chomsky and listened to in SoCal punk rock music. A more personal darkness came from watching my older brother’s descent into hard drug addiction. I can remember the petrifying fear of lying in my bedroom as my parents called the paramedics, who stomped up the stairs and bellowed to one another as they slammed another needle in his body, this one to save his life. This happened more times than I care to recall. Amidst all this, my rebellious streak deepened. Baseball felt inane. I started going to games stoned, smoking a cigarette as I strolled in. I skipped practice to hang out with my girlfriend. Most of all, I just had a shitty attitude. I cussed out parents and coaches, refused to talk, and sulked at the end of the bench when I was pulled from the lineup. After one last chance too many, I got kicked off the team. Good riddance, or so I thought. I never played again. For a long time, I had dreams about the game. The ping of the ball off the bat, pounding steps along the basepath, the propulsion and exhilaration. I tried to ignore them. I denied the ache that echoed in the absence within. The longing haunted me though. I was back around my hometown a few years back, waiting for a trolley down to a beachfront festival with my parents and son. We stood just across the street from the old ballpark. It still looked great. I couldn’t believe what I saw. There they were, the ten-year-old all-stars in their teal and black uniforms, fielding grounders and hitting wiffle balls. There should have been nothing surprising in the sight, just another little league team getting ready for a game. But it astounded me, because nothing had changed. That could have been me twenty-five years ago. It felt like many lifetimes. My entire reality had shifted times over, so that my memory of that life was like a phantasm. But here the kids were, still playing ball. Life persists in its effervescent flow. Those times are gone, stacking tiles on the scoreboard in centre field, running the ravine with other kids while my brothers played, driving to tournaments with my dad listening to Neil Young tapes. The baseball diamond may be the closest thing I had to a holy site in my childhood. It awoke in me feelings of reverence and awe, intimating the presence of a transcendent beauty greater than myself. Shoeless Joe Jackson and Willlie Mays were mythical figures of yore. I broke with this venerable tradition in the wrong way, casting a shadow of residual pain. I know this pain was not great in the brutal ways that many have endured. I was very close with a cousin afflicted with muscular dystrophy while growing up. Compared to what he endured, my own loss was extraordinarily ordinary, but it was mine and it was real. It taught me something about the ephemeral nature of life. There is beauty in this ephemerality. One day all those immaculate ballparks that housed the dreams of bright-eyed youths will crack and crumble, until they are reclaimed by the wilderness and chaotic order from whence they
sprung. All memories of lazy Sunday afternoons at the ballpark, chomping sunflower seeds while idly watching a double header, will fade into vague traces of nothingness. But for now, memory lives in me. James Falconer lives in Toronto with his partner, son, baby girl, and big bear of a pup. He jams with creativity outside compartments, transcendence in immanence, and the suffusion of animative love in every energetic aspect of the universe. Also, damn he likes coffee.
The Bescherelle MD
January 6th is a date that holds a special significance for families in Italy and throughout the Italian diaspora. On the eve of this day, folklore holds that La Befana, an old witch, would visit homes and leave gifts in the shoes of children who had been good over the previous year; disobedient children, however, could expect to find lumps of coal. On this day, my sisters and I would wake up to find the typical simple gifts that children our age enjoyed, such as money or small toys, as well as necessary items that did not provide the typical excitement or mental stimulation that children crave, like school supplies or clothes. To be funny, my parents would also leave root vegetables alongside the other gifts (after all, no child is good for the entire year, so my parents thought these would serve as a more appropriate reminder to be good than coal). It was on this day when I was in grade 6, that I received my first Bescherelle, the famous French-language grammar reference book. It was one of the books that focused on verb conjugations, about 300 pages. Its cover was hard, green and laminated, with the word “Bescherelle” featured prominently in big white letters along the side of the book, along with the subtitle, “L’Art de Conjuguer” (the art of conjugating). Unlike other grammar books or dictionaries on our family’s bookshelves, this one was small and seemed non-threatening at first. The pages were smooth, and when flipped through quickly would produce a gentle breeze. This particular copy was also printed in France, which brought a special allure to it. I was a French-immersion student at the time, so this seemed an appropriate tool to accompany me in the journey of French-language learning, with all its confusing, intricate, and counterintuitive language rules. This Bescherelle was a powerful object. Overtime, I found that like most of the academic texts used during my schooling, it could impose its strict and singular way of learning on me. First, there were no images. This version of the Bescherelle was geared toward young students, so one would think it would include creative components to help explain and illustrate the various verb conjugations and grammar rules. The information was conveyed mostly through black or dark blue text, and sometimes with simple diagrams of charts and arrows. The information took up the entire page; according to my father, this was done to discourage doodling or drawing on the pages. To this day, I do not know if he was serious or not. I nevertheless found it to be indicative of the expectations of formal schooling: a heavy emphasis on rules, memorization, and linear thinking. I liken the book to a strict teacher who can effectively help you learn information, but oftentimes at the expense of your enjoyment of the learning process. It was ultimately one of reasons why I associated language learning with strict use of correct grammar and memorization of rules, and not through immersion, experiential learning, or seeing the value of language as a means for self-expression. I thought that if I didn’t prioritize the Bescherelle by memorizing verb conjugations, I was somehow learning French “the wrong way”. It admittedly took me years after I left school to see the error in this way of thinking. My emotional relationship with the Bescherelle was nevertheless quite ambivalent. On the one hand, I resented it for its plainness, strict rules, and lack of imagination. On the other, I recognized its virtues and how helpful it was throughout my time as a French immersion student. I should mention that I was an elementary student before internet-use or smartphones were so ubiquitous. It was also before the times of Google translate, which at that time would produce such poor translations that the
teacher would always know if you had used it. Typically, you had to look up words in dictionaries or refer to actual books for clarity on confusing grammar concepts (yes, times like these existed). I ultimately felt tied to my Bescherelle due to my circumstances. It was a tough and intransigent teacher, but at the same time a refuge and source of reassurance during the difficult times of French immersion. Like most evocative objects significant to one’s learning, there are several lessons that I draw from it. First, items impose themselves on us. It is therefore important to be mindful of the different tools that we use in learning, as these can by their nature be inclusive or exclusionary. Though the Bescherelle was useful for me, I understand that not all students would thrive with this resource. Also, despite how effective it was as an educational tool, I remember how much it stifled my creative capacities. I felt that I had to repress certain elements of my personality in conforming to the dictates of this resource. I believe that grammar is important to learn a language, but it should be used alongside other creative elements. Also, I believe students are in the best position to make sense of different concepts in their own way; I still do not understand why I had to copy out the diagrams in the Bescherelle (which I did not find helpful at all) instead of creating my own. Learning a language can truly be one of the most fulfilling and beautiful experiences one can have. Among other things, it connects us to different worldviews, which oftentimes compels us to examine our own. I consider my passion for the French language to be one of my defining characteristics, and I appreciate the role that the Bescherelle had played in helping build that foundation for me. I have not picked one up in years. I am nevertheless certain that it would elicit the same feelings that I had during my times as a student. Even with separation and the passage of time, the power of the Bescherelle’s pages endures.
The book becomes part of the history of our self-understanding. The stories that mean most to us join the process by which we came to be securely our own. Literacy allows access to a huge force for development. When an adult in a remote village rejoices that ABC is mastered, it isn’t just because bring the world to them; books bring them, in new ways, to themselves. - Francis Spufford, The Child that Books Built: A Life in Reading
M.D. is a student at the Faculty of Education at York University. After completing his undergrad, he worked in various industries including consulting, the non-profit sector, and government. He eventually realized, however, that his true passion lies in education. He is currently pursuing his Bachelor of Education and plans to become a high school French and history teacher. He strongly believes that every student’s identity, goals, and skills should be valued for them to succeed in education. He hopes to impart a true passion for learning among his students that will enable them to find joy and excitement both in and after school.
Works Cited: Spufford, Francis. The Child that Books Built: A Life in Reading. London, Picador, 2003.
“Maybe your country is only a place you make up in your own mind. Something you dream about and sing about. Maybe it's not a place on the map at all, but just a story full of people you meet and places you visit, full of books and films you've been to. I'm not afraid of being homesick and having no language to live in. I don't have to be like anyone else. I'm walking on the wall and nobody can stop me.” – Hugo Hamilton
BISCUIT POOH
Jeffrey Man
My fingers went across his smooth, shiny nose, unaware this moment would be the start of something much bigger than a single encounter.
Biscuit Pooh, named after its peculiar but adorable shape, was a birthday gift from Natalia, a visiting nurse who came (and still comes) twice a week for physiotherapy treatments. I was not a big teddy bear person at the time, preferring to cheer on whichever Toronto sports team was playing least terribly that year. But there was something about Biscuit, something about his texture, easy-going smile, and hands on his head, that made me spend less time hoping for athletic miracles and more time immersing myself in imaginary worlds.
Biscuit was a regular member of a twice-weekly interaction between him, myself, Natalia and the living room sofa. My treatments consisted of me lying down on my side facing the inside of the couch, a few inches away from Biscuit’s understanding smile. I liked talking to him, Natalia liked playing with his ears, and both of us loved having three-way conversations where we could literally put words in someone else’s mouth.
Eventually, Biscuit got some brothers and sisters. A few dozen of them, in fact. Winnie the Pooh became a big part of who I was.
Looking back, I realize Biscuit meant more to me than he previously got credit for. He was more than a stuffed animal; he fulfilled a human need to belong.
We are wired to seek community, to be a part of something bigger than ourselves. From lively (pre-pandemic) late night university parties to intimate family dinners, from membership in social organizations to work for political movements, we are most alive when in the company of our tribes. For me, tribalism is an expression of who we are as a species. Group identity is part of what it means to be human. Acceptance is what we all aspire to achieve.
As with all kids, social acceptance is the most valuable currency. The number of friends we have is prioritized over the quality of those relationships. Growing up, I was not one of the “popular kids”. I did not notice it as much in elementary school as I did in high school. It made sense – when we were younger, hanging out with peers who had an entourage of adults with them was more socially acceptable. I’m not saying this as an indictment of early adult influence, but rather as an observation of how, as we move from childhood to adolescence, we want exclusivity in the privileged world of the teenager.
Biscuit was the perfect solution to this problem. He accepted me for who I was, not that he had much of a choice. That’s the thing about captive audiences – it makes being alone a little bit easier. It makes conversations more “efficient”. It makes controlling personal narratives more expeditious. Biscuit was a big part of the seemingly realistic world I built for myself, one in which kids who were different were the same as those who were not. One in which acceptance by stuffed animals was equivalent to acceptance by human beings. One in which companionship was a reality for all people.
But this was not the whole picture.
Biscuit, by himself, was an incomplete addition to the family – after all, what fun is an imaginary world if there are only two members in it? Biscuit was the start of a Winnie the Pooh collection that continues to expand in size and scope. World building is a lifelong exercise.
I wrote this essay in past tense because I thought that was an accurate representation of Biscuit’s impact on my life. As I am writing now, as I hear my voice dictating text in the same way my able-bodied colleagues hear the clacking of their keyboards, I am actively reconsidering this choice. While Biscuit’s influence has diminished over time, Winnie the Pooh is still a big part of who I am.
Maybe expressing my thoughts as if they were from a past life is a way to block out the impact of past traumas. Even as I am writing these sentences, I am getting more and more distracted by flashbacks from my childhood. Of both happiness and anxiety inducing events. Of the things I wrote about and things I prefer not to express here.
It’s time to acknowledge reality.
It’s time to acknowledge how experiences with exclusion cast long shadows.
It’s time to acknowledge how confronting my past is the best way to move towards living a fulfilled future.
It’s easy to bury the past when there are 37 projects due in the next 37 hours. It’s less easy when one of those assignments requires writing about the very things I want to forget.
While this is meant to be a personal essay, I feel a note at this point is most appropriate.
Jen, thank you for the opportunity to engage with thoughts I never considered before. Thank you for the chance to get quiet and reflect on what makes me who I am today. Thank you for giving me the ability to feel. These are all very important skills for future teachers, and I am grateful to be able to develop those competencies over the course of writing this paper.
Biscuit was not a part of what makes me, me. Biscuit is an integral influence on who I am, what I do, and who I want to be. I want to never forget the importance of belonging, the unconscious pain of exclusion, and the realization that allows us to take a step forward in our lives.
All teachers bring their childhoods into the classroom. They bring with them fond memories of successful lemonade stand businesses, stinging recollections of relentless bullying, and everything in between.
For me, I will be bringing memories of a yellow, happy-go-lucky teddy bear, lifelong experiences of exclusion, and previously unearthed insights discovered by putting voice to word processor on a gloomy October afternoon.
Such is the life of a teacher candidate.
Jeffrey Man, storyteller, creator and Winnie the Pooh enthusiast, is a teacher candidate at the Faculty of Education at York University, program coordinator with the equity, diversity and inclusion team at Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital and member of the Special Education Advisory Committee at the York Catholic District School Board.
“Owning our story can be hard but not nearly as difficult as spending our lives running from it. Embracing our vulnerabilities is risky but not nearly as dangerous as giving up on love and belonging and joy—the experiences that make us the most vulnerable. Only when we are brave enough to explore the darkness will we discover the infinite power of our light.” – Brene Brown
My Blue Kids Bicycle Daniel Muromski
“After a long day on my bicycle, I feel refreshed, cleansed, purified. I feel that I have established contact with my environment and that I am at peace. On days like that I am permeated with a profound gratitude for my bicycle …” (Paul de Vivie, “Vélocio”, Le Cycliste, France, 1911)
For as long as I can remember, bicycles always struck my curiosity when I was a child. It was an object that got me excited when I saw one, because I thought it was so incredible that a human can increase their speed significantly by just using their two legs and pedals. The way I thought about bicycles each time I saw them was very abstract and odd. The way they worked was one thing, but how a person could be in control of them and directly impact how fast it could go was an idea that really fascinated me as a child. I was able to experience my first bicycle when I was a little child. It was bought by my parents for my twin sister and me, which meant that we were supposed to share it. The bicycle was painted with a nice midnight blue color which shined in the sunlight. It had a blue pad around the small crossbar, blue streamers on the handlebars, and a basket. It had white training wheels on the back of it as well. It smelled of a brand new factory plastic, rubber and metal. At first glance I remember I felt shocked but excited that I was able to sit on a bike and control it as soon as we stepped outside. The first time I was able to ride the bike, was when my family went for a walk in our older neighbourhood during the fall time when the fresh air smelled of leaves. I was the first one to be able to try it (with my father’s help) since my sister was too nervous. When I started riding it I remember the sound of the training wheels clattering against the ground and the feeling of the ridges from the white rubber handlebars which I gripped with my hands. My imagination ran wild while I was on the bike, as I felt the freedom and power of the idea that I could control the speed and location of wherever I choose to go. During my initial time with the bike, my parents found a creative way to share it amongst my sister and me. How we shared it depended on the fire hydrants. We switched once we got to the next fire hydrant near the sidewalk. I remember I had trouble sharing the first few stops due to the large amounts of fun I had, until my parents reminded me to get off. But once I got off and gave my sister a chance to ride the bike, I ended up realizing the importance of being together with my family. This realization happened when I switched from spending time isolated on the bike to walking in a group with my parents. I felt grateful and blessed to have loving parents who spent time with us, especially because I had friends from school who told me their parents were too busy for them. That sad idea came into my mind as I walked with my parents with my sister ahead of us, and I thought to myself how lucky I was to share this moment and life with my parents. I even felt happy and warm inside when I saw my sister having fun on the bike. No matter how much fun I had on the bike, when I saw my sister enjoy her time with it too I felt selfless because I got the opportunity to share something I was attached to. To this present day I remember the feeling of togetherness, safety and emotional bliss. The bike gave me insight on the importance of sharing time and being kind to loved ones. Overtime, this was the routine that my sister and I had when we shared the bike in our childhood. My time spent walking outdoors and sharing the bike over the years has grown my bond with my sister and parents. This is why the bike resembles relationships for me. My connection with my twin sister has solidified ever since we started to share the bike. We have grown closer, where the times and laughs we shared back then, have translated into the present
moment where we still share them now. The time spent sharing and riding also translates into a strengthened bond with my parents. I was taught how to ride the bike by my father and it was a very memorable moment for me because the experience let me understand the value of savoring the moment by living in the present. Those moments also include spending time with my family and having new exciting experiences with the loved ones in my life. Every time I overthink into the future, I stop and start to value the present moment in my life, because I remember my initial experience with the bike and how sentimental it was for me. To add on, sharing the bike has given me the realization that being kind, considerate and selfless to a certain degree is rewarding. It is heartwarming to see others enjoy the experiences that I already did, and to give others an opportunity to try the things I found enjoyable. Therefore, the bicycle is symbolic of my childhood realizations and values, which have defined the kind of person I am in the present day. All of the various experiences I had with the bike when I was a child have morphed my ideas, beliefs and values in the present. This is why the bike is evocative for me as it represents family, safety, togetherness and happiness, while also underlining personal values of how to treat others and be a good person. I came to understand many ideas when I had experiences with the bike, and I feel at peace whenever I think about it. I understood and applied those same ideas at a deeper level as I grew older and invited more people into my life that I learned to love. My relationship with the bike has impacted me directly by giving me the opportunity to realize the importance of valuing family, loved ones, living in the present and being kind to others. I give gratitude to the bike and the experiences it allowed me to have with the environment around me.
M.A.B.
“What she was finding also was how one book led to another, doors kept opening wherever she turned and the days weren’t long enough for the reading she wanted to do.” -
Alan Bennett, The Uncommon Reader
Books
Growing up, and even still, I wasn’t much of an avid reader of books. In my free time, I would play with toys, hang out with friends, or watch TV, typical childhood behaviours. The title of this essay might suggest that I’m going to be talking about my childhood love of books and my connection to them, but it’s more about the concept of books, their symbolism, and their meaning to me. I was the first daughter and the first granddaughter born to my family. This position receives a lot of attention and support, but also holds a lot of expectations and responsibilities. As I was also the first in my immediate family to prospectively graduate high school and attend post-secondary education, education and learning has been a large focus in my life. My parents were very supportive of my learning. Some of my earliest and fondest memories are of my father and I watching documentaries on National Geographic and reading together, while mom would draw with me and answer any questions I had about life. While education was a significant priority for my parents, my grandfather, who I call Dedo, was very enthusiastic about encouraging me to learn and want to do so. Coming from a small village in Greece in the 1930s and 40s, he didn’t have the same opportunities that I did, and he wanted nothing more than for me to utilize the resources I have and never take them for granted. While it seems like the pressure to do well in school would be high due to the persistency of my grandfather, I never viewed it that way. In fact, I think it made me more excited to go to school and learn. I wanted to make my family proud, even though I knew I could regardless of whether I ended up with a degree or not. The support I received influenced me to set goals for myself and my education. My main goal was to be the first high school graduate, and after that, to be the first university graduate in my immediate family. While Dedo wasn’t here to see me achieve either of these goals, he was extremely proud of the progress I had made while he was still with us, and his support still stays with me as I continue my educational journey. Now, how does this relate to books? Dedo always emphasized the importance of books. Every single time we spoke, he would talk about how important reading and paying attention in school was. He always made a point to tell me to prioritize school, saying “books, not boys” and telling me not to stress about little things, like typical adolescent drama. He related books to learning and obtaining an education. While books are typically a symbol of education and learning, my Dedo’s choice of words and support stuck with me throughout my life and educational career. As a result, books symbolize the value of education for me. I haven’t realized the impact that my grandfather’s words of encouragement had on my life until reflecting upon it for this essay. I knew they were inspirational but was unaware of the extent. The symbolism of books for me has influenced me as a learner for as long as I can remember, and now that I am on the path to becoming an educator, it’s even more prevalent. The excitement I had for school when I was starting kindergarten, the eagerness to learn, and my commitment to lifelong learning by becoming a teacher is a by-product of my family’s support and my grandfather’s endless efforts to inspire me to learn.
MAB is a first-year teachers education candidate in the Intermediate/Senior division at York University. Her teachables are music and history. She received her Bachelor of Music degree from the University of Toronto in 2021. Her passion for music and dedication to being a lifelong learner inspired her to pursue music education. She is from Oshawa, Ontario and pursues her passion for music through her work as a musician in the military, as well as providing clarinet lessons. Bennett, Alan. The Uncommon Reader. London, Faber, Straus and Giroux, 2007. Hope House Press. Notebooks-cambridge. 2016, Cambridge, United Kingdom. https://unsplash.com/photos/IOzk8YKDhYg Kraft, Roman. Old Books in Shelves. 2016. https://unsplash.com/photos/X1exjxxBho4
I don't know if you've ever noticed this, but first impressions are often entirely wrong. You can look at a painting for the first time, for example, and not like it at all, but after looking at it a little longer you may find it very pleasing. The first time you try Gorgonzola cheese you may find it too strong, but when you are older you may want to eat nothing but Gorgonzola cheese. … Your initial opinion on just about anything may change over time. ― Lemony Snicket.
MY BRACES Cry s ta l L e e
my mom brought me to the orthodontist. I still remember the moment I entered his office, where he showed me an x-ray of my crooked teeth and explained that I had to receive treatment to fix my overbite. Getting braces was a whole new experience for me. None of my classmates had them and I had only seen them in cartoons on television before. I was nervous, scared, and anxious. At this first meeting with my orthodontist, I was told that I would be stuck with them for at least two years. At least? As a ten-year-old, two years was a fifth of my entire life. I feared this idea of time and permanence. How would I survive monthly appointments and a mouth full of metal for the next two years? I initially rejected getting the treatment but ultimately had to agree to it because I was told that my overbite would affect my health as I grew up. This was one of the first times I had to make an important decision for my future self. I went back a few weeks later, and after what felt like hours of keeping my mouth open and trying to keep my gag reflex in check, I officially got my braces and was left with a disgusting taste of dental stuff in my mouth. Right after they were on, I wanted them off. Unfortunately, I knew that wasn’t going to happen for at least two years. Before I left, my orthodontist gifted me a goodie bag of tools to help me with my braces, as well as a long list of things I could and couldn’t do. I still remember the pain I was left with for the following days. I’ve never handled pain well. I dreaded my first day back at school. Before getting my braces, I was already being bullied at school by a group of older girls and my new look would give them another reason to tease me. My braces compounded my existing self-esteem issues. I became hyper aware of how I looked and the way I spoke. Because of them, I had a slight lisp which led to me talking less
My Braces 3
and I became completely focused on ensuring every word that left my mouth was pronounced perfectly whenever I talked to someone. I also developed a habit where every time I laughed at a joke or did something that required me to open my mouth wide enough for others to see, I would unconsciously raise my hand to cover it. I vividly remember when it was my first picture day with my braces. While the other girls in my class would be fixing their hair or uniforms, I would be practicing how to smile without showing my teeth. Fortunately, my period of shame and embarrassment didn’t last long. I don’t remember when it happened exactly, but I eventually realized that my braces didn’t change who I fundamentally was or the relationships I had already established. My friends didn’t stop being friends with me once I got my braces. The girls who bullied me were going to continue bullying me regardless of whether I had them or not. I learned that I’m not defined by the way I look, and I should be proud of myself for taking this next step in growing up. The two (and a half) years I waited to get my braces off seemed like forever. When they were finally removed from my mouth, it was a bittersweet moment. I finally had a set of ‘perfect’ teeth that fit society’s standards and were best for my health, but I also felt like it was another piece of evidence of me growing up, something I wasn’t ready for. Looking back, having braces was also quite an ironic experience. On the one hand, they taught me to accept the insecurities I have about my imperfections, but on the other hand, one of the reasons I had them was to get a ‘perfect’ smile. I would describe my relationship with my braces as an ultimate example of “it gets worse before it gets better”. They changed me physically, but even more mentally. While my braces
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Crystal Lee
experience was filled with pain and insecurities, they taught me to embrace myself for who I am. This is not to say that I am always confident about myself, but that’s one part of my imperfections I’ve accepted. Most importantly, I learned that I shouldn’t be so quick to judge others based on their outward appearance and first impressions. For the years I had them, whenever I spoke to or smiled at someone, I would think that my braces defined their first impression of me, so I tried to hide them. But I realized that if that’s all they thought of me, then they were losing out on getting to recognize the real me – my humour, my personality, my beliefs. Today, I never judge a book by its cover or a person by my first impression of them. My second, third, and fourth impressions are just as important, and I never want to miss out on getting to know someone for who they truly are.
is an aspiring mathematics teacher currently studying at York University. She recently finished her Bachelor of Mathematics program at the University of Waterloo and is excited to continue learning in her journey to becoming a teacher. She grew up in Scarborough and currently resides in Thornhill. During her free time, she enjoys watching movies and cooking for her family and friends.
My Braces 5
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Crystal Lee
Lemony Snicket, 1999), 27-28.
(Toronto: HarperCollins,
Illustration on page 2 courtesy of Freepik. Illustration on page 6 courtesy of Odyssey.
“Mr. L. did not get better all at once. He had first to experience cycles of separations, dreams, depressions, and insights—the repetition, or 'working through,' required for long-term neuroplastic change. New ways of relating had to be learned, wiring new neurons together, and old ways of responding had to be unlearned, weakening neuronal links. Because Mr. L. had linked the ideas of separation and death, they were wired together in his neuronal networks. Now that he was conscious of his association, he could unlearn it.” ― Norman Doidge, The Brain that Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science
MY BRAIN, ED Zoë Myles
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Zoë Myles
We used to be one, but now I’m not so sure. It is attached to me, flows through my skeleton and links my body together. Scientists tell us our brain makes us who we are and allows us to form our own thoughts… But how is it, something that is supposed to be me, would loath me so much? Something that has grown with me and experienced heart ache, trials, tribulations and feats, formed memories and shared our first kiss… how can something like that, grow to hate me so much? We have all had our fair share of faults growing up, that much I know. As time progresses through my life however, I feel a continuous severance for myself and my brain. The older I get the more I see my brain as its own entity; separate from my own. Why is that I wonder? Did it start in grade three, when I couldn’t keep up with the rest of the class in academics? Was it when I couldn’t emotionally connect to my peers around me, and not understand why I was bullied, only to become a bully myself? No… I don’t believe those where what separated us. In those moments my brain and I were one, I would think it, and my brain would agree. No. I don’t believe the separation happened in the span of a year, or even the span of a decade. It was a subconscious and overtly slow sever, unnoticed, and unchecked. I believe the definitive moment my brain truly betrayed me and ripped us apart, was when it told me I wasn’t beautiful. At first I believed it. Why wouldn’t I? My brain had never lied to me before, why would it start now? I. Wasn’t. Beautiful. Then eventually I became fat, ugly, stupid and a loner. “How do I fix this?” I asked my trusty friend, the one who’s always been there for me; “Lose weight of course. People will like you if you lose weight.”… And so I did.
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My Brain
It wasn’t until much later that I realized my Brain had been lying to me. That the whispers in the dark of night, the spews of hate at my reflection in the mirror had all just been tricks to lure me into a falsehood I could be grievously content with. I had therapists tell me to treat my eating disorder like an “abusive boyfriend” and to call it “ED”. I started calling my Brain “Ed”. Treating my brain like an abusive boyfriend; ignoring the thoughts that came uncensored and uninvited into my mind and pushing away the nudges towards scales, calorie counting and closed bathroom doors. The more I ignored it, the louder it became and the harder to tune out. Along with an eating disorder came anxiety, depression, Type 1 diabetes, the memory and insecurity of learning disabilities and a reciprocated demonizing towards my Brain in return. As all abusive relationships are, they are not bad at all times of the day and can have an element of reassurance, compassion and love for their partner. There were times where Ed would be loving towards me, buy me nice outfits, compliment how much exercise I’ve been doing and even encourage me to eat healthier. There were times I would catch myself looking in the mirror and enjoying what I saw rather than being anguished with the image in front of me. These were the stepping stones to healing myself, laid out in plain sight for me to see; but only accessible if I chose to see them. It took a long time for me to realize that the love and abuse were not one in the same, and it was up to me to change that. I am not the expert of healing, nor will I ever claim to have all of the answers. In fact to this day I am still recovering from the damage done to me by my own Brain; by Ed… However I will not lie that these experiences with my brain shaped who I am today, both for better and worse. Ed taught me how to love myself, accept myself for who I am, and 4
Zoë Myles
embrace my beauty, both inside and out. Through Ed I have a new appreciation for confidence in individuals, and an acquired nerve to speak when I feel the need to speak. Ed gave me boldness, open mindedness and a raw passion for the things I love. For Ed had shown me all of the darkness, loss and turmoil; and I made a promise to myself, my Brainmy Ed, that I would never go that far again. Since these instances I have started to build a new relationship with Ed; mend my thoughts and try to glue us back together; with not much help from him I might add. Things break apart, scars are left behind and words will hurt you but so long as you stand your ground and keep trudging on, all things heal with time. Maybe the plate you smashed may not be the same, or the scars won’t fade… but the plate becomes art, the scars become memories and the words sting much less. We carry these pains on our backs and in our hearts, but the most painful of memories become the most powerful of lessons and the building blocks towards a better future. My relationship to my Brain is a strong and complicated one. I wouldn’t say I love or hate it, but I acknowledge its existence. We share our mind, body and soul; and in that we must learn to appreciate their existence and not read into only the very surface of their being. My Brain has made me feel many things throughout my childhood, adolescence and into adulthood, and will continue to do so beyond; but the lessons we teach ourselves through the objects we hold closely are the lessons we will forever know and learn from.
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My Brain
Zoë Myles is a professional in Baking and Pastry arts, an apprentice Chef graduated from Niagara College with an Honors Certificate and Teacher Candidate attending York University to become a Hospitality and Tourism teacher in Secondary School. Her passion for the culinary industry, and grown empathy towards adolescents and the struggles they face have aided her to further pursue a career in teaching, where she has hopes of encouraging youth into finding their own stepping stones to battle their own EDs and come to terms with their own personal growth; regardless if they have passion for cooking or not.
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Zoë Myles
“But most of all,” she said, “I like to watch people. Sometimes I ride the subway all day and look at them and listen to them. I just want to figure out who they are and what they want and where they're going. Sometimes I even go to the Fun Parks and ride in the jet cars when they race on the edge of town at midnight and the police don’t care as long as they’re insured. As long as everyone has ten thousand insurance everyone’s happy. Sometimes I sneak around and listen in subways. Or I listen at soda fountains, and do you know what?” “What?” “People don’t talk about anything.” “Oh, they must!” “No, not anything.” ― Ray Bradbury, “Fahrenheit 451”
BUS TICKETS
Ana Cojocariu
Walking home alone was the first step towards independence and freedom as a child in Toronto. Living in a neighborhood that didn’t really have school bus routes meant that the next step towards independence was taking the TTC to and from school alone. It might not seem like a big deal, but in the mind of a child, going anywhere alone felt like the ultimate form of freedom, even if it just meant going to school. This was before Presto passes existed, and so bus tickets were the currency of exchange. Having bus tickets on you as a kid meant you had freedom and it also meant that you were trusted and responsible. It’s crazy to think how reputation defining these little square pieces of paper could be, and how they impacted my development from child to young adult. It was less so the tickets themselves, and more so what they allowed me to do, allowed me to learn about myself, my interests, while also allowing me to learn about others. The first time I remember having to take the bus on my own was in 2008, at the age of 12. There may have been earlier times, but this one moment sticks out as being especially influential. Being in grade six at the time, and in an elementary school that only went up to grade six, I had two options for middle schools on the table. The local neighborhood school my older sister had gone to, and most of my friends would later go on to attending, or a specialized art school a few neighborhoods south. To get into the art program, I needed to attend an interview and bring along a portfolio of my work. Having scheduled the interview during the day meant my parents were unable to drive me, so I left school early that day, walked towards the bus stop, and boarded the 7 Bathurst bus south. My bus ticket in hand, I remember the bus driver questioning my age because I had inserted a child ticket as opposed to a student ticket into the slot. He asked if I was under 12, and I responded by saying I was 12. Looking back on it now, I suspect he was also questioning what a 12-year-old was doing on a public bus alone as opposed to being in school. That was the first, but definitely not the last time bus drivers would think I looked older than I was claiming to be. I would later make it a habit of always having my health card in my wallet, given that it was the only form of ID someone my age could carry around, and one that displayed my date of birth. Having been accepted into the art program, I found myself having to take public transit to school every day starting in 2008. This meant that I needed ten bus tickets a week, 40 bus tickets a month, and roughly 350 bus tickets per school year. Too young to have even a summer job of my own, my parents would give me a $20 bill every week that would be intended for buying my tickets at the local gas station. With some money left over, I often spent it on sweets, gum, or saved it up to buy something bigger the next week. Regardless of what I did with the extra, having to buy my own bus tickets on a weekly basis instilled some sort of financial responsibility in me that I’m not sure my parents intended, but were happy to see as a result. I learned how to keep the $20 safe,
how to plan ahead and ensure I’d have enough tickets to get to school and back the next day, and how to safe up my extra money. The bus tickets themselves weren’t much to write home about. Ten tickets per pack, printed on a perforated paper, allowing them to be torn apart from one another, or easily folded to fit into a small wallet. Their designs would change from time to time, but they weren’t all that special at the end of the day. The only reason they meant so much to me, and that I remember them to this day is because of how they made me feel, the experiences they allowed me to have, and the sense of independence they afforded me as a child and teenager. Spending at least one hour on public transit everyday gave me the opportunity to see people I otherwise wouldn’t, observe them on their way to work, on their way home from work, and imagine what their lives must be like once they got off the bus. As such, bus tickets sparked my interest in people watching. They provided me with the perfect opportunity to sit and observe others within an environment where doing so wasn’t an especially weird thing to do. Ultimately, bus tickets likely influenced my later interest in social psychology and my love for learning about social interactions, beliefs, and attitudes towards others. Ten little square pieces of paper with just a single purpose, turned out to be the most evocative objects in my development and learning process by providing me with the freedom, independence, and time needed for me to realize my interests and passions. Ana Cojocariu completed her MA degree in psychology at Ryerson University. Focusing on social psychology, her research mainly examined ideological beliefs and attitudes towards different types of criminal offenders. Although teaching has always been a main goal of hers, only in the past few years has she decided that teaching at the intermediate/senior level would be more interesting and rewarding than teaching at the post-secondary level. She is currently in a teacher education program and learning how to teach social sciences and law to high school students in Ontario, Canada.
“It’s been a while since I wrote a poem because a sentence fluttered in my mind, and I couldn’t hold within me any longer. Mind is like a cocoon and words that we write are the butterflies that emerge, all varied and colourful. While we believe that these butterflies are going to live forever, the sad reality is every butterfly dies every day. Our job as writers is to ensure these butterflies outlast us and we have a long life to see them outlive us. The longer we live, the better we know if our words are of any value.”
My Butterfly Diary Bidemi Keshinro
I brushed my teeth and got my pajamas on as I got ready to go to bed after a long day. I slid my diary from under the bed, unlocked it, and opened it up ready to make my latest entry. It was a small hardcovered notebook, yellow with shimmering butterflies that floated across the cover. On the inside of the front cover was the name of each of my secret crushes. Big box letters decorated with hearts with angry lines that crossed out the ones that broke my heart, usually without even knowing it. The butterflies continued across each page of the diary; I remember colouring them in with my pencil as I paused to collect my thoughts. I always fixated on the different patterns of the butterflies and the level of freedom that they seemed to have even while being trapped on the pages. This is what journal writing meant for me, I felt free to express myself while being restricted to the lines and spaces on each page. I scribbled down all the details of my day, and even if I felt happy, sad, angry, frustrated, or even tired I knew that my diary could feel those emotions. The deep lines as my pencils pressed into the pages could sense the tension and conflict in my emotion. As my pencil made words across the page they eventually became illegible as my thoughts ran faster than my pencil could. It was on my eighth birthday that my mom gave me the diary. There was no bow or gift wrapping but I knew it was a gift and I loved it. The smell and feel of the fresh new pages welcomed my words. Each day, I couldn’t wait to tell my diary about my day. Even if I wrote a few words, a few pages, or not at all I knew that my diary was there, under my bed, waiting for me. I was always a very social child. I was the student that got moved for talking too much but would end up talking in the new spot that I got moved to. This can be contrasted to how I was at home as an only child until the age of ten, I was very quiet with no one to talk to about the things I had on my mind. I enjoyed the moments that I was left alone to listen to and sort through all my thoughts. In these pre-teen years, speaking out loud to someone about my feelings was almost impossible so I needed somewhere to explore and discover who I was. This diary was now a safe place for me to write out my thoughts and feelings. It was a place that I could be creative and free with no judgement. This diary was my best friend, and I had no problem trusting it with all my secrets. Entering high school, I slowly had less and less time to spend with my diary until I completely stopped. I never said goodbye but eventually one day became my last day. I guess I always felt that my diary understood why I never came back because it knew me. It knew that I was ready to escape its pages and like the butterflies find my freedom beyond the pages. My diary not only allowed me to mature but it helped me to discover my love of self. When I went back to re-read my diary entries, I don’t just see what I was going through, I see who I was. In hindsight I was able to understand my developing personality and discover who I was so that I can be the person that I am today. Knowing who I was and reflecting on what made me who I was showed me that approval only needed to come from within. My façade as a social person in school was simply my way of constantly trying to please others. With my diary, I never had to pretend or hide who I was because this was a safe space. This object taught me how to accept myself the same way that it accepted me. This self-confidence was essential to bring me through pivotal years of my life. To this day, I enjoy journaling and seeing my thoughts on paper. Even though I don’t bare my feelings as I did with my diary, I always trust the pages of my journal. I feel safe, I feel comfortable, and I feel heard.
Bidemi Keshinro was a biology student at University of Toronto before pursuing a master’s degree in Science at University of Ottawa. This is where she discovered her passion for teaching and is now a teacher’s candidate at York University.
Russo
Life is not easy for any of us. But what of that? We must have perseverance and, above all, confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for something, and that this thing, at whatever cost, must be attained. ~Marie Curie, Forbes
2
The Caboodle Erica Russo
Dance has been constant in my life since I was 4 years old. I was a rather quiet child growing up, never having much to say. Every year I grew to love the sport more and more, and at the age of 7 I officially joined the competitive dance team at my studio. The competitive team had a reputable status and thus was physically demanding and required hours of dedication. I was at the studio 4 days a week from 12 to 16 hours. As a young child this commitment was a sacrifice on my time, school studies and social events with friends and family. However, I knew that this was where I belonged. I can recall the anticipation leading up to my first competition. Being a new member of the competitive team at the studio and a new member to a new company “K”, we were introduced to the rituals. Every member of the competitive team travelled with something called a “caboodle” and every dancer had an identical one. A caboodle is used to store makeup, hair pieces, shoes, and anything the dancer may need. Essentially, a “normal” caboodle would be small and compact and easy to carry. However, my studio had us purchase a roller toolbox organizer. The image of tiny 7-year-old me rolling around a man’s mobile toolbox organizer made my whole family laugh. This is how my relationship with my caboodle started. After purchasing the caboodle, my friends and I decorated them together. We purchased stickers and covered the whole thing, so that it was no longer just black and yellow. Ironically though, black and yellow were our studio colours so they went with our team. Having decorated my caboodle helped make this mobile toolbox organizer personal and representative of my identity. Therefore, it provided me with another outlet to express myself within the dance world. When I look at my caboodle that currently lives in my garage, I get transported back into my childhood. I reminisce about all the fun adventures I had with my caboodle and how it has become part of my identity. This caboodle shaped who I am today in many ways. This caboodle taught me the importance of community. We travelled together and as a team we shared a unified common goal. Hence, we moved as a unit. Our caboodles carried everything we needed to succeed besides our physical capabilities. Additionally, this object allowed me to become independent. Another aspect that competitive dance required was travel. I have competed in places such as Florida, Detroit, Myrtle Beach, Hamilton, Peterborough, Collingwood and many more. As a result, my parents were not always available to take me to my competitions and thus I would have to travel with another family. My caboodle allowed me to store all my belongings and I quickly learned to be responsible without my parents. The caboodle became an investment in myself and shaping qualities within me. Other parents wouldn't know where I kept all my belongings within my caboodle, nor did they have to ask me to start getting ready for the next dance. I took initiative and was responsible. I knew that my friend's parents would have to ensure multiple dancers were ready and thus I did whatever I could on my own first and then patiently waited for their help. Looking back, I believe the biggest impact my caboodle had in shaping my life values through the development of my self-confidence. From a young age, I was competing on stage in front of thousands of people. Being on stage gave me confidence in performing and this helped me with my everyday life as well. I associated my self-confidence on stage with my caboodle as it held the tools that complemented my physical abilities on stage. However, as I started performing elsewhere, like at school, I realized that the caboodle helped foster these abilities, but I didn’t necessarily need it to perform well. It was symbolic of my abilities, teamwork, and independence. It made me the person I am today as I am not afraid of public speaking and any type of presentation. My caboodle provides me with fond memories of my childhood and the sport that shaped who I am today. The caboodle taught me that I hold all the tools within myself to be successful and that the other tools within the caboodle were just there to showcase these abilities. This object allowed me to become someone who is creative, expressive, and no longer shy. It allowed me to value the commitment and respect of belonging to a community who shares a common goal and values. Furthermore, the caboodle was a symbol of high status within our dance studio. As a result, this symbol represented my determination, dedication, and commitment to my training. Lastly, it fostered the belief within me that I could be independent and helped build my self-confidence on stage.
Erica Russo went on to compete for the next 8 years in jazz, ballet, tap, hip hop, lyrical and contemporary dance. She attended a Regional Arts high school for dance. In addition, she has spent numerous hours volunteering at local dance studios which included teaching dance and organizing and running year end recitals. Today, Erica tries to stay active within the dance community by attending dance programs or drop-in classes. Erica is a teacher candidate, who has a Mathematics and English degree from York University. Within her academic studies she has taken dance courses as electives to continue to expand her knowledge and stay current about the art and sport she loves.
Works Cited Curie, Marie. “Quotes on Confidence.” Forbes, Forbes Magazine, https://www.forbes.com/quotes/6520/.
THE CAMERA Tiffany Truong
1! Tiffany Truong
“You only have to start saying of something : ‘Ah, how beautiful ! We must photograph it !' and you are already close to the view of the person who thinks that everything that is not photographed is lost, as if it never existed, and therefore in order to really live you must photograph as much as you can, and to photograph as much as you can you must either live in the most photographable way possible, or else consider photographable every moment of your life.” ― Italo Calvino, Difficult Loves
2! Tiffany Truong
My mother and I have always had an amazing relationship. I grew up to be exactly like her and more, she is fun, loving, outgoing and loves taking photos. When I was 2 years old, my mother knew how much I loved being in front of a camera. Anytime she pulled out the camera I would give her different poses and smiled my brightest. Building from that, I had the opportunity to receive my own series of cameras growing up. I started off with a camera phone where I began my passion of picture taking. In fact, my camera phone did not even have a SIM card. I only wanted it because there was a tool inside of this tiny silver Nokia flip phone where it had the ability to take photos. I remember it was a tradition where anytime I made a new friend, I wanted to document it with a photo. Even today I still have my first photo with my best friend on that silver Nokia flip phone, that photo had horrendous quality. Knowing how much I loved taking photos, my mother bought me my first compact camera at the age of 12. It was a cheap Silver Canon point and shoot camera, slim enough that I was able to carry it around in the back of my pocket. Despite the camera being a lower-end affordable model that camera was worth a million dollars to 12 year old Tiffany. I remember bringing that camera everywhere I went and documenting every step (I am pretty sure I literally took photos of the ground). Whenever I was bored, I entertained myself by taking silly selfies reacting to things happening around me. I remember sitting in the backseat of the car listening to music and reacting to every lyric while capturing those moments with a series of photos. At that time my camera did not have a video function, most of my photos were taken like a tableau scene back to back demonstrating what I was doing. Unfortunately this camera did not last long, because it was a cheap camera… The camera overheated and stopped working one day. I found the camera in my bag with the battery leaking through. I did not know what to do but broke out in tears. Initially I was upset because I would be without my precious camera but as time passed the memories associated with that camera meant more than the camera itself. My mother bought me another camera but it was not the same, it could never replace my first. I lost all the photos that were captured inside it, I was heartbroken knowing that I will never be able to look back at those memories. I kept the broken camera as something to look back on. I eventually moved on and continue my love for cameras. My mother got me a black Samsung camera that had a front display where you can see what you are recording. This camera had a video function. I began my love for making skits with my friends and family. With this video 3! Tiffany Truong
function, there was an option to pause and continue recording. I started to play around with different backgrounds, characters, and scenes developing funny skits. Around this age of 14, I started to be interested in posting videos online to Youtube. I never cared on who watches but to post it somewhere to look back on. I realized how much of a hoarder I became. I never want to delete any memories, I enjoy holding those memories forever. When I went to high school, I experienced a sense of judgement for bringing my camera around the school. I still continued my tradition where anytime I made a friend, I documented it with my camera. I continued to capture my everyday life with photos and videos.. One time, in my grade 10 history class… We were finished our work and waiting for the bell to go off. I decided to take a photo with my friends where it has not been a problem until that day. The teacher decided to come over to me and grabbed my device and deleted all my photos against my will. I knew that I was never able to retrieve those photos again and cried. She wiped all my memory and never apologized. Looking back at that memory, I wish I could have done something but because she held that authoritative power over me, I had to be quiet for the rest of the semester. I was very hesitant bringing a camera around again, I decided to only bring it on occasions or use it outside of school. If I ever do needed to capture something I would use my iPhone. When I graduated, I lost a group of friends who ended up telling me that they no longer wanted to be friends anymore. They mentioned how I never wanted to live in the moment but always recording and capturing photos. It really hurt me that they threw away a 5 year friendship because of something I love. After that, I started to “live in the moment” I went through a phase on not wanting to take photos or videos anymore. I started to get mad at my mother because she kept wanting to take photos or recording what is happening but never “living in the moment” but I realized, that was not me. I want to have physical memory, I want to be able to look back at myself and remember how much fun I had when I was young, and I want that for my mother as well. Today I continue carrying on my traditions. I continue making memories and footage for myself to look back on while still living in the moment. I constantly upgrade my choice of camera device. No matter what type of camera I use, it wasn’t about the physical object itself but the memory that carries with it. A camera that I adored came in different varieties whether it was a camera phone, compact camera, go pro, DSLR, webcam, etc. It built me into the person I am today. Growing up with a camera helped me build 4! Tiffany Truong
the confidence to be in front of a camera. I am proud of myself on overcoming the obstacles carrying my camera everywhere I went. I built relationships with people through the love of pictures and video taking. I am an outgoing bubbly person because I was never afraid to ask people to be in my photos and videos. I found my passion for acting, singing, and creating content. I’ve driven myself to embrace that side of me. All because it started with a 2 year old Tiffany smiling in front of a camera. Tiffany Truong Age 23, Vietnamese Canadian, Born in Mississauga Ontario, studied Theatre at York University, received her Bachelor of Arts degree in 2020, still creating content on youtube and twitch streaming, currently using a Canon EOS Rebel T7i DSLR camera, passion for disposable cameras, photographed for businesses and creators, modelled with professional photographers, currently studying in the Junior and Intermediate division of Education at York University.
5! Tiffany Truong
Sam Layard
The Canoe “Canoes, too, are unobtrusive; they don’t storm the natural world or ride over it, but, drift in upon it as a part of its own silence. As you either care about what the land is or not, so do you like or dislike quiet things --- sailboats, or rainy green mornings in foreign places, or a grazing herd, or the ruins of old monasteries in the mountains…Chances for being quiet nowadays are limited.” -John Graves, Goodbye to a River The canoe is sixteen feet long and white. It is made of fiberglass, with seats at each end made from scrap wood, and a molded yoke in the middle for carrying it on your shoulders. The ends of the canoe, where it would be run onto or off of rocks or logs or sand or dirt on either end of a portage, have putty-filled cracks and deformities, painted white to match. The bare wood gunwales along the edges of the hull are worn and smooth and comfortable to hold onto when lifting the canoe off the ground; this is a strong contrast to the outside of the hull itself. The white sides of the canoe are a patchwork of rough and splintery scars from amateur repair efforts, and the extra materials have added enough weight to the vessel to illicit a surprised grunt from anyone picking it up for the first time. In my early adolescence, the canoe was the vehicle for Saturday morning adventures with my dad. Waking up early to load the boat onto the roof racks always included a lesson in knots. I learned, practiced, and relearned bowlines, trucker hitches, round turn & two half hitches. To this day I can’t get these on the first try. Following the successful (mostly but not always; see amateur repair efforts) securing of the canoe to the roof racks, a stop at Tim Horton’s was mandatory because every bailing bucket ever carried in this canoe started out holding coffee and was subsequently lost in the clutter of the pickup truck on the return trip. Often, the wake up was accompanied by the forecast from overnight and the resulting water conditions; “It pissed rain last night”, he would whisper “Lets get out there while the water’s moving.”. We would drive out to any nearby fast-moving water we could find, drop the canoe and our paddles and life jackets off at the top, park the truck at the bottom, and hike back up. He would yell commands from the back seat, and we would navigate our way around, between, and over any rocks poking out of the rapids. A sudden lurch meant we had run straight into a rock we hadn’t seen under the water. A sudden lurch with an accompanying crunch meant we would be spending part of the morning with the canoe on sawhorses patching up holes and considering a new river or stream to visit. While a great deal of my experience with the canoe was related to splashing and crashing and yelling my way through the water, it was also the first time in memory that I enjoyed quiet without boredom. The Royal Botanical Gardens of Burlington maintained a wetlands conservation area near where my family lived, and this was the most common destination for the canoe. On a calm Saturday morning, before many cars were out on the road to produce faraway exhaust noise, only the natural sounds around us could be heard. We spent a great deal of time sitting and enjoying the moment and place. When we wanted to explore, we paddled quietly, making hunting strokes (more commonly referred to as “Indian stroke” at the time – a paddling technique where the blade of the paddle never leaves the water, and so can’t drip into the water and make noise). We would slide silently through reeds and water vegetation, only a few strokes at a time, with the occasional stop for my dad to unpack his camera and get a shot, breaking the silence the click and ratchet noises of the shutter and film advance lever. Long after growing out of my spot in the front of the canoe, I still feel a strong urge to suppress my own noises when I paddle, and to seek out quiet places to pass through.
Sam Layard graduated from Wilfrid Laurier University and is currently a Primary Care Paramedic in Simcoe County. He continues to try his best to tie effective knots, and to paddle without disturbing. He has moved on from the white canoe and now spends his time on the water in a twelve-foot kayak, made of durable plastic and requiring no fiberglass patches. The white canoe, which briefly held the name “Worth Pondering” was retired and cut in half to form the starting line of a local canoe race, which takes place near the conservation area every year. Sam and his dad have never won the race, but they came close once.
References: Graves, J., Waterhouse, R. Goodbye to a River. Vintage, 2002.
CARINA, MY MENTOR Monica Cieslak
Growing up, I would look forward to Saturday evenings as I would attend my Catechism class at my local community church. Why did I look forward to attending these classes? It was because I had met a special person who had become my role model and my mentor. Her name was Carina. Carina was a young teacher who dedicated her Saturdays to working with young children at church. Every time I saw her, she had a big smile on her face and always had a positive attitude. She was young, yet professional. Her long brown hair was always in a ponytail and she always had a soft, approachable, yet energetic tone to her voice. She saw the good in everyone and everything. At the age of eight years old I knew I wanted to be just like her when I grew up - a mentor to adolescents. Attending Catechism class and seeing Carina evoked different feelings within me that I hadn’t really ever experienced elsewhere. Carina became a person who I felt extremely comfortable to be around. I would show my true colours, and act as the crazy young child that I was. I never felt that she would judge me or shame me, rather I felt that she always wanted the best for me, and genuinely cared for me. Eventually, being in the same community, our families also started becoming friends, and we would attend the same events, and community gatherings. Having Carina as a support person throughout my childhood meant the absolute world to me. Whenever I was surrounded by her presence, I felt safe and that I had someone I could trust. I felt that I could accomplish anything with her by my side. Our relationship grew stronger over the years, especially when I became a teenager. I began to turn to her for guidance and emotional support. With her constant care and genuine advice, I always felt motivated and empowered to work towards my goals - especially my career goals to become a teacher. I always had a feeling I wanted to become a teacher, but it wasn’t until high school that I actually took steps towards these goals. Carina told me I should give it a shot, and she offered me a co-op placement in her classroom. She taught me many different strategies when working with children, and also gave me the opportunity to lead some lessons and activities. I was loving the experience. I feel like it sparked a new enthusiasm within me, where I was eager to learn and gain more experience. She allowed me to discover my potential to teach. I was really enjoying my experience, until one day Carina gave me a call. She told me that she was beginning a new chapter in her life and was going to open a martial arts gym with her husband. So many thoughts began running through my mind. I was so happy for her as I knew it was something she always wanted to do, but I was also really sad. I realized that I would probably not see her as often and would no longer have the opportunity to work with her in the classroom. As her life picked up we became more distant from one another. This obstacle put me in a position where I felt lost and had no idea of what to do next. My drive to work and gain more experience slowly deteriorated. A couple years later I ended up reconnecting with Carina as I missed her presence deeply. We spent hours on the phone catching up and ended up talking about children's programming. The kids martial arts program at her gym was growing, and I could see how excited she was by this. Just by speaking with her, I could tell how passionate she was about helping children succeed in life. She truly inspired me by the work she was doing, and so I asked her if there were any positions to work at the gym.
She first offered me a position as a Camp Counsellor, and after a year I was promoted to the position of Children’s Program Coordinator. Through this experience I have learned how important it is for children to have an outlet to express themselves, and how important it can be to have a support system outside of school. As a result, I am always focused on programs that help children build confidence in a positive space. Together, Carina and I work on developing curriculum for camps and martial arts programing, after school programs, and even tutoring programs. I always feel a sense of maturity when around her. She makes me feel as if I am no less than her, but rather an equal partner and contributor. This experience has allowed me to gain invaluable experience, and has also helped to build my confidence. Overall, Carina has helped me to realize my aspirations to become a mentor to children. She has taught me to persevere towards my goals, even when obstacles may come in the way. I now tend to look at situations from more of a positive perspective, and view “change” as an opportunity for growth. As a teacher candidate, I believe that children need someone that they can rely on and turn to when in need. My goal is to become that support system and stepping stone for students, just as Carina was for me. Monica Cieslak is a teacher candidate working towards finishing her Bachelor of Education Degree at York University. She is still currently working at VRTU Muay Thai as the Children’s Program Coordinator, where she develops and implements programming for children ages 4-12. Recently Monica has worked towards introducing a youth at risk program at the gym. Monica strives to provide an atmosphere to students that honours diversity, accessibility, and equity.
“The consistent, enduring presence of a caring adult in a young person’s life can be the difference between staying in school or dropping out, making healthy decisions or engaging in risky behaviors, and realizing one’s potential or failing to achieve one’s dreams”(Bruce & Bridgeland, Pg.1). Cited Work Bruce, Mary, and Bridgeland, John. The Mentoring Effect: Young People’s Perspectives ... EricMary. 2013, https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED558065.pdf.
CHẢ GIÒ (Vietnamese egg rolls) “Organizing the past into a narrative isn’t a way just to understand the self but also to attempt to predict the future. Which is interesting, because the storytelling device that seems most incompatible with the realities of actual life is foreshadowing… ‘The future is never a direct replica of the past,’ Adler says. ‘So we need to be able to take pieces of things that have happened to us and reconfigure them into possible futures.” For example, through experience, one learns that “We need to talk” rarely foreshadows anything good. (Life has its own clichés.)” (Beck, 2015).
Photo 1 (“Cha gio (Vietnamese egg rolls)”, 2021)
When I was little, I lived in Ottawa until I was around 8 years old. In this period, I lived with my parents until they moved to Toronto and I moved in with my grandparents and their house. It was a cozy time of life not because of the size of the house but because we had family that lived in the city there who always came together. My grandparents and I lived in a typical cul-de-sac. My grandpa was highly nurturing. He took on the role of homemaker as my grandmother was working at the time. He cooked and fed me, cleaned, spent his free time with me, and helped me with my homework. I occasionally got picked up from school before the end of the school day. Once, I got in trouble for sneaking out of class and going to the office to check for my grandpa’s arrival. My teacher caught me in the hallway and gave me an earful. But I couldn’t help it. I was a child hoping to be picked up to go back to my cozy and comfortable home with the people who looked after me. Most days after school, I got off the school bus that stopped at my cul-de-sac, walked to my grandpa who was waiting on the street, and we would walk together to the house. I would go inside, drop my backpack to the floor immediately and head to the kitchen. I was told, many years later, that it was rude and a bad habit to not put away your own belongings and assume others would do it for you. I agree. In the kitchen, there would be a dish with about four to five chả giò rolls. This is Vietnamese egg rolls. They are similar to other egg rolls and spring rolls from other cultures except chả giò has ground pork as a main ingredient that is not common in other egg rolls. Many egg rolls and spring rolls I have had are vegetarian which does not hit home as well as Vietnamese egg rolls. My grandmother would make an innumerable number of egg rolls at a time. She must have prepared the ingredients and rolled them into its final form for hours. Many times, I watched her cook. I watched as she took a clump of mixed ingredients as the filling (pork, mushrooms, onion, and other seasoning ingredients I did not know), and placed it on the egg roll wrap. Then, she folded the wrap and tightly rolled it into … a roll. The filling was snug and compact inside the wrap. It was safe and secure. Then, she took out her fryer and fried a small amount to cook them whenever we wanted to eat some. The taste of Vietnamese egg rolls was and still is exquisite to me. It has a crisp texture on the exterior and a savoury flavour inside. Its aroma is also savoury and it drives my cravings. Simply delicious, these egg rolls brought excitement to my taste buds. I enjoyed eating it alone, or dipping it in fish sauce, or wrapping a lettuce around it and then dipping it in the fish sauce. The combinations were plentiful. I enjoyed this dish so much as a child and it became a relevant correlation to my grandparents because I would remember them who looked after me in place of my parents. When I moved to Toronto to live with my parents, I came to question the decisions made by my parents to live away from me because I always wondered about my life with my grandparents and the meaning of my parents’ absence. Eventually, somewhere along the way, I came to the conclusion that their absence was hurtful. I felt hurt knowing that my parents were okay with me being away for so long. I'm sure it was difficult for them to be away from me as well but never considered that as much. During my adolescence, there were several instances where my mom was preparing to make egg rolls and I either did not join her or my participation was short-lived. Then, I built the courage to engage in a discussion with my parents about their decision to live away from me. The responses I received were easy to understand in hindsight yet they are easy unsatisfying. They talked about relationship building with my grandparents as well as my parents searching for careers in a new city. These things were not difficult to understand, but rather their benefits were hard to grasp at the time. I did a practicum for my undergraduate working with children in child care. In this
role, I observed the interactions between children and their families and noted how meaningful it was that children had people aside from their parents who cared for them. It was the grandparents of these children, in particular, that profoundly revealed this to me. It was eye-opening and evidently, I could find the resemblance to my own experience. Following this revelation, I was able to reflect on my childhood experiences with a different lens for some time. Afterward, I found an opportunity after a long time to have a conversation again with my parents as they prepared egg rolls. As they prepared them, I sat at the table and prepared the egg rolls with them until the ingredients ran out which indicates completion. I was able to see my parents as human beings with limits. I saw that they did their best with what they knew at the time and I was ready to move forward. Hence, in my work with children at child care, I am patient and understanding in interacting with them in hopes to model those behaviours and communicate clearly. Whenever I made and ate these egg rolls again with my parents, I was able to feel snug and compact like the egg rolls themselves. It is like I am taken care of just like when I lived in Ottawa with my grands.
Photo 2 (“Cha gio (Vietnamese egg rolls)”, 2021)
References Beck, J. (2015). Life’s stories: How you arrange the plot points of your life into a narrative can shape who you are-and is a fundamental part of being human. The Atlantic. Retrieved from https://bit.ly/3CrIQ5e Cha gio (Vietnamese egg rolls). (2021, March 9). [Blog post]. Retrieved from https://www.cooking-therapy.com/cha-gio/
THE CHOIR
Sinat Mohamed
On September 8th, 2012, I found my consolatory space. This space my highschool music room - was dedicated to the choir. In the centre of the room were four tapered choral risers, each level carpeted on the surface. The carpeted decks provided warmth, similar to the floors I carelessly played on as a child. Across the risers was a grand piano and to the left of that were three windows that illuminated even the darkest corner. The euphonious sounds of the piano and the choir were cohesive, yet every voice had a different style and tone. Within the differences, I found a sense of belonging. Growing up, I was very shy. I hardly expressed my opinions because the thought of others critiquing my words put a burning knot of fear into the pit of my stomach. In highschool, I knew I was different; I silently stood true to my values and never went against them to fit in. However, behind the willpower was an empty state of being. Most of the time, my educational experience felt hollow. I was doing academically well - receiving the grades that put a smile on my parents face - but I wasn't smiling on the inside. I then joined the music group and I loved every moment: choir practice and vocal class. Singing became my form of expression and more importantly provided purpose to my education. In the choir, I was an Alto. The Alto’s were positioned on the lower risers; however, the welcoming spirit of the group always made me feel on top. After choir, I had calculus class. In calculus, I had friends around me, but for some reason I always felt uncomfortable. Calculus class was very structured – static and logical. I felt restricted by all the numbers on the page, it reminded me of the “perfect” grades that I was compelled to receive. The course felt weightless and so I projected all my negative weight onto the course. All my teenage insecurities and problems were expelled onto the subject and so walking into class felt suffocating. Similarly, at home I felt suffocated in my own body – I would struggle in search of my purpose. At home, I contained the bad and only when I thought of my next choir practice I allowed myself to contain the good. The music room evoked a sense of joy because the thought of choir reminded me of my purpose. I was able to translate that sense of joy into my daily activities. I incorporated music and auditory learning into all of my courses. For example, in biology class I would remember terms by creating a song, and in chemistry class I would understand content by listening to different people on Youtube. This was the start of my interest in the STEM field. Music went from being a hobby to being incorporated
into my whole self. Soon, grade 12 came along and then came my frightful first year of university. On September 8th, 2016, I lost my consolatory space. I lived at the University of Guelph with my 3 friends from highschool. Living away from home was an amazing experience as I got to build autonomy; however, even with my friends and the weekly visits to my parents house, I felt empty and alone. I thought transferring to a school closer to home would cheer me up. And so, in 2017, I started the Chemistry program at Ryerson University. The first day was hard for me because I didn’t have my best friend in all my classes and labs. The transfer made me more lonely and it started to affect my mental health. I would think back to my highschool experience in the choir and how positive that made me; and so, I searched for a music group at Ryerson. I attended the Rye Musician meetings once a week - something felt off. I was shocked to find that being a part of a musical environment didn’t evoke the same joy as my highschool choir once did. I then realized that I wasn't in search of a new music group, rather I was in search for ways in which I could implement what I learned from music into my studies. In university, I stopped creatively learning; I would just rush through assignments, do whatever logically made sense, and crunch numbers - similar to my highschool calculus class. And so, I took a new approach to my university journey. I started to take my time when completing assignments. For example, in Organic Chemistry we had to memorize many chemical mechanisms; I went to my basement layed a bristol board on a big table, played music, and started to draw out each mechanism. While filling the bristol board, I sang the songs that I learned in choir and playfully mimicked the piano solos. 5 years later, I have the bristol board pasted on my slide closet door. The sense of joy that choir once evoked is now present every time I see the many chemical mechanisms.
Sinat Mohamed is an Intermediate-Senior teacher candidate at York University and an advocate for music education. Her teachables are Chemistry and Mathematics. She completed her undergraduate Chemistry degree at Ryerson University. She has a strong interest in the STEM field; in addition, she enjoys singing and playing musical instruments. Her learning style is auditory and musical. Sinat was a part of many choirs in her grade school journey and hopes to support all musical after school activities in her future.
“If I were not a physicist, I would probably be a musician. I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music.” — Albert Einstein
Children's drawing can be lovely, but it can also be very odd. Stick figures without bodies abound. And if there are bodies, that does not guarantee arms. Figures may be clothed, but then the body may be visible beneath, as if viewed through an X-ray machine. If there are houses with chimneys, the chimneys will usually be perpendicular to the roof line, not the ground line. All these peculiarities, and many more, are comfortably familiar, but totally mysterious. What is it about the child's mind, eye, and hand that leads him to draw as he does? - Jacqueline Goodnow, Children Drawing
THE COOKIE TIN
Laura Colacci
I am seven years old, I am sitting at the end of a long kitchen table in my grandparents’ small family home. In front of me, I have a butter cookie tin can full of pencils, pens and markers without lids on them. My grandmother has given me spare paper from the flip side of bill invoices, flyers and loose company pads of paper from around the house. I am slowly drawing a picture of me, a flower, the sun in the corner of the page, a cloud and a house. My grandmother is preparing dinner at the other end of the kitchen. There is steam coming from the stove as she boils water for pasta. The steam fills the room and the windows in the kitchen fog up from the steam. It is around five o’clock, and we are waiting for my parents to return from work so we can eat dinner all together. There is a moment of peace as my grandmother cooks and I draw, as my parents haven’t stormed in from their long commute to complain about traffic or the drama they had in the office that day. Me and grandma work quietly on the two ends of the room. There is so much warmth and comfort in this moment of waiting, drawing and aromas of roasted potatoes and tomato sauce filling the house. I spent a lot of time with my grandparents when I was small. I learned how to draw and colour at my grandparents’ kitchen table. There were no other toys or games in their house. My grandparents never paid extra for channel 52 which had all of the Disney shows my friends watched and I didn’t like YTV because they only had Yugiogh and other violent animated kid shows that only my brother liked to watch. I would come home from school and pull out the butter cookie tin can from the cupboard under the TV. The can was a strange mismatch of stationary. Some of the stationary was from when my mum was a child. The erasers were dry and made a mess on the paper. Some of the markers were dried out and some were scented as marshmallows and raspberries. Through drawing at my grandparent’s home, I would learn how to problem solve and draw carefully and precisely as the erasers on the pencils didn’t work or perhaps were broken off. Using erasers on my pencil drawings would make more of a mess than leaving the mistaken line in the drawing as it was. My grandmother’s cousin worked at the Laurentian pencil crayon factory and she would always share colours she got at work. A mix of these colours were also present in the cookie tin. Spending a few hours after school everyday with the cookie tin and my grandparents gave me time to think and be in my own world of thoughts. My grandfather would teach me how to sharpen a pencil without a sharpener and with just a paring knife. We would cut the shavings of the pencils together in front of the kitchen sink. My grandfather went to school in southern Italy and had to stop going to school at grade 4, so he could help his family on their family farm. He would remind me everyday to study well and enjoy school. I would draw my pictures to give him or my grandmother. They would add my daily drawings to the fridge. My drawings made them happy. I found freedom through my drawings that I made alone with the loving encouragement of my grandparents. I continued to express myself through my drawings and journaling throughout my adolescence. I later majored in Fine Art in university. I found my identity through drawing and still today find the act of doodling a meditative time for myself to create textures and process feelings and ideas, a time to day dream.
My grandparents still have a cookie tin full of markers and colours in the cupboard under their TV. The cookie tin only comes out now when my small first cousins visit for Sunday lunch. I get to watch my cousins draw unicorns and mountains and I see myself in them as they become absorbed in the imaginary world they create on paper. Drawing is a beautiful meditative activity that follows me throughout my life to help me understand my inside world and to also help me understand the outside world around me. Laura Colacci is a teaching candidate at York University’s Faculty of Education. She completed an HBA in Italian, Fine Art and Art History and an MA in Italian Literature at the University of Toronto. Laura’s graduate research focused on the approaches to Italian tradition through late 20th century Italian and Italian-American children’s book literature. Additionally, Laura is a practicing visual artist working out of her studio in Mississauga. For more information on Laura’s visual practice, please visit www.lauracolacci.com
References Goodnow, Jacqueline. Children Drawing, Cambridge, MA and London, England: Harvard University Press, 2013. https://doi.org/10.4159/harvard.9780674492158
GRANDMA AND HER COUCH Bilal Hussein
It’s 2:34pm on a Monday Afternoon, as I walk off the
school bus in front of the White Oaks Mall parking lot. I can go one of two ways, either 500 meters down Jalna Boulevard to get home, or I could walk a bit further to hang out with my 63-year-old best friend Mariam, who also happens to be my grandmother. Since the beginning of the 10th grade, every day after school, I had to make that same decision at roughly 2:34pm, and not once was it a difficult decision to make. Before walking towards my grandparent’s apartment building, I would make a quick pitstop into the mall to grab a small black coffee and a small regular coffee for my grandparents which comes to $3.14 every time, how could I forget? At times, I would even be walking 1.5 kilometers with these perfectly hot coffees in my hand, mid-January, while the cold winter wind slices through the mesh of my Nike Roshes. As I finally walk into the apartment building and dial 0047, I instantly begin to feel this sense of belonging. As my grandmother picks up the phone and says “Allo” in the thickest middle eastern accent you could possibly think of, my heart warms up and suddenly, I don’t feel cold anymore. Finally, I get off the elevator on the 11th floor and the moment I step out, the beautiful smell of grandma’s cooking tickles the little hairs in my nose. I walk down the old hallway with dark brown bricks on either side of me and old dark green carpet under my feet, I finally make it to 1103. A setting I will never forget, even if I tried. Considering I didn’t drive at the time, I would usually hang out with my grandmother from 3pm-6pm which is when my mom finished work at the pharmacy around the corner. Within the first two hours I filled my time with eating, completing puzzles with my grandpa and watching the same episode of this Turkish show that my grandmother loved so very much. But then, there was always this last hour where, while we were watching her show for the 30 millionth time, I would fall asleep on this beautiful, white floral, vintage couch right next to her. Similar to the picture above, this couch did not look comfortable at all. But the moment I laid my head on it, it was lights out until my mom showed up. Over the next 2 and a half years, this was my daily routine. There came a time when basketball season was upon us while I was in the twelfth grade and couldn’t make it over to her house, so my grandmother
decided to call my dad and ask where I was. As he explained how I was at practice, she explained to her son, my father, that when she wakes up in the morning, she plans on what she is going to cook as if she is waiting for her son to come home from school to eat and sleep. Those words will stick with me until the day I die. On Friday November 13th, 2015, my grandmother passed away. My whole life came crashing down, and I was constantly contemplating my whole life at this point. What was the point of doing anything anymore if I couldn’t see my best friend, if I couldn’t listen to her old stories from back in the day, if I couldn’t enjoy a nice meal with her after school? As time passed, I ran out of tears, I regularly felt this lump in my throat that would not go away, and had this hole in my heart that could never be filled regardless of how many people said “I know how you feel, I’m here if you need anything”. Nobody knew how I felt and that’s what killed me inside. With time, things got a little bit easier but when it came time to empty out the apartment, my family didn’t think it was a good idea for me to be present, thinking I would cry hysterically and make a scene. After convincing them I would be on my best behaviour, we walked through that same foyer, the same hallway with the brick walls and green carpet, and the same door that read 1103. We decided as a family that every member can take home one thing, but that didn’t sit right with me considering I wanted the whole apartment. After understanding I wasn’t the only one going through a difficult time, I made my decision for what I wanted to take home. Other than her glasses that my uncle snuck out for me; I told my dad I want the couch. Nobody understood why the couch was so important, but it wasn’t anyone’s business, I have made my choice. Today, the couch sits in my basement where I am currently writing this paper from. It has taught me that although life can be a bitch sometimes, we must learn to move on and further develop. That doesn’t necessarily mean to forget everything and move on but use those emotions and feelings to help better yourself throughout your life. If it wasn’t for Grandma Mariam, I wouldn’t be half the man I am today. Through her stories and the time I had spent at 1103 Jalna Blvd, I can honestly say, she is the reason I am where I am
today. Till this day, the couch still provides me with a sense of belonging, love and even hope. Hope that one day I can make my grandkids feel the same way she made me feel. Although I still feel her presence through the couch, I would give anything for one last meal with her.
Bilal Hussein is a 1st year I/S BEd student with a degree in
Sociology from the University of Western Ontario. Born on July 4th, 1997, Bilal is a family man first before anything. Born and raised in London, Ontario for 24 years, Bilal background stems from the Lebanese village of Bekaa Valley. Throughout his life, Bilal has managed to overcome middle-child syndrome with an older brother at the age of 27 and a younger brother at the age of 19. This BEd program at York is a new experience for Bilal, but he’s excited that he is able to share his personal life stories through assignments such as this one. “We find it familiar to consider objects as useful or aes-thetic, as necessities or vain indulgences. We are on less familiar ground when we consider objects as companions to our emotional lives or as provocations to thought. The notion of evocative objects brings together these two less familiar ideas, underscoring the inseparability of thought and feeling in our relationship to things. We think with the objects we love; we love the objects we think with” -Sherry Turkle, Evocative Objects: Things We Think With
Turkle, Sherry. Evocative Objects: Things We Think With. MIT Press, 2007.
CRIMINAL MINDS By: Dante Alaimo I don’t remember a time when my mom and I weren’t watching Criminal Minds together. The show aired in 2005 so I was at least seven years old when we started. The show is about a team of Behavioural Analysts in the FBI who solve murders committed by serial killers all across the USA. There were other tv shows we watched together, all of which lacked the same importance and commitment. Every week, I’d hop into my mom's bed, she’d turn on the tv and we’d hear something along the lines of, “this subject matter may not be suitable for younger audiences, viewer discretion is advised.” I could’ve definitely been classified under “younger audiences” but for some reason my mom didn’t mind me watching. I had a bedtime back then but my mom allowed me to stay up an extra hour to watch the show. Every episode, as the plot progressed, my mom and I would come up with predictions for who the murderer was. Our favourite character was Spencer Reid, the young genius on the team. My mom would always say that I reminded her of him and that’s probably why intelligence became an important part of my identity. I began to identify with Reid. I got along better with women than men, my vocabulary expanded from a young age and I had a hard time feeling like I fit in anywhere. On top of that Spencer was abandoned by his dad and even though my dad was around when I was growing up, he was never really there for me; it was almost as if I was abandoned. For years, my mom and I never missed a Criminal Minds day. Week after week, it was like our relationship got stronger and stronger. This show became a pillar and a totem of the close relationship I had with my mom. My love for this show transfered into my love for law and criminology. When I was 10 years old I decided I wanted to become a lawyer. I wanted to put criminals in jail and I became interested in understanding them. It just occurred to me as I am writing this, that is probably because my dad was a criminal and I wanted to understand why we didn’t have a good relationship. I analyzed everything and everyone around me, especially my parents. That became my way of learning. I learned by watching and listening deeper than the surface level. My memory became very visually and auditorily based. We got this cable box from Rogers that made it possible to record tv shows and movies to watch later. My mom started recording the Criminal Minds episodes and the routine was less consistent but still there. We still never missed watching an episode together. My mom went into the hospital for brain surgery when I was 12 years old because of a tumor she has. She was in recovery for months that seemed endless and we weren’t able to continue watching our show together for a while. After she recovered, things weren’t the same. We still watched Criminal Minds together but because we were able to record it, some
days she would tell me to watch it without her and she would catch up on the episode later. I got older and soon she stopped watching the show all together. At this point I realized that watching Criminal Minds with my mom was a way for me to overcompensate for the lack of a relationship I had with my dad. It distracted me from the trauma of being in a broken home. A house full of yelling and fighting between my parents, me and my dad, my sister and my mom. I drowned out the PTSD with my connection to my mom. Because of my mom’s recovery, the house was oddly and uncomfortably silent. In this silence, I could still hear my parents’ voices screaming at each other. I couldn’t focus because any moment I had to myself, I’d get flashes of arguments that my parents had, flashes of hearing doors slamming and plates breaking. Soon, Criminal Minds became a memory, a reminder of the relationship I once had with my mom. My visual and auditory strengths became a hindrance in my everyday life. The images and the sounds of my parents' arguments were so vivid, it was almost as if it was currently happening. I remember trying to use the show to get back what once was but it didn’t work. My mom wasn’t the same but neither was I. I was more independent, more self sufficient and I grew to accept the changing dynamics of my relationship with my mom. After my mom’s brain surgery, her memory wasn’t the best. I’d bring up old episodes or characters from the show and she’d have no idea what I was talking about. I realized that I no longer had the same love for law as I had previously. I was only pursuing it because of the relationship I had watching Criminal Minds with my mom but since that changed so did my career goals and interests. I decided to put my auditory and visual skills to work and pursued music. Music drowned out the screaming and yelling in my head. It drowned out the PTSD and it helped me move on with my life. It helped me to focus the memories into something, controlling them rather than them controlling me. Now, watching Criminal Minds takes me back to a time in my life where I felt out of control. A time when my home life was a toxic environment and my only escape was a tv show that showed me other people might have it worse than I do. The show had quotes in every episode and some of them have stuck with me my entire life. Probably one of the most important ones to me was one by Rose Kennedy. “It has been said that time heals all wounds. I do not agree. The wounds remain. In time, the mind, protecting its sanity, covers them with scar tissue, and the pain lessens, but it is never gone.”
Dreamcatcher Rachel DiPede My dreamcatcher has always been important to me. As a child I suffered from a lot of nightmares. I would often get so scared and go into my parent’s room for comfort. Once they calmed me down, I would fall back asleep and then wake up in my bed the next morning. A family friend suggested i should try a dreamcatcher. So that summer my grandmother purchased one for me and I have had it hanging in my room ever since. (Turkle, 2007, p. 5)
The history of dreamcatchers is very important. It is from indigenous decent, specifically from the Ojibwe tribe. They are a hoop traditionally made of willow, with string in the middle in the pattern of an elaborate spiderweb. Often the bottom has feathers and beads attached, symbolizing the connection to the land and the nature that surrounds it. It is said if you have a bad dream, it will get caught in this web, leaving you with only happy dreams. It is important to note that dreamcatchers are beautiful, but they must only be hanging in a room where you sleep since anywhere else is disrespectful. Personally, I found that the dreamcatcher did help with my nightmares as a child. This could have been a placebo since there is no evidence of them working, but the story behind the dream catcher I had made it very important to me, and ultimately worked regardless. I am very fortunate to have a family cottage. This family cottage happens to be on indigenous land as well. It is on Christian Island which is in Georgian Bay near the town of Midland, and the people are part of Beausoleil First Nations, and it is part of the Ojibwe tribe. This cottage has been in my family since the early 70’s and I would spend every summer up there as a child- Sometimes even months at a time. I was also very
fortunate to be exposed to indigenous culture through those years and with my grandparents as well. They made sure my sisters and I understood the land we are on and what exactly that meant in terms of historical and interpersonal respect for the area and its people. They would take us to the Powwow every year, and I was amazed by all the beautiful outfits, singing, dancing, and how welcomed I felt to be there. There is a lady named Wanda who has an art shop on the island. She is an indigenous artist and even has pieces in the Art Gallery of Ontario. My grandmother introduced me to her and told her about my bad dream problem. I ended up picking a dreamcatcher that I liked, and Wanda had informed me that her grandmother made it who was an elder in the tribe. It was beautiful. The hoop was wrapped in a tan leather, the one that is used to make moccasins. The web string was a light purple, my favourite color. There is three pieces of tan leather hanging down the bottom of the hoop with colorful beads attached and feathers. When we got back to the cottage, I hanged it up and I was so excited to go to sleep that night to test out if it would work. I would try every night to have a bad dream, and it just didn’t happen. Something about this dreamcatcher worked and it improved my sleep and my parents greatly. Even now as an adult I feel at home with it. About five years later my grandmother passed away. She was a mother figure to me, sometimes even more then my actual mother. My mother was going through some mental struggles for a few years and my grandmother really became the nurturing figure in my life. This dreamcatcher was not only a way for me to trap bad dreams. It now connected me to my grandmother and added even more meaning. When we had her funeral some of the friends my grandparents had made over the year from the tribe showed up, including one of the former chiefs. This dreamcatcher was not just a piece of willow, string, and feathers to trap bad dreams. It connected me to traditions going back many years, the people who made it, and my grandmother. To this day I still have it hanging in my room, and when I have children, I will go back to Wanda and purchase one for them.
Myself and my grandmother on the ferry to Christian Island
Rachel DiPede is a student at York University Technological Education Program. She has been working in the culinary field for eleven years. Her love of food and teaching has motivated her to become a Hospitality and Tourism teacher. Not just teaching students how to cook, but the culture, history, and connection food can have. She believes it is important to teach the future generation the culinary dishes that have been passed down through generations, and to know the basic life skill of feeding yourself healthy delicious food. References Turkle, S. (2007). Evocative Objects: things we think with . MIT Press .
Dress-up Chest Victoria Tavares
I grew up constantly moving around, from city to city, we never stayed in one place for very long. Connection and attachment were difficult for me to grasp and maintain, I was so familiar with having to let things go, friends, memories, I never had a familiar foundation with one place. Moving around as often as we did, I was only able to carry specific items with me, one thing I always had to have was my dress up chest. As a child I always enjoyed playing dress up and imagining myself in different fantasy worlds dependent on what I chose from my chest. My struggle of making friends taught me to be independent, I played on my own, my dress up chest was my realm of treasures and dreams. I could be whomever I wanted to be, whether a princess slaying fire breathing dragons from my castle, or the captain of my pirate ship preparing for Viking attacks. It was an escape from all reality and a way to distract myself from the loneliness. The chest I owned was quite large, approximately big enough that if I, as a six your old child wanted to lie down in it, I could. It was vibrant and multi-coloured and had photos of young girls my age dressed up like princesses all around it and made of hard plastic. When it was purchased, it only had a few princess-like dresses, two glittery tiaras that felt like it was digging into the sides of your skull when you put them on, and one pair of gold Cinderella slippers that made a clicking sound, like clicking a pen when walked in them. As time went on, I collected many different costumes, from old Halloween outfits, old clothes that I was not able to wear outside anymore, or anything that was gifted to me over the years. I collected fire men costumes, fairy costumes, animal costumes, movie character costumes, religious costumes and many more, including accessory pieces to go with each. I remember the chest smelling like bounce dryer sheets and fruit roll up candy, my mom would make sure my costumes were always washed and well taken care of, because it was something I always played with. The smell of the chest resonates with me now, bounce dryer sheets being the only ones I currently use to do my laundry and fruit roll up candy still being one of my favourites. My dress up chest carries an immense number of memories but there is only one that really jumps out at me each time I think about it. I remember being at home and my family had come to visit, my cousin had come over and we were playing together. From what I can remember I asked him if he wanted to play with my dress up chest but on one condition, I was
allowed to dress him up however I wanted. He agreed and we began to dress up, I chose a thick purple cotton fabric dress covered in sequence and rhinestones that just went past his toes. He put on the biggest tiara I. had with a bright purple gem smack in the middle, chunky bracelets and jewelry that had missing pieces to them, and a feathery boa scarf that was purple as well wrapped around his neck. To top it off, I put a bit if lip gloss on him and we made our way upstairs to everyone. We put on a fashion show for the adults and took tons of photos, memories we still look back on to this day. My dress up chest was a significant piece in my childhood, truly something I could never part ways with, throughout every single move, every single difficulty in my life, my chest and everything in it were my safe haven. It was my opportunity to escape and be able to be a child and not have to worry about anything. It also taught me how to be creative and have a huge imagination, which transformed into ambition for me. Being able to be comfortable and express myself at a young age really helped me with being creative and being able to piece outfits together that are appealing, designing and setting up different rooms in my home, and much more. It has also provided me the opportunity to open my own dessert business which I currently run with someone else. My dress up chest also inspired me to take part in mission and activism work, such as travelling to Africa to build schools, but most importantly had shaped me to want to become an educator, someone students can learn from and look up to. Looking back on everything I have accomplished over my adult life. I never understood the importance of childhood and how your experiences growing up are what create the individual you remember as you grow. My dress up chest was more than an inspiration, but a guide, a role model, an important figure that provided me options of any career I wanted to pursue, with simply imagination. “You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose. You’re on your own and you know. And YOU are the one who’ll decide where to go…” (Dr. Seuss, Oh the Places You’ll Go!) Victoria Julianna Simao – Tavares: I am an intermediate senior first year education student in the consecutive education program with teachable’s in both English and Social Science. I am interested in a world of using your imagination to embark on new journeys in life. I am a strong believer in going with where the road takes you without a plan. I have embraced this way of thinking throughout my essay while discussing my evocative object. It is something that has truly molded me into becoming who I am today. Photo of some of my work from my current business!
FOOTBALL SABRI SOUFIAN
In grade two, I moved to a new neighbourhood, and switched schools. This was extremely overwhelming for me, someone who, up until that point, was always around family. Now to be fair, in my house, there was my mom, my dad, and my two brothers, and I was the middle child. Yet, where we lived before, in the same building, two of my uncles lived, and within a two-minute drive, there resided several of my cousins, aunts and uncles, and my beloved grandmother. I would see family every day. The area we moved to, was about forty-five minutes north of our old apartment. I had no friends here, and my family was not close enough to see as regularly as I liked. The culture was completely different, and I began to feel a lot of social anxiety in school. I did not know how to make friends. I always had my older brother or older cousins to hang out with. My friends were their friends, I never had to meet any one “new”. I love people, and genuinely enjoy the company of others, but for some reason, initiating a relationship with someone has always been an intimidating task for me, and as an eight yearold boy, it was the most difficult mission I set out to complete. At a new school for the first time, I just wanted to make friends, but I was extremely shy and painstakingly quiet. Fortunately, at recess, it seemed at this new school, playing football was their tradition. One of the other students noticed I would just watch as the rest of them played, and one day, he asked if I wanted to join. Of course, I said yes! Football was already my favorite sport, but now, playing this game, brought a whole new meaning to my life. This leather ball that I would grip tightly on its seams when I would throw the perfect spiral and that would slip fittingly into my hands for a catch when I would leap into the air and extend out my arms, became an avenue for me to break out of my shell. Almost immediately after that first time playing with the other students, I felt free of my anxiety. I became comfortable expressing myself in class, and with other students. I started building friendships and meaningful connections with some people that I hope are with me until the very end. Through football, I learned how to communicate with others, how to be a leader, how to help others grow, and how to work with others towards a common goal. I learned what it meant to work hard every day, repeating the same tasks to sharpen my skills, and build towards eventual success. I learned to pick myself, and others, up after a bad day, and to not let a setback lead to failure. I learned to share my passion others and to pull the best out of others to reach their full potential. That day that I was invited to play football at recess, changed the trajectory of my life in so many ways. Now, football is an extremely physical sport, and as you get older, it gets harder and harder to continue to play. Yet, my relationship with football did not end as injuries started to add up and the soreness after a game began lasting longer than I was accustom to. Our relationship evolved. The professional football season is short, from September to early February, and Sunday is the day when most games are played. As an adult, my friends and I have very different schedules. Some are in school, some have their careers, and some running their own business, it is hard to find time to get everyone together, but football has become that reason. During football season, we congregate at someone’s house and spend whole Sundays watching football together, catching up, and spending valuable time together. Each year, it becomes more about seeing the ones you love rather than actually watching football.
Football has also led me to travel to different parts of the United State that I have never seen before, I have met people in several different cities and built lasting relationships that can weather long distance. Now, I know people I can reconnect with any time I am in their city. I get recommendations from the city’s own, for the best places to eat and stay while visiting. It is special to be able to experience certain cities as one of their own residents. Ultimately, my goal is to visit all thirty-two stadiums across the United States, and who knows what else I get to experience along the way. These road trips have also become an important part of the journey as it serves me as a way to clear my mind, and reflect on life, the road trips have become vital to my mental health. Through fantasy football leagues, I am able to keep up my competitive spirit and stay connected with friends that have moved to different parts of Canada. We have online group chats to keep up-to-date on all football related news, and more importantly, each other’s lives. A key to the story of my relationship with football, that student that I referenced earlier that first invited me to join the other students at recess, he is someone that I, now, consider a brother. A part of my family just as my other two brothers, our relationship flourished from that day on, and I am so thankful. We have been there for each other through the hardest times in our lives, and we have celebrated with each other in the most joyful times. An unbreakable bond has formed, and it all started with a shared love of football. Sabri Soufian is a loving son, brother, and friend. He is a teacher candidate at York University, excited about the challenge ahead. He is looking forward to continue mentoring youth, and feeling privileged for the opportunity to help shape their futures. Sabri is a successful financial advisor, wishing to promote financial literacy for all Canadians. Sabri is focused on improving every day, enjoying the present and trusting that the future will be ever satisfying. Sabri provides support to others, paying special attention to mental health, and well-being. Sabri is hopeful for a future that is barrier-free to all.
“Critics who treat 'adult' as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. When I became a man, I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.” - C.S. Lewis
Friendship Bracelets Lilyana Robichaud
Lilyana likes to keep things, especially when they are given to her by children. She has a large wooden chest, with the letters “love mail” written in it. It holds all the pictures, cards, crafts, keychains, and friendship bracelets that she has received throughout the years. She does this because she believes that when children give her a gift made for her, they are giving her a bit of their hearts. These mementos are capsules, intended to hold together the memory they share. Originally, Lilyana only kept them because she thought it would be cruel to throw them away. She saw many adults thank excited, happy children for their present and toss it out as soon as the child leaves. This seemed disingenuous and heartless to her, so she made sure to keep everything she was given. Eventually, she was surprised to find that when she looked at these gifts, she could recall many details about the giver. Unfortunately, due to the large number of children that she has worked with, she has forgotten most of them. The small objects that she has received over the years have kept the givers into her memory much better than she realized they would. Lilyana has been a camp counsellor nearly every summer since she was fourteen, so the most common type of gifts that she has stored are friendship bracelets. It takes a lot of time to make a bracelet, especially for little fingers. Help is also required to tie the knots, so children are very picky for whom they make a bracelet. Even the fact that they are called friendship bracelets are of great importance to children. Admittedly, it might seem silly to write of these trinkets as if they are heirlooms; however, children consider them very important. This mean that Lilyana treated them as important too. She had decided that she would never look down on the things the children find valuable because that would belittle them. Perhaps because she took this so seriously, she has memorised every bracelet given to her and the child that it came from. Additionally, they are encoded with many of the interactions that she had with that child. Looking at a certain blue bracelet brings up a little boy that loved to perform. When he would become restless, she would have him, and a few of his outgoing friends, perform a skit they come up with in front of the other children. She remembers how she the parents warned her that he is very mischievous but ended up finding him friendly and honest. A shell bracelet was given to her by a girl who wanted to be the world’s best big sister. She was gentle and caring, but also very shy. The token holds the memory of all the different strategies Lilyana tried before she found how she could get the girl to open up. Some of the memories are a source of pride and some of shame. At times Lilyana looks at a bracelet, given to her by a child and feels she let them down. These cause her to sit and reflect on what she did wrong and how to avoid making the same mistake. These objects have become more than just nostalgic, they evoke a kind of meditation in Lilyana. They are like case studies of her actions, so she studies them to improve herself and her interactions with children. These reflections can bring on such strong emotions that thinking back on the lives she crossed paths with she can be moved to tears. After much time spent in meditation over the bracelets, Lilyana found that the best way to engage children is at their level. This means that their concerns need to be taken seriously, even if they seem insignificant to an adult. It also means taking genuine pleasure in that they find fun. It will not do to simply watch over the children, yelling commands, and demanding obedience. As Lewis mentioned, adults should not feel shame to play with children in childish ways and Lilyana would argue that it would be detrimental for teachers to put up walls between themselves and their students. Seeing adolescents’ difficulties as trivial and looking down on them for being inexperienced harms everyone involved. It is not a way to build a safe space in the classroom, nor is it an effective way to teach. If a teacher wants to be given lots of friendship bracelets, that
is to say, if they want their students to be moved by what they learn, they must first demonstrate that they value their life experiences. Friendship bracelets might seem like a less personal evocative object than most. Especially since they belong to children that had little time in Lilyana’s life. However, they hold a strong attachment to her, for each individual child, as well as the lesson that they represent collectively. They serve as a reminder of past triumphs and mistakes that she meditates on, hoping to improve herself. Furthermore, they represent Lilyana’s ideology towards building connections between teacher and student. Some students struggle with very serious problems, and it is important to address those; however, every student struggles with some small aspect of growing up. Lilyana wants her students to know she will not ridicule them for being confused by their adolescence and that their concerns will be taken seriously. Lilyana was born in an Eastern European country called Bulgaria. The country had been Socialist until the early 1990’s, so it was quite impoverished. Her parents immigrated to Canada with their four children in an attempt to give them a better life. When Lilyana was in high school, she met her future husband and married him seven years later. Together, they bought a house to build their new family. She graduated from Wilfrid Laurier University with a Bachelor of English and started attending the Intermediate to Senior level of the Bachelor of Education at York University.
GAME BOY ADVANCE SP Harpit Samra He watched kids stand in front of the machines, transfixed, their hands melded to controllers, their bony arms like umbilical cords joining human and machine. He asked the kids questions about what made a game good. Arakawa realized that the most successful games had something the players couldn't articulate. The words used to describe them were those usually reserved to describe forms of intimacy between people. It was as if the players and the game itself somehow merged. ― David Sheff, Game Over, Press Start to Continue: How Nintendo Conquered the World
My experience with gaming started with the Nintendo GameCube and 007: Nightfire. I say experience when I was actually only an observer. It wasn’t that my brother and male cousins didn’t let me play; it was that they didn’t include me. When they played on the GameCube it was a boys’ event, a boys’ club, and all I was allowed to do was navigate the map and solve any puzzles in the game. I sat to the side and observed as they shot assassins and drove cars through snowy landscapes. I was there but I wasn’t part of them. I was an outsider. It wasn’t until that I was 12 that I got to experience gaming. The Game Boy Advance SP came into my hands by accident. My brother went out and bought a game cartridge (Need for Speed Most Wanted) for a system we didn’t have, and rather than returning it, my dad bought us the handheld system. It became mine because my brother bores of it: the screen too small, the play too simplistic, and the games childish. It was small but was mine. It is a perfect compact silver square and when closed is about 8.4 x 8.2 x 2.44 cm. On the left side is the volume slider and on the right side is the power switch. In the front is a slot for the gaming cartridge which makes a clicking noise when you slide in a game. It opens with a soft click to reveal a square screen on top. On the bottom are the controls: the cross shaped D-pad for movement, six action buttons: two on the back, L and R, four on the front A, B, Select and Start, a backlight button and finally on the back a charging port and a link port for a game link cable to connect to the Game Boy Advance, Game Boy or another Game Boy Advance SP. It’s scuffed now, with scratches everywhere and the paint worn in some places. When your finger slides the power button from off to on, there’s a snap and then the screen lights up. A clear trill resounds as the rainbow-coloured logo appears letter by letter, and it ends with a bright ring before the game launches. I remember this console being my first step into the boys’ world but also something for myself. I took it everywhere in my pocket like when I went to visit relatives, when I went to India, and on long bus and car rides. As my brother and cousins would play, I would find a corner and game. If it wasn’t in my pocket, I’d feel uncomfortable, exposed, and vulnerable in some way. As a kid who didn’t make a lot of friends, who had a hard time forming connections, and was shy, gaming was my escape. Lonely children find ways and things to help them cope in a world where they don’t fit; gaming was mine. I wasn’t lonely or worried about anything as I sat for hours and hours entirely immersed and oblivious to the outside world as I played. The first game I viscerally remember playing is Pokémon FireRed. I was awed and surprised that gaming could be so fun, that I could be a trainer, that I could catch Pokémon and battle with them. That I could be part of a story. I expanded into other genres and consoles as I grew. I had to learn battle strategies, consider what weapons were the best suited for battle, and I had to solve puzzles and riddles. I learned new words as I read the dialogue on screen. I explored what death and loss meant as characters lost loved ones or were betrayed and what friendship meant as characters built connections. I found that I enjoyed games that were story driven and single player. I hated multiplayer games because I
enjoy being alone. I am a quiet person that doesn’t like the intrusion of others into my private realms. I learned what it meant to write a story that moved, a story that made you feel. But not all that I learnt was good. When you love something, you must be aware of its flaws and limitations. As I played more and more, expanding to different consoles, I realized that gaming, like the console’s namesake, Game Boy, was and still is to an extent a very male dominated world that excludes girls and many others. Gaming was built on misogynistic views, over-sexualized and simplistic depictions of women, and was a place where the majority of the playable characters were straight white men. Jokes were made about any sexuality that wasn’t heterosexual. It was a space where girls were reduced to damsels or sexual caricatures. This sparked in me an anger so deep that sometimes I felt scorched by it–a disgust, a repulsion at how society viewed me and others. This led to me creating my own stories where there were developed and flushed out female characters, characters of colour, characters of different sexualities who had internal lives and were human because I refused to let these depictions I was bombarded by to be the truth. I refused to let them define me and others. If the gaming world couldn’t make a place for me then I would do it myself. I started to support games, movies, novels and shows that broke these stereotypes and gave a voice to people like me. Gaming has gotten better in years; there is more diversity and representation now as the world progresses. It’s slow. But it is getting there.
Harpit Samra has a double BA Honours in English and Creative Writing and is currently pursuing a BA in Education. When not studying she can be found by the sound of keyboard keys clicking as she writes. When not writing she can be found with a Nintendo Switch or a PS5 controller in her hands not noticing the shifts in time as she plays.
Work Cited Sheff, David. Game Over, Press Start to Continue: How Nintendo Conquered the World. New York, Vintage Books, 1994.
Love is the crowning grace of humanity, the holiest right of the soul, the golden link which binds us to duty and truth, the redeeming principle that chiefly reconciles the heart to life, and is prophetic of eternal good. Francesco Petrarch, Notable Thoughts About Women: A Literary Mosaic (Ballou, 1882, p. 311)
The Gold Pendant Necklace Nathalie Sanchez Zepeda
Short, long, silver, gold, colourful, beads, diamonds, chain, and choker are some of the many different types of necklaces that people wear. People wear jewelry such as necklaces as fashion statements, symbolizing wealth status and self-expression. Others receive necklaces as gifts and some like to wear necklaces with their birthstone that convey a meaningful message. People also have their preference in sorting their jewelry. Jewelry can be organized in boxes, hung on walls or closets and it can also be placed on a stand. When I look at my necklace stand, I see all types of necklaces but there is one necklace in particular that stands out the most. This necklace is one that has an important significance and value to me. In terms of value I am not implying the worth of the necklace but instead this necklace represents the values that I carry with me that somehow influences my way of living. My necklace is a gold necklace. The necklace fits loosely around my neck and is slightly below my collarbone. A series of small gold interlocking pieces form the chain of my necklace. Both ends of the chain are connected through a lobster clasp. In one of the chain pieces where the lobster clasp interlinks has the name Italy on it, perhaps it denotes where the necklace was made. In this case, my necklace was either made in Italy or was made by using materials from Italy. The pendant of my necklace comes in the form of a rectangular shape. It is connected to the chain by a thin rectangular bail. What makes this necklace special is the art of the pendant. A picture of the Virgin Mary is engraved onto the pendant. The golden necklace as I like to describe it symbolizes two things for me. It symbolizes love and faith. The earliest memory I have of my necklace was from the age of one to two years old. However, I was granted my necklace as a gift from my parents when I was only six or eight months at the time of my baptism. As many can imagine, when I was a baby, my necklace fitted loosely around my small neck and further below my collarbone, perhaps near my stomach. When I flip through family albums, I see pictures of myself as an infant and well into my childhood wearing the necklace. Memories come to mind, one day at school I was playing recess with my friends when out of nowhere I felt my necklace fall to the ground. I panicked and realized that the clasp had broken. Luckily, my necklace got repaired. When I think of my necklace, I think of my parents. My parents were the ones who chose the necklace and with love they gifted it to me. My parents usually like to give my brothers and I gifts that carry a sentimental value. Therefore, the necklace is very valuable to me. The necklace in some way represents their love towards me. My parents are the most important people in my life and when I wear and look at my necklace, it reminds me of the love that exists between us. Amidst the love that the necklace represents, my necklace also symbolizes my faith. I grew up and was raised as a Catholic. I was baptized and also received the sacraments of Holy Communion and Confirmation. I also attended Catholic elementary and secondary school and I attend mass on Sundays. As a Catholic, I try my best to live by the values and beliefs of my religion and I view my relationship with God as important. My necklace which carries a picture of the Virgin Mary represents my faith and religion. In all the special events in my life such as my birthdays, graduations, attending important celebrations and in receiving the sacraments of Baptism, Holy Communion and Confirmation I have worn my necklace. My necklace can be seen as a marker of important events in my life. I also feel a sense of protection when I wear my necklace. I feel guided by my faith and love. As a child, I remember wearing my necklace and moving the pendant to the right and left constantly whenever I felt nervous or scared. It is a habit that I continue to do at times even now as an adult. Although I do not wear my necklace on a daily basis, the significance and value of the necklace transcends above all other objects or
possessions that I own. It carries memories of my past during infancy, childhood, adolescence including adulthood as I continue to wear my necklace during special occasions. It essentially represents who I am as a person. I am shaped by the love of my parents which is somehow carried with me when forming relationships with friends and family. I consider myself capable of forming bonds with those around me. Family and friends who become family are very important in my life. My faith also builds who I am as a person since not only was I born into a Catholic family, but I have decided to continue living as a Catholic out of my personal choice. Personally, love and faith are two of the utmost importance for me. Presently, at the age of twenty-two I like to think of the future without discarding the present. I like to live in the moment but also have plans for the future in terms of family, relationships and career. I have not received any jewelry passed down from generations. Interestingly, I would like to pass down my necklace to my future children as a sign of love that will not only be traced back to me but also to my parents. Memories can be traced back to objects and objects can represent many things in a person’s life. My golden necklace embraces both aspects. I relive memories of my life, feel surrounded with love and guided by my faith through my golden necklace.
Nathalie Sanchez Zepeda is a Latina born in Toronto, Ontario and was raised and currently lives in Scarborough, Ontario. She has recently graduated from York University from the Mathematics for Education program where she majored in mathematics. Currently, she is a teacher candidate studying at York University in the consecutive Bachelor of Education program. Nathalie has two brothers, one older brother and one younger brother. Her favourite hobbies include going on walks with family and friends, listening to music, watching movies and decorating in times of special festivities. Nathalie’s favourite colour is purple and enjoys Italian cuisine. Her goal is to become a role model teacher for future students. References Ballou, M.M. (1882). Notable Thoughts About Women: A Literary Mosaic. United States: Houghton, Mifflin and Company.
Grandpa’s sailboat James Dyer
“The things with which people interact are not simply tools for survival, or for making survival easier and more comfortable. Things embody goals, make skills manifest, and shape the identities of their users. Man is not only homo sapiens or homo ludens, he is also homofaber, the maker and user of objects, his self to a large extent a reflection of things with which he interacts. Thus objects also make and use their makers and users.”
-Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi & Eugene Rochberg-Halton, “The Nature Of Things”, 1981
I remember a knock on my bedroom door, being halfway startled out of the pile of lego that I had been engrossed in, and my mother coming into my room with something behind her back. She explained that she had come home from visiting my grandparents and had brought home a gift from my grandfather. I remember expecting chocolate, probably a kinder egg that had a toy in it that I could doubtlessly incorporate into the play world I had just been ripped out of. That was the typical little gift when grandma and grandpa came over. Not this time though; this time it was a hand made wooden model sailboat, maybe six inches long, painted and varnished with canvas sails and a neat Dutch flag on the top of the mast.
After the initial disappointment of the toy not being wrapped in a chocolate shell, I was further disappointed to learn that it was not, in fact, a toy at all. It was a model to be sat on my shelf and admired - Grandpa made this by hand after all. I must have appreciated the gesture at the time but as a child with very limited capacity for sentimentality, especially for things that didn’t go bang, light up, or click together, I immediately lost interest for the toy that wasn’t a toy.
I also hated cleaning my room. I really hated it - to the point where I had to be forced to do it and whoever forced me would suffer all of the little boy rage I could muster. In one instance of this, after being faced with every humane piece of leverage my parents possessed, I sought a target for revenge. The poor wooden boat was the ideal mark, being of little use to my play time and most definitely cared for by my mother more than me. I snapped the main mast in two and made a pathetic attempt to cut my way through the canvas sails with plastic safety scissors.
When she saw my handiwork my mother immediately took the model away and put it in the top shelf of the linen closet - amongst many of the family heirlooms. This placement amongst the items most treasured in my family was surprising, so too was my mother’s reaction - it wasn’t anger or disappointment, it was hurt. I realized that I had failed in a responsibility and accepted that the boat was both literally and figuratively beyond my grasp.
The boat stayed on the shelf for what must have been six or seven years, popping in and out of my head until I had matured enough to at least recognize why I felt guilty. One night I went to the linen closet and quietly took the boat and returned it to my desk, still a tattered reminder of my not being ready for my grandfathers gift, but it was wanted nonetheless. I attempted to fix it with some glues I figured would work. Having no experience fixing much of anything however, I failed at that too. It stayed broken on my desk for years, even after I moved away to university and later for work, tucked behind a picture frame so that my parents couldn’t see that I had reclaimed my grandfathers boat.
My grandfather died in 2019. I had made the drive home to Ottawa to see him before he passed, staying in my old room that had largely remained as I left it, as I did every time I came back to visit. Mostly I would see the boat behind the books or picture frame, maybe reposition it so that the mast looked like it was still standing, feel guilty again, and go about the rest of my visit not thinking any more about it. Sitting in my room having lost my grandfather however, I resolved to finally fix the sailboat. It was a simple fix honestly, greatly overestimated in my mind but then again, in my mind it wasn’t just a boat I was repairing. Some sanding and some gluing later (the right glue this time) the mast stood on its own again and I was faced with a realization that this boat had now felt the work of two people. The hands of my grandfather shaping, gluing and painting it, and mine doing similar work, both of us thinking of each other as we did it.
I don’t feel guilty about breaking the sailboat anymore and the boat itself has taken on a new meaning. It still stays at home in Ottawa, on my desk that was commandeered by my dad a few years ago. I see the boat every time I return home but instead of evidence of a sad mistake it feels more like a warm reminder that I can grow and can be responsible for things, that I could forgive myself for making a mistake, and that I love my Grandpa very much, and it feels like he knows all that too.
James Dyer is a teacher candidate at York University and spends his remaining time as a rowing coach, budding woodworker and cycling enthusiast. He loves the outdoors and is more likely found in a boat, on a bike, or in a tent than anywhere inside. Most importantly he is passionate about people and revels in their capacity for good.
Lucidity came slowly I awoke from dreams of untying a great knot It unraveled like a braid into what seemed were thousands Of separate strands of fishing line Attached to coarse behavior, it flowed A calm it urged, what else is here? -
Japanese Breakfast, “Paprika”
MY GUITAR Gregor Hemon
I started playing guitar when I was about eight years old, taking lessons at one of the three music stores ten minutes away from my parents’ home. I learned how to play simple chord progressions and classic rock riffs on an inexpensive Yamaha guitar, a simple steel-string acoustic guitar with a reflective gloss finish and a shiny black pickguard that cost under $100. Perfect for someone who had not been able to stick with a hobby for more than three months like myself. I loved that guitar, it served its purpose of teaching me the basics of the instrument and I stuck with the hobby because of it. But the Yamaha was not My Guitar. It took five years until I started looking for My Guitar. At that point I had fallen out of love with the Yamaha because I started playing music that was heavy with fingerpicking and the steel strings would hurt the tips of my fingers, frustrating me every time I played. So, I set out to look for a nylonstring guitar at one of the nearby music stores. The store in question was a square brick building on the busy arterial street near my house. Differentiating it from the other sqaure brick building was a forest green banner with “Pongetti’s Musical Instruments” written on it in crisp white lettering, but what truly made it stand out was the interior. Warm incandescent light flooded over drums and keyboards that took up most of the floor space at the front of the store, with harsh fluorescent light illuminating guitar pedals, microphones, and amps guarded by one of the Pongettis at the back of the store. The store had a unique smell that came from the thick black carpet covering the floor, the plastic and metal of the keyboards and drums, and the warm wood of the guitars arranged neatly in rows down the length of the store. In these rows was where I found and bought My Guitar. I was thirteen years old, and I had just withdrawn half of the money in my bank account. I took this massive sum of $500 and brought it to Pongetti’s to buy the most beautiful guitar that was there. I remember comparing My Guitar to the Yamaha and marveling over how different they were. It had a smooth, soft, matte finish, with a surface unbroken by a shiny pickguard. My Guitar had a precise geometric rosette decorating the sound hole, intricate engravings around the tuning pegs, and a warm sound that came from the nylon strings stretched across its short and wide neck. My Guitar came with a hard plastic case as well, vastly different from the soft fabric case that stored the Yamaha. This case gave My Guitar an almost indescribable smell; it smelled sweet and rich, with a musty mothball like scent, which mixed with the warm woodsy scent of My creating a fragrance that never fails to trigger my memories of playing it whenever I smell it now. Buying My Guitar was a milestone and a representation of the first big purchase I had ever made with my own money. It was also a diploma, representing my graduation from the songs and skills taught by the Yamaha to the new, more challenging lessons of My Guitar. I was not an expert at the guitar by any means. I could play a couple of songs well and had a knack for picking up new songs quickly, but I had no ear for pitch or any understanding of music theory. Playing the guitar was a hobby, something I did for myself and very rarely for others, until I grew older and entered high school. Playing guitar became a way for me to understand myself and my emotions. High school was overwhelming and stressful, which made me feel like my brain was tangled up in one impossible knot that left me unable to properly process and understand every new emotion I experienced. My Guitar came to life then, untangling my knotted brain by helping me focus on something that was not my own thoughts. As my fingers traced complex patterns across the strings, I could let my mind relax, settle, and analyze whatever I was feeling. I no longer play My Guitar. I am not sure exactly why I stopped. Maybe I became too busy when I started university, maybe I just lost interest, or maybe I had learned what I needed from My Guitar. I like to think this last reason is true. I like to think that My Guitar taught me how to regulate my emotions in a healthy way, how to calm down, clear my head, and untangle whatever knot is tying up my brain. Though I do not play anymore, I have not forgotten My
Guitar. I brought it with me when I moved out of my parents’ house a year ago, even though I had not played it regularly for six years. Now it sits tucked away in a corner of my apartment, its sweet-smelling case collecting dust, waiting to help me unpick another knot in my brain.
Hannah Montana Cassandra Chan
Growing up, I spent a lot of my time sitting in front of our television set watching my favourite TV shows. I especially loved the Family Channel. I had a whole list of favourite shows. Some of these included Kim Possible, The Suite Life of Zach and Cody, The Proud Family, Wizards of Waverly Place. Watching TV was always a sacred time because of the different worlds I could be transported to. It was a way to relax, it was something to get excited about, and it was time to spend with my family. Now when I reminisce with friends, I will always ask “What TV shows did you watch as a kid?” because I have come to realize that all of these shows are a large reason why I am the way I am today.
The show that stuck with me the absolute most was Hannah Montana, and it was one of my favourite parts of my day. Me and my brother, Mark, would go down to the basement where our big boxy television set sat. I would either sit on our bright, striped futon, or I would sit on the floor cross-legged when things got more intense. I can still feel the soft carpet as I would sit on the floor. When I was finally allowed to watch Family Channel, I had felt so grown up and cool. I was able to watch shows that didn’t have such a strong educational element. Like Hannah Montana, many of these shows were about high school kids. I wanted to grow up to be in high school so badly. Spoiler: my high school experience was very dull and most of my memories of high school consist of my ugly beige uniform pants. I took such a liking to Hannah Montana because I felt as though I related to Hannah Montana. Sounds crazy but hear me out. Miley Stewart had a solid friend group and a supportive family, while still dealing with bullies. She was just another girl next door, but she was able to accomplish so much. I aspired to be like her. I felt like there were so many possibilities in the world watching this show. It felt good and had me looking forward to growing up. I knew that I would not be famous, but I still felt encouraged to dream big.
Hannah Montana was not just a TV show in my house. I had her Barbies, I had her Wii karaoke game, I had a Hannah Montana trivia game. When Hannah Montana and Miley Cyrus Best of Both Worlds Concert came out on DVD and was sold with 3D glasses, I begged my parents to get them for me. When we discovered that they were sold out at the first Walmart, we went to another and then another and I dragged my parents to each store until we were able to find it. Without knowing it, Hannah Montana slowly became a massive part of my life. It even changed where I wanted my life to go. In grade four, I remember my teacher asked us to write a journal entry on what we wanted to be when we grew up. That was the first year I had changed my answer from teacher to international pop superstar! I had joined my school’s choir and suddenly, I was singing all the time. It became so important to me because Hannah Montana always made me laugh all while teaching me some life lessons. She taught me that living more than
one life is not always glamorous and it complicates your life a lot. What drew me to this show was the way I felt watching it. I was so intrigued by the idea of living this double life, being famous but also just living as a teenager. A few years later, it all came to an end. Miley had to choose between Jake and Jesse, revealed her true identity to the world, and went on with her life. The final season was an exciting one. After it finished there were only reruns. I vividly remember walking up to my Dad to ask him if he could find any new episodes for me. Then it hit me. There were no more new episodes. This was the end of an era. Before this moment I had just been going thorough my childhood, never having to think about the way my life will change in the future. I very quickly came to realize that there are eras ending all the time in my life. Elementary school came to an end, then high school, then my undergrad. I slowly stopped playing with my toys, all while slowly I stopped watching Family Channel. I started using social media and started watching shows that my parents were watching. This was a sad realization because this was the first time where I felt my life really changing. I was attached to this show and completely invested. More invested than any other show on Family Channel. I wanted the show to just keep going until I outgrew it, but it finished before that point. I had to let go of something that was important and embrace the other shows that were coming. I realized life is going to change and changes can be good and exciting. It also taught me to embrace those changes in life. I have always found changes to be hard, but I am constantly excited and grateful to be in the era I am in and am excited for all the eras in my future.
Cassandra Chan is a teacher candidate at York University and her teachable is geography. Ever since she was little, she has wanted to be a teacher but that changed after watching Hannah Montana. She wanted to be a worldwide pop star for a few years but is not because – as much as she loves to still sing Hannah Montana songs in the car – she is not very good at it. Hence the return to education.
You procrastinate the world, it's gonna pass you by Already runnin' late, instead of runnin', better fly You crashed into the ground, and hard You pick yourself and laugh You keep on shootin' for the stars What other choice do you have? Hannah Montana, Kiss It Goodbye
References Molinder, N., et al. (2010). Kiss It Goodbye [Lyrics]. Retrieved from https://www.musixmatch.com/lyrics/Hannah-Montana/Kiss-It-Goodbye
“The thing is not to write what no one else has written but to write what only you could have written. I found this fragment in my old notebooks. The person who wrote that couldn't have known what would happen: how a voice hollows how words you once loved can wither on a page.” Nam Le
Journal Michael Celotti
Throughout grade school and in the early years of high school, I would say that I was an introvert, very to myself, did not create much conversation, I enjoyed being by myself. With all of this time by myself I always had a journal with me during class, and not just a journal for me to do homework, but a journal for me to create stories, doodle, and be able to do whatever I wanted in it. My journals throughout the years were filled with doodles, drawings, stories, free writings, and everything else you can think of. I would write in it whenever I could during lessons, recess, even sometimes would bring it to the washrooms, it was a place for me that brought comfort, and I was able to create and imagine anything in the world, it was an object that I had a great connection with and grew a very strong relationship with.
This journal for me could be described as being fun, creative, imaginative, judgement free, safe, interesting, and personal. This object was evocative for me because it became an extension of my thoughts and feelings, and it was a way for me to express them. Whenever I was sad, I would draw rain clouds, and sad faces, and sometimes write about the bad things that had happened. When I was happy. I wrote and drew about the things that made me happy, there is one story that I still remember to this day about my journals. In grade 8 when I had made the soccer team, I remember we played our first game in front of my home school and I ended up scoring that game. It was one of the happiest moments of childhood, I remember the joy I felt of everyone hugging me, and the screams from the people in the crowd. It was very exhilarating, and I’ll never forget it. That same night the first thing I did was write about it in my journal. I had drawn a picture of how I scored, wrote about the emotions I was feeling, it was a great outlet for me and it became part of me. This object became invested with the words, feelings, and meanings, I ascribed it to be because, it was not just an object that I would use to write in when I was bored during class, or did it because I had to. It became evocative for me because it was an outlet of me as a person, my feelings, emotions, and moments in my life. It was something I enjoyed doing even when I was writing about bad things that had happened to me or sad moments. It was an escape from reality and a place of no judgement because, no one else saw it other than me, so it did not have to make sense to anyone, it was not getting marked, there is not right or wrong answers, I was in control of my own story and my own work, so I think that is why I became so invested in this object. This object allowed me to express myself, being a child who was very introverted and did not talk to much people, it was hard for me to express my feelings and emotions into words to others, so this journal allowed me to do that and I was able to relieve and sadness, and/or express my happiness, or any other emotions and feelings I was feeling at the time. Whenever I would finish one, I would just start another. I had a mountain of journals, and every page was different in its own way. I would say the most important lesson that this journal taught me was that, it is okay to express your emotions or however you’re feeling in the moment, as I got older I knew that I could not write in a journal every time something would happen to me, especially if those things were more serious and I really needed to talk to someone. The journalling helped me be aware of how I felt and made it more comfortable for me to talk to people whenever something good or bad had happened to me, it actually helped me with becoming more extroverted and being able to talk to people easier.
In conclusion, the journal was a place for me to escape, a place for me to feel safe of judgement, and for me to express my emotions and feelings. It became an evocative object for me because I grew a very strong relationship with it due to the fact that it was an extension of myself, and I knew that I was the controller of my own story and everything else that was written in there. It became a part of me and I truly think it helped shape the person I am today, which I am very happy about. Those journals taught me a lot of things but ultimately helped me become more social and create relationships with people I never thought I could have.
I am someone now who loves to talk to people, create conversation, and meet others. I also enjoy being by myself and at peace with my own thoughts. Sports are a major part in my life, specifically soccer, it is a sport that I played all my life and has taught me a lot about life. Family is everything to me I have grown up with all of my family on the same street as me and they all play a huge part in my life. I love to travel, see new places, and create new memories with the people around me.
LEGO Keegan Durie
As it was for many children, Lego occupied a great deal of my time and attention as a young boy. I can’t be certain how much Lego I had, but I know there was enough to fill at least two large Tupperware storage containers. I have my parents to thank for this, as they had the means and support to fuel my Lego collection, keep it growing and freshly stocked. I’m not sure if they were aware this was an excellent way to develop my imagination and creativity, or whether they just appreciated the fact that it occupied my attention for hours on end, perhaps it was both, for both are true. Regardless of their reasons, my folks allowed me to pursue my interest in Lego from a young age, which further developed my personality and skillset for what would be the rest of my life. Lego has been around for a long time, making several advances in its design and production along the way. What started out as simple building blocks, has evolved into one of the largest toy companies in the world. Lego’s products include sets containing themes which touch many aspects of life. These days, children can buy a Lego set with themes ranging from architecture, to workplaces, to collaboration with popular tv shows and movies. A close friend of mine recently bought a set, which once assembled, created a model version of Jerry Seinfeld’s apartment, showcasing that Lego is not simply reserved for young children. The scope of Lego’s themes prove they can be fun for any person regardless of their age or interests. I can vividly recall when my parents bought me a Batman themed Lego set as a young boy, and the excitement I had to be able to combine my love for Lego with a character I admired from the world of superheroes. I think this was an excellent business idea on the part of Lego, to be able to expand children’s interests beyond the simple concept of building blocks. Despite the expansive scope of products that Lego now produces, I believe none of it is critical to instilling in children the creativity and imagination, which comes with its limitless potential for play. Having an abundance of varied pieces allowed me, as well as many other kids, the ability to use Lego to stretch my imagination to whatever reaches I could think of with enough time and stimulation. Lego, as a company, is very aware of the positive effect its products have on kids, and they take pride in this aspect of their toys. Lego has hit the sweet spot in their product by providing for children the combination of imagination, creativity, fun and learning, all in one toy. These traits let children be active and engaged participants in healthy development by having each of these components interact with each other, and in turn are subconsciously passed on to the child playing with Lego. I am certain my time playing with Lego helped me develop a sense of creativity and imagination, which is still a part of me today, and probably always will be. All of my memories of playing with Lego are very fond to me, because they are associated with play, joy and excitement. I’d never actively thought about how it developed my personality and skillset, but in retrospect its glaringly obvious. The countess hours I spent playing with Lego was continually influencing my creativity by forcing me to use logic and reasoning to come up with realistic ways to build new things, a personality trait I use today in my everyday life. Being a Green Industries teacher candidate, I have worked for many years in the
landscaping design and construction industry, where my creativity skills allowed me to excel at my job. In working in a design and problem-solving based occupation, I was constantly practicing the skills Lego initially helped me develop. This included imagining the possibilities that could be created with an empty landscape, finding alternative solutions to problems using limited materials, and all the while, having a fun sense of play. I pride myself in my ability to creatively problem solve in any aspect of my life, and I have to thank Lego for setting the stage for me to develop these skills. It’s funny to think about the hours I have spent playing with those little plastic blocks, and yet I haven’t had the desire the play with them for 15 to 20 years. When I think a little deeper about it, I really haven’t stopped playing with Lego all these years. The plastic blocks have been substituted for other material objects in my world, whether it’s been designing a flagstone patio, or attempting to assemble an Ikea product in record time. I’m thankful that I was able to develop my personality with this simple toy, and my hope is that one day I’ll able to provide my own children, as well as my future students, the opportunity to develop their own sense of imagination, creativity, play and learning.
Keegan Durie is a first-year teacher candidate at York University. His teachable is in Green Industries, as part of the Technical Education stream. Keegan has worked for many years in the Green Industries field, while also completing an Advanced Diploma in Architectural Technology, as well as a Bachelor of Commerce degree in Management Studies. Keegan was raised in Collingwood, Ontario and hopes to return there upon graduation from Teacher’s College.
More than a communicative tool, LEGO brings with it a culture of play whose many resonances guide its attachment potential. This evocativeness is only intensified by the fact that LEGO is not merely associated with childhood at large, but particularly with imagination and creativity, deeply generative practices that speak to the profundity of children’s self-expression. - Jonathan Rey Lee, DECONSTRUCTING LEGO: The medium and messages of Lego play
References Lee, J. R. (2020). Deconstructing LEGO: The Medium and Messages of LEGO Play. Germany: Springer International Publishing. lego.com
Images First image: https://www.realhomes.com/design/lego-storage-ideas Second image: https://dad-camp.com/survive-the-worldwide-lego-shortage/
Play is the mechanism by which children learn – how they experience their world, practice new skills, and internalize new ideas - and is therefore the essential “work of children” (Paley 2004). Through this continuous and expanding process, early skills give rise to new ones and new experiences are integrated with previous ones. Through play, children learn about the world and engage in activities that encourage their cognitive, emotional, and social development (Elkind 2007). For example, when a child bangs on a drum, she learns she can create a sound. Through play, she learns the important concept of cause and effect. – Gabriel Guyton, Using Toys to Support Learning and Development
THE MUSICAL TEDDY BEAR A’aishah Abdul Hameed
As a child, I loved stuffed animals. My latte brown musical teddy bear was the highlight of my childhood and, in many ways, was my best friend growing up. At the age of nine, I named the bear ‘Stella’ after my favourite character from the popular television show, Winx Club. I named it this because it reminded me of Stella and her bubbly personality. I even dressed up the bear by putting colourful hair clips on its ears and bracelets on the hand, like Stella would in the show. The bear was incredibly soft and squishy, making it warm and comforting to sleep with at night. Stella made me feel special as a child because of her inviting black button eyes and enormous pink smile. The soft and furry teddy bear had three hearts of different shades of pink and red attached to it and a curled arm. The words “hugs,” “kisses,” and “xoxo” was significant to me because it was a reminder of my mother’s warmth and care. Sometimes, when I would play with Stella, I would fall asleep, and my mother told me that I would put my hand and squeeze it into the bear’s arm just like a mother would hold tight onto their child. When my mom first bought me this teddy bear, it smelled like that distinct smell of the toy store, almost with a hint of warm hot chocolate. I used to think that since my mom bought it during Christmas time and the mall was filled with the various smells of hot cocoa, gingerbread cookies, and tinsel, it was the smell of winter. However, as time passed, the teddy bear started to smell like a fresh lavender field, which was my mother’s handiwork. She actually sprayed Stella with a lavender aroma to help with calming me down and reducing stress. In fact, the lavender scent was so soothing that when my younger sisters were having trouble sleeping, I would let them sleep with Stella, and they soundly fell asleep. Indeed, there was a strong emotional connection that I developed with my teddy bear as a child. The best part of my teddy bear was that it sang “Baby” by Justin Bieber. Like many other teenage girls, I was a big fan of Justin Bieber and his music. I specifically wanted this teddy bear because it played music from it, and I knew that it was something I could proudly show off to my friends at school. I associated this musical teddy bear with being popular and cool, which would garner the attention of others at school. And it worked! My friends were immediately fond of the teddy bear and would take turns playing with it during recess. They would play the song on repeat to the point that the boys would chuckle when they passed by us. I would blush a little, and my cheeks would warm up when the cute boys laughed at us, but I did not care because this bear was so special. My mother bought this for me at a tough time in our life. My father left our family, and that day was never the same. Whenever I think about how he just walked out with a silent and distant goodbye, my stomach just sinks inside, and I am completely numb. Every member of my family felt his absence. After my mom bought me this teddy bear, I began to enjoy life again and bring colour into my life and my mom’s and sisters’ lives as well. My warm smiles and contagious laughter while playing with Stella brought joy and comfort to my home. We felt like a family again after what felt like an eternity of pain. A memorable experience I remember is bringing Stella to school for the first time. Apart from all my friends getting excited to see her and play with her, my grade three teacher, Mrs. Ubbink, wanted me to present Stella at our next Show and Tell. I felt so accomplished at that moment that my teacher found Stella to be something unique and special to share with the rest of my class. I specifically recall Mrs. Ubbink telling me to share the strength associated with the teddy bear, as she knew my family situation. At the Show and Tell presentation, I presented Stella with silver flower hair clips clipped to the ears and a mint green bracelet tied to the bear’s hand. I played the Justin Bieber song to which the class started to sing along, and I expressed how Stella
symbolized strength because I chose to be happy and have a fresh start in my life despite my dad leaving. In life, we are often faced with challenging situations, and how we choose to move forward defines the person we become, creating a new and beautiful life journey. This teddy bear was evocative by its very nature because it represented my own story and different life events, making it meaningful and personal to me. Reflecting on my relationship with the teddy bear allowed me to become a stronger version of myself. After my dad left and my family was left to pick up the pieces, I taught myself to be strong and confident for my younger sisters and be a role model for them and someone they can look up to. In some ways, I think I matured a little too early for my age compared to my friends and other kids my age. Nevertheless, this was my life story, and I accepted it. The teddy bear was a powerful symbol of change and acceptance. I learned to accept reality and move on in my life. This evocative object from my past shaped my experiences, beliefs, and values today. It showed me the importance of realizing my own self-worth and building a strong personality that no one can shatter. As I built my confidence, I became more assertive in tackling any life problems that came my way and learned to handle difficult situations, whether it be at school or otherwise; thus, making me a stronger individual in all aspects. In this manner, childhood play can be seen as a vital part of a child’s life. Through play, I experienced my own world and began to develop essential life skills. In fact, by playing the song on repeat, my memorization skills improved significantly, which served me well during our school’s annual speech competition. As Turkle notes, objects act as companions to our emotional lives and we, in turn, become attached to these objects (Turkle, 2011). Stella, the teddy bear, was an emotional companion to me in my childhood and little did I know that it had taught me fundamental life lessons. A’aishah Abdul Hameed is a first-year teacher candidate at York University’s Faculty of Education. She is working towards a Bachelor of Education to teach law and social sciences in intermediate and senior classrooms. She researches and writes about socio-legal issues with particular interests in criminal justice, penal reform, human rights and legal policy, and forensic psychology. Her interests in socio-legal issues fuse together her passion for education to further expand the Grade 11 and Grade 12 law curriculum. She hopes to use her wealth of knowledge and passion for teaching to bring a new perspective to law classrooms and create a learning space that celebrates innovative and unorthodox teaching and learning strategies. References Guyton, G. (2011). Using Toys to Support Infant-Toddler Learning and Development. NAEYC. Retrieved from https://educate.bankstreet.edu/faculty-staff/6. Turkle, S. (2011). Evocative Objects: Things We Think With. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
I now know for certain that my mind and emotions, my fix on the real and my family’s well-being, depend on just a few grams of salt. But treatment’s the easy part. Without honesty, without a true family reckoning, that salt’s next to worthless. – David Lovelace
THE NINTENDO DS LITE Rivka Lee
“Can I please get a Nintendo DS for my birthday?” was the question I asked my parents as my 10th birthday drew near. I had been begging my parents for a Nintendo DS for about a year; they had become very popular amongst my peers at school as a fun pastime. As my 10th birthday rolled around, my parents agreed to buy me my first Nintendo DS off eBay. Two weeks passed and the day arrived – the day I would receive my Nintendo DS. As I held the newly delivered package containing my birthday gift, I felt ecstatic. The cardboard felt crisp and heavy, making the anticipation of opening the box even more exciting. I placed the box on my kitchen table and got out the utility knife to open the box. I slowly opened the box but was caught off guard by what I discovered inside. To my surprise, it wasn’t the blue Nintendo DS Lite that I had been hoping for. It was in fact blue, but a different model than I anticipated: the first generation of the Nintendo DS. I was very upset, but no refunds or exchanges were allowed from this seller on eBay. Begrudgingly, I accepted the birthday gift from my parents and went along playing on my new device. This is when I learned my first lesson – do your research when buying anything to avoid impulse buying and truly getting the item you have in mind. The weekend goes by faster than ever and next thing I know, I am back at school. Talking with my best friend at the time, I shared about how the Nintendo DS I got was not the one I hoped for. I complained about how upset I was that this happened. Her response to me was, “Do you want to play with my DS? I can lend it to you!” I responded in an instance: “What? I can’t ask you to do that! Your parents wouldn’t allow this!” Then she replied, “I don’t need to tell them. It can be a secret between us.” I responded hesitantly, “only if you’re sure because I don’t want to get you in trouble.” Later that week after school, she stuffed her ice blue Nintendo DS Lite in my bag in a corner of the school. I asked, “When should I return this to you?” She replied hastily, “It doesn’t matter. I don’t even care about it. You can have it.” Before I had time to respond, she left because her ride arrived to pick her up. Next thing I know, I have a mint condition, ice blue, Nintendo DS Lite in my backpack along with many popular games. Back at home, I secretly pulled out my new Nintendo DS lite in the colour of my dreams. I was scared to tell my parents about this device my
friend gave me because of what they might think or worse – they would make me return the device. For many weeks, I played with the Nintendo DS lite in secret without my parents knowing. I hid it so well that by the time they found out about it, I said that it was the original one they bought me and that I had been playing with it for weeks now, so they should have noticed. This lie that I told made me feel so guilty about having the Nintendo DS lite in my possession, but I was more fearful of what my parents would think of me if they found out. This was the second lesson I learned from my Nintendo DS – do not lie your way into getting what you want because guilt follows lies. After months of playing with the device, my friend never asked for it back, and a small crack formed on the hinge of the device from wear and tear. The device still worked perfectly fine and there was nothing wrong internally with the device, only exterior damage. However, the guilt that I felt was astronomical. The guilt of receiving an expensive device at no cost from a friend, combined with the guilt of hiding a part of myself from my parents, snowballed into making me feel as if I was unworthy of this device. This guilt built up internally and I did not know what to do with myself. On one hand, if I continued using the Nintendo DS lite, I would continue to feel guilty about having it in my possession. On the other hand, if I did not play with it, I felt that it would be putting the gift that my friend gave me to waste. Ten-yearold me felt very conflicted at this point as to how to proceed. A few months passed as I continued to deliberate on what to do. The crack remained, which got me thinking: “If I got rid of this device, I can buy a brand-new Nintendo DS lite, then it would be fine because I will pay for it myself.” The next decision I made taught me one of the biggest lessons ever. The next thing I remember after thinking this thought was that I proceeded to continuously throw the device against the hardwood ground to break the device. As I successfully broke the device that was now holding on by a thread literally, I ran to my parents saying, “My Nintendo broke! I need to buy a new one now. I’ll buy it with my own money this time.” A few weeks later, I proceeded to the game store with my family and there, with my own money, bought my brand-new Nintendo 3DS. As I reflect on this adventure of acquiring my DS today, I can see a lot of areas where I went wrong and could have made better decisions. As I look back now, the lessons that I learned were deeply rooted in how I hold my
values today. First, honesty is the best policy. In a world that normalizes lying to get to the top, it is important to be honest with yourself and those who care about you. Lying to yourself to rationalize your behaviour will bite you back and negatively affect you in the future. As I continued to rationalize my actions by lying to my parents and eventually breaking a device that worked fine, it caused me to constantly live with a burden of guilt. Next, when you do lie to yourself, let your future-self be empathetic with your past-self, realizing that your past-self did what they thought was the best decision to make at the time. No one is perfect and everyone is bound to make mistakes. Empathize and learn to forgive yourself. Take your mistakes and learn from them to grow stronger and become a better version of yourself. Who would have guessed that a small, 218 g device would make such an impact on my life in the way that I view myself and in what I value now? The Nintendo DS lite challenged me to live an honest life – honest to myself, my family, my friends, and all those around me. Rivka Lee is an aspiring teacher currently in her first year of the Bachelor of Education program in the Junior/Intermediate division at York University. Her teachable subject is General Sciences. She graduated from Western University with an undergraduate degree of a Bachelor of Science. She has lived and grown up in the Greater Toronto Area all her life. Her hobbies and interests include playing and making music, watching shows that evoke strong emotions, cooking food from various cuisines in the world and going on fun adventures with her friends. She values her family and close friends very much as they are dear to her heart.
Life is like a piano; the white keys represent happiness and the black show sadness. But as you go through life’s journey, remember that the black keys also create music. Author Unknown
The Piano Julia Romano
In grade one, I expressed to my parents that I would love to learn how to play an instrument. Specifically, I had wanted to learn how to play the piano. My brother who was two years older also expressed his desire to learn how to play the piano. One day my brother and I had walked home from elementary school as we had every single day. To our dismay, we walked into our house and saw a baby grand piano sitting in our spare room by the entrance. We were overjoyed and immediately began arguing over which one of us would test it out first. As I patiently waited for my turn to press the keys and listen to the sounds of the different notes, I could hardly contain my anticipation. That night, I spent hours at the piano teaching myself simple songs such as ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’ and ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.’ I taught myself these songs by pressing random notes and listening closely to the sounds that they would emit. I began to play the instrument as an extracurricular activity in which I attended private piano lessons until the age of 18 wherein I achieved level 8 through the conservatory of music which authorized me to teach piano through private lessons. The road that lay ahead of me was
complete with joy, struggle, overwhelmingness, and many tears. However, this journey was initiated by the object of one instrument which will remain the foremost evocative object within both my educational and personal journey of growth and learning. Playing the piano introduced me to the world of music and also assisted in other subject areas I struggled with in school such as math and science which similarly require an abundance of practice and repetition. The object which is most evocative in relation to my learning journey is the piano. It is an instrument I have played since the young age of six years old which introduced me to the responsibility and dedication required in playing an instrument. I believe that these are both fundamental skills that should be instilled in children. My piano is a large, glossy black instrument with snow white keys broken up by matte black ones in between them. It stands on three legs and has three gold petals hanging beneath the keyboard in front of a short black bench. The legs each stand on their own golden wheel with a small, round dish beneath it which is upturned around the edge. The words Pearl River are lined above the keyboard in gold lettering. Each note that is pressed evokes a different sound from the last. Some notes are low and dark sounding while others are happy and relaxing. The metronome which sits atop it is a deep burgundy with a golden pendulum that swings back and forth. The keys are cold beneath my fingertips. What makes this object evocative for me above all else is the history I share with it. I have experienced many life events, both happy and sad, which have often been soothed by playing the piano as a form of relaxation and stress relief. Growing up, I was required to practice the piano for at least thirty minutes every day which enabled this object to be a part of my everyday life. While reading the text by Sherry Turkle, it occurred to me that the piano represents an object of discipline and desire similarly to the story of the ballet slippers. Similarly to music, dance is also an art form that can be represented through evocative objects. The author explained that although the ballet shoe resembled joy through allowing her to do what she loves most which is ballet, it also reminds her of the damage it caused to her feet and legs due to the “restrictive nature of the shoe, combined with the demanding movement required of my feet within them” (Medina, 57). I can relate to the simultaneous feeling of both joy and distress caused by my evocative object as I would play the piano to express my feelings which varied from happiness or sadness to anger and overwhelmingness. I ascribe the piano to the words ‘free,’ ‘vent,’ and ‘learn’ as it has enabled me to vent my feelings, both positive and negative, caused by events within my everyday life and enabling a sense of freedom from these feelings. It has also allowed me to learn from these events through gaining the ability of open mindedness and improving my craft. It also symbolizes protection against my own emotions as I have utilized the piano to escape negative emotions or events within my real life, similarly to the story within the reading about the yellow raincoat. The author explains that “this notion of protection goes a long way toward explaining how people construct theories to gain a sense of control over their surroundings” which I believe encapsulates my experience using the piano as a method of escapism at times (Belmonte, 74). The piano has allowed me to grow independently as a person through coming to terms with the events which have greatly impacted my life. It has helped shape my experiences, beliefs, and values in the present through enabling me to view life through an optimistic lens which enabled my devoted to school, work, and extracurricular activities. It allowed me to gain valuable life skills that I was able to adopt at a young age including time management, discipline, and perseverance. These skills have enabled me to excel in various subject areas in school and devoting time to the subjects I struggled in. Overall, the piano has taught me many lessons about
who I am and that I am capable of much more than I once thought I was as a shy, timid young girl. I am proud of myself for consistently working at improving my ability to play the piano despite many obstacles that have come in the way in addition to difficult periods of my life. Touching back on Matthew Belmonte’s story of the yellow raincoat, it was stated that he imagines “life as a film being screened by an incompetent projectionist” (Belmonte, 74). Similarly, I imagine life as a long, complex classical piano piece complete with highs, lows, points of happiness and sadness. My name is Julia Romano and I am currently in my first year within the Concurrent Education program at York University. I recently completed my honours undergraduate degree in Interdisciplinary Social Science. My teachable subjects are Social Science and English which I plan to teach in the Intermediate/Senior division. I am passionate about learning different methods of approaching decolonization within the Ontario Catholic education system and plan to teach within the Catholic school board. Upon completion of this program, I plan to complete a Masters of Education in hopes of one day becoming a principal. Works Cited Turkle, S. (2007). What makes an object evocative. Evocative objects: Things we think with, 307-326. L. J., Jenkins, L., says, L. D., & Daniel, L. (2016, June 10). Quotables for pianists: 12 of our favorite piano quotes. Musicnotes Blog. Retrieved October 25, 2021, from https://www.musicnotes.com/blog/2014/09/23/piano-quotes/.
Just think: is childhood not difficult in all of its unexplained contexts? . . . And nothing is supposed to change; if life then suddenly becomes more bearable, more carefree, and more joyful for many, this is only the case because they have stopped taking it seriously and actually bearing it and feeling it and filling it with their most authentic selves. This is not progress as life intends it. This is a renunciation of all of its expanses and opportunities. What is asked of us is that we love what is difficult and learn to handle what is difficult and heavy. In difficulty there are benign forces, the hands that work on us. In the midst of difficulty we are meant to experience our joy, our happiness, our dreams: there, against the depth of this background, they become visible and only there we may recognize their beauty. And only in the darkness of difficulty our precious smile attains its meaning: only there it shines with its deep and dreamy light, and in the brightness that it spreads momentarily we behold the wonders and treasures all around us. —Rainer Maria Rilke, letter to a young girl, November 20, 1904
PUZZLES Bāssel Abd Al-Qādir
Between the fall of 2018 and the winter of 2020, I completed 273 puzzles. For the most part, I didn’t do them as a leisurely pastime; I was systematic, pedantic, about my approach, and was also frantic, being very mindful about how long it took me. The reason for this is that, during this time, I was clinically anxious and depressed. It wasn’t until the end of this period that my months-long suspicions were finally confirmed and I was formally diagnosed with major depressive disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, and OCD to boot. When I reflect on the journey that culminated in my diagnosis, I am struck by how prominently puzzles figure in my life—be it in relation to the actual act of solving them or simply through the appearance of their themes in my thinking, behaviour and outlook. I was a precocious child, successful both academically and socially, and well-liked by my teachers and peers. Though I eventually made friends by the fourth grade, I was bullied quite severely between the ages of five and seven, an experience which left an indelible impression on me. As a result of this, being socially accepted would become among my highest priorities for the remainder of my childhood and through my adolescence. At home, the expectation for academic success was always very high, but since I could achieve this with ease, I had more than enough time to dedicate to socializing. The consequence of this became apparent when it came time to apply to university; I hadn’t given any thought to what I wanted to study. I finally settled on business: the subject you apply for if you haven’t a clue what else to do, but are intent on going to university all the same. Luckily, after gaining admission to Laurier’s business program, I discovered a double-degree program, through which I could earn a Bachelor of Mathematics from the University of Waterloo alongside a business degree. It was a no-brainer—more puzzles!—and an especially attractive option when set against the fact that I felt condemned to study business. To say I struggled when I got to university would be a walloping understatement. Still deeply concerned with social status, and without the tempering force of my father to keep me in line academically, I nearly failed out of school after my first semester. Where my giftedness as a child was my greatest strength, it had become the basis for my greatest weakness, as I hadn’t developed the proper work ethic to be able to perform at the postsecondary level. Worse still, my intellect had, up until that point, served as the
foundation upon which so much of my identity rested. Suddenly, I was no longer the smartest person in the classroom—far from it. I was placed on academic probation. Motivated more by the fear of failure than by the possibilities of success, I made the necessary adjustments to avoid getting kicked out of school with all its attendant shame. Just as I’d done in high school, I didn’t think at all about what I would do after graduating—particularly when that itself seemed so uncertain. When I completed my coursework in December 2017, it was the first time I wasn’t either in school or working since the summer before I began university. I busied myself for the first few months travelling and seeing friends. When the weight of my shiftlessness finally became too much to bear, I knew I couldn’t avoid thinking about my future any longer. Due to my penchant for overthinking, I couldn’t divorce the question of career from that of life purpose. I felt as though every decision that had gotten me to this point was so utterly lacking in conviction that I had to get it right this time. My identity crisis deepened to such a degree during this period that I could no longer trust my intuition, having overthought myself into oblivion. Around this time, I began doing puzzles. They were a welcome way to pass the time: a single activity could at once provide me with a mild sense of relief from my anxiety and a feeling of accomplishment while avoiding the difficult work of life. They also carried the added bonus of making me feel intelligent whenever I completed one, keeping my fragile ego propped up. Too afraid to look to the future, I instead turned inwards, looking to my earliest memories for guidance. I was stunned when I discovered a report card from my preschool days, dated March 10, 1998, two months shy of my fourth birthday, which read, “Bassel’s favourite activity is doing puzzles. He is very adept at doing puzzles and will concentrate on this activity until completion.” To find a written testimony about my three-year-old self that could just have easily been said about myself at 26 was unsettling but also an experience of profound revelatory significance. At first, puzzles were an anodyne—a temporary relief from a pervasive disquietude, a way to create some measure of order within the fragmented chaos of my mental state. They quickly morphed into an obsession and distraction, serving as an escape from my dismal, aimless reality. In the end, however, puzzles turned out to be more than all of this: they were a window to my soul.
Finding that report card was akin to finding a missing puzzle piece to complete the picture. Suddenly, I understood just how deeply ingrained my affinity for meticulously identifying patterns to reach a predefined conclusion was. With this, I also realized that I had been approaching the decision of which life path I was going to take in the same manner. My depressive episode had been so prolonged because no matter how many personality tests or online career quizzes I took, I was no closer to feeling that sense of certainty I was looking for—the sort of certainty you feel when you’re doing a puzzle and you know precisely the shape and colour of the piece you’re looking for. Through puzzles, I learned that life doesn’t come with a final image on the box to refer to. It is an evolving product, constantly subject to changes in colour and shape. Much of life is lived through trial and error, achieved through brute force. The mathematician inside me cringes at such an inelegant, inefficient approach. But puzzles taught me that life, like play, is messy and brutal and chaotic. Bāssel Abd Al-Qādir is a math educator and musician.
“The time is ripe for looking back over the day, the week, the year, and trying to figure out where we have come from and where we are going to, for sifting through the things we have done and the things we have left undone for a clue to who we are and who, for better or worse, we are becoming. But again and again we avoid the long thoughts….We cling to the present out of wariness of the past. And why not, after all? We get confused. We need such escape as we can find. But there is a deeper need yet, I think, and that is the need—not all the time, surely, but from time to time—to enter that still room within us all where the past lives on as a part of the present, where the dead are alive again, where we are most alive ourselves to turnings and to where our journeys have brought us. The name of the room is Remember—the room where with patience, with charity, with quietness of heart, we remember consciously to remember the lives we have lived.” ― Frederick Buechner, A Room Called Remember: Uncollected Pieces
THE RECIPE BOOK Caitlyn Tiedje
As a child I loved to cook with my mom, it has been (and continues to be) a favourite pastime of ours when we spend time together. I remember overfilling cupcake tins and blowing bubbles at each other while washing the dishes. She taught me how to set the table and prepare for guests, a favourite quote of hers is “don’t stress about entertaining—it’s better to have a smile on your face when you greet company—rather than a spotless floor and a frown”. These memories are my childhood, and they are encompassed in the recipe book my mom made for me when I graduated from high school. It remains to be my favourite and most treasured gift I have ever received. Throughout my childhood and school years she collected recipes that she knew I enjoyed from friends and family and handwrote them into a recipe book. Each recipe from a family member or friend is accompanied by a photo, and sometimes even a small anecdote to remind me of them. There is also a note from my mom written on the inside of the front cover of the book as a congratulations on my graduation. There are stories scrawled into the margins in places where she had later remembered a particularly funny time with friends or a sweet memory from a holiday with family. She worked on it for years and it’s obvious how the entire book was made with love and thought, she put so much of herself into it. This recipe book is an embodiment of my mother, but also of all the people who raised me, cared for me, and loved me while I was growing up. I think of each recipe as a piece of all the people who have been in my life and even though some of them are no longer in my life or this world, I will always be reminded of them and be able to keep that part of them. The book itself is evocative for the reasons I have just described, but each individual element, each recipe, is also meaningful and important within the context of evocative objects. Each page invokes a different emotion, unveils different memories, and this is truly a beautiful aspect of this object. Some of the most memorable recipes are ones I have never even used yet but look forward to using in the future. For example, one of the best recipes is from a childhood friend’s mom who made homemade play dough for us, which we would sculpt into animals and leave to dry. Every time I flip by that page, I think about how I’d love to use that recipe for my own children or nieces and nephews one day. When I think of my memories as a child I can remember the smell, the way it was still warm from the pot right after my mom finished making it, and even the number of times I would curiously taste it, despite knowing that it was going to be terrible (the recipe calls for 2 cups of salt). Another significant recipe is from my great-grandmother, who recently passed away. She provided many of the recipes found inside my book, but one of my favourites is her recipe for chocolate chip cookies. It never fails to bring up
memories of my sisters and I helping her bake in her old, 80s-style kitchen whenever we went to visit her. She had a little white stool that belonged to the grandchildren as we all took turns standing on it to reach the counter to help her while we baked. I remember standing on the stool helping her mix the cookie dough before we’d roll it into balls and press them down with a fork on the cookie sheet, making neat criss-cross patterns before she’d stick them in the oven. This recipe even brings up memories of my great-grandfather too, who passed away many years ago now. He was never directly involved with baking, but we were always sent over to the antler-covered living room with a plate of fresh cookies to offer him. Now that my grandparents have passed on, I keep these memories close to my heart and this simple recipe allows me to do this. Lastly, one of my favourite recipes of all time originates from my mom: her infamous chocolate chip banana muffins. It’s a family favourite at home— whenever she bakes them they’re either devoured within a couple days or they’re given to friends. When my sisters and I were children in grade school my mom would sometimes finish her shift at the hospital early and she would be home before we’d get back. After getting off the bus we’d open the door to the house and smell the muffins baking in the oven. What a treat! She made them for us to put in our school lunches and they quickly became popular with classmates, leading to her bringing them in for the whole class on holidays and special occasions. When I moved away for university, she would send me back with a Tupperware full of muffins for my freezer and one time she even sent them to me in the mail! She was dedicated to delivering this comfort food even though I had moved across the country for school. This book travelled with me to university, and I still use it all the time, especially for baking treats for me and my roommates. The book holds a special place in my heart because I know how many different contributions were made from people in my life whom I love. This book reminds me of my past and the people who have made me into the person I am today, and it also encourages me to look to the future, to be creative, and to enjoy spending time with the ones I love.
Caitlyn Tiedje is a teacher candidate at York University and a recent graduate from the University of Toronto with a degree in immunology and human biology. She hopes to become a high school biology teacher and a swim coach. Francisco.
Works Cited Buechner, F. (1992). A room called Remember: Uncollected pieces. Harper San Francisco.
But the worst enemy you can meet will always be yourself; you lie in wait for yourself in caverns and forests. Lonely one, you are going the way to yourself! And your way goes past yourself, and past your seven devils! You will be a heretic to yourself and witch and soothsayer and fool and doubter and unholy one and villain. You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame: how could you become new, if you had not first become ashes? – Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
THE RUNNING SHOES MONICA BILICI
When I was about twelve years old, I became addicted to exercise and was on a very promising route towards a full-blown eating disorder. It was around this time in my life that I decided that I wanted to start running, and a brand-new pair of pink running shoes was the best way that I knew how to get started. Even in grade seven, I was horribly obsessive and overly ambitious, so I can’t possibly think of a better object to personify my self-destructive behaviours as a young, female adolescent drowning in feelings of inadequacy and helplessness. I can’t pinpoint what one factor pushed me to pursue running at such a young age, but I do know that health and fitness were a suffocating and inescapable topic in my life at the time. My dad and brother were both avid runners and gym goers, and my mom had shows like “The Biggest Loser” on the TV every single night. Not to mention that my parents are first-generation immigrants from former-communist Romania, where, despite food shortages and interminable bread lines, many Eastern European women also struggled with their own body image disorders and didn’t realize how they were projecting their sick standards onto their daughters. So, by the time I was just six years old, words like “fat” or “chubby” became a part of my inner monologue. I finally got my hands on my first pair of running shoes for my birthday. I was thrilled to be able to pick out shoes like these for myself, and not have to sport any pair of sneakers that my mom plopped in front of me. They were a gorgeous pair of bright pink Asics trainers, with ribbon-like laces and irresistible white swirls etched on the sides. When I slid them on for the first time, I seemed to transform immediately. The height the shoes gave me, the killer design and the stunning bright colours made me feel important, put together, strong, athletic, and, for once in my life, kind of cool. I knew that if I worked hard enough, I would eventually be able to have a flat stomach and the long, beautiful legs that I had ached to have ever since I was six. In some cruel and insidious way, my running shoes were just the vehicle I thought I needed to get to my mother’s love. I unconsciously concluded that the more I suppressed and twisted myself to fit her vision and standards, the happier and the more confident I would be. The fear of disappointing my parents, my caretakers, the ones who sacrificed everything for my brother and I to lead a better life in Canada, was also so monstruous and daunting, that the only way to feel in control despite the pressure was through compulsive and repetitive exercise, like running. The treadmill was my favourite way to run. The rhythmic thud, thud, thud of my running shoes slamming against the band was addicting, and each run was a brutal competition with myself to see how many more calories I could purge, especially if I had eaten a little more than I “should have” that day. I realize now that it wasn’t even my running shoes, but rather, my allconsuming feelings of shame, guilt, fear, and self-loathing that fueled my so-called passion for running, which then offered me a false sense of security and confidence. Calories, then, became a direct measure of my output, and therefore, a reflection of my value as an individual. Running eventually took a massive toll on me physically and psychologically. I became emaciated and was constantly sore, I struggled to stay focused in school, and I turned apathetic and withdrawn. To be sure, my shoes weakened along with me. Their vibrant pink hue turned dull and grey, the soles were almost non-existent, and the fabric began to wither away. Despite my deteriorating health (and footwear), I decided one day that I was going to burn 500 calories in less than an hour. I started to run, maxing out the treadmill’s incline and going at my fastest speed possible, but after about 30 minutes, tears of frustration began to trickle down my face, and I could feel my body shutting down and my lungs screaming at me to stop. I refused to listen to my intuition and instead felt disgusted with myself for being so weak and pathetic. By some stroke of luck, though, my shoes stopped me. My laces had been so worn out that they wouldn’t
even stayed tied, causing me to trip and collapse on the floor beneath me. It was in that moment, as I laid on the ground, with one shoe untied and the other barely holding on, that I realized what I had been doing to myself. My shoes were telling me to stop all along. I didn’t recognize that this entire time, I had been running away from myself in a frantic attempt to get to my mother, to get her approval and validation, and to feel whole and worthy in my own skin. I now understand that it is quite literally impossible to hate yourself happy. My shoes symbolized my self-destruction, and while I can toss out an old pair of trainers, I am with my body forever and strongly believe in nourishing, honouring, and protecting the one and only home I’ve been given in this life. It is mine, and mine only, and so no one, not even my own mother, can control what that looks like. I am happy to say that I no longer am a runner and have instead found other, more empowering forms of exercise, such as weightlifting, which has allowed me to rebuild my self and discover what it means to love oneself. While I feel utterly repulsed by the running shoes and have not put them on since, I hold onto them as a reminder of who I once was, along with the pain and misery that I vow to never put myself through ever again. Monica Bilici studied French and Business at the University of Waterloo and is now a first year Teacher Candidate at York University in Toronto, Ontario. Currently working as an Online Tutor, Monica is looking forward to one day having her own classroom full of bright, young learners. Mental health and physical wellness are of utmost importance to Monica, and she hopes to share her struggles with body image and eating disorders with her future students. The path to recovery can often just as dark and lonely as that of self-destruction, and Monica hopes to be a guiding light for anyone that may find themselves lost along the way.
Works Cited Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, et al. Nietzsche: Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Cambridge University Press, 2006.
“The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – that you’d thought special, particular to you. And here it is, set down by someone else, a person you’ve never met, maybe even someone long dead. And it’s as if a hand has come out, and taken yours.” -- Alan Bennett, The History Boys
The Scrapbook Michelle Blanchard
The leather-bound scrapbook lay at the bottom of the closet in the spare bedroom of my parents’ house. When I was young, this is the spare bedroom where my grandmother had lived for a year, while she struggled with Alzheimers, and now many years after her death it was still full of her belongings -- musty clothes, empty perfume bottles, photo albums. The scrapbook did not reveal its secrets easily. As I flipped the delicate pages full of newspaper clippings, smelling aging paper and the remnants of my grandmother’s perfume, questions only mounted. The bulk of the clippings were letters; they seemed to have nothing to do with each other, in no particular order, with a variety of authors. The one thing they shared was that they all referenced letters written by a person named “Jimmy”. My mother said the scrapbook belonged to her mother’s mother, Lily Eleanor Horswill. Great-Grandma Lily was an imposing figure in our family history; born in London in the 19th-century, she sailed to Canada at the age of 12, met a fellow Londoner in Riverdale Park
whom she married, and raised four children in the east end of Toronto between the World Wars. She was a gifted artist, singer, and poet; my mother remembered her “stumping around” in her garden, barking orders and wearing pants at a time when no self-respecting grandmother would dare. One of her artworks, a large oil painting of a young girl holding a kitten, hung in that same spare bedroom. She loomed large in my mind’s eye, though we never met; she died when my mother was 17. I pored over the scrapbook for days, attempting to make sense of its innards. What I managed to put together was this: In the early twentieth century, when print dominated the media landscape, it was common for newspapers to offer a women’s section, featuring fashion, human interest, recipes, and homemaking. Within the women’s section of the Toronto Globe, a column called “Dear Homemaker” published letters from readers seeking guidance on everything from silver-polishing to child-rearing. At first glance, it looked like a simple advice column; the “homemaker” offered tips on spot-treating white linen or making the freshest preserves. What emerged from the column was a massive network of women, sharing their lives and forming friendships through their letters. And my great-grandmother, writing under the pen name “Jimmy,” was one of them. The scrapbook alone was an imperfect narrator of Lily’s life story. For starters, most of the letters saved to the scrapbook were written by other people. They praised her delightful stories, her vivid writing, and her sharp wit; interestingly, a number of the letters she had saved were extremely critical of her writing and her opinions, of which she had no shortage. The letters she wrote and saved painted a picture of a bright, industrious young woman who found herself frustrated by domestic life. She loved travel, art, and her garden. She enjoyed her children, though they were often in the background of her letters. She had a thousand opinions, on everything from children’s literature to feminism: Drug Stores: That might be our seasonal controversy. Shall they stay open on Sunday? Of course, the view of every right-minded citizen would be that they should close; but unfortunately, the majority -- who are the Sunday customers -- say no, we won’t have our rights interfered with. So for no other reason than that they delight to defy the law; they insist on this Sunday service. I feel so sympathetic when I think of “Contrary” and her hated housework. I, too, hate it. I do it, and have been doing it for ten years and shall do till I die, I guess, but I cannot like it. It always seems like misplaced energy. One writes or types and lo, a recognizable result. One paints or sews and behold something is created. One reads and nourishes one’s mind, all permanent, but when one houseworks and sees the place spic and span, little feet rush in, little scissors go snip, snip, and where is the tidiness which one created just five short minutes ago? Women cannot make men what they will. They may bend their characters a little, but they certainly cannot make them into paragons of kindness. You
may humor a man all you will, but you cannot make him thoughtful, and all you succeed in doing is losing your own individuality and making a doormat of yourself. Most fascinating of all was the community that formed amongst the letter-writers. “Jimmy” was only one frequent contributor; there was a whole pack of similarly pseudonymed authors who must have penned the equivalent of novels over decades. Not only did they have their own mini-celebrity status, they became friends, and organized meetups. A new vision of Lily, the pants-wearing gardener and painter I’d heard so much about, began to form in my mind -- younger but just as brash, traipsing around mid-century Toronto with a pack of friends who started as penpals. Suddenly, she could have been my friend. I had just moved to Toronto, into a shabby little ground-floor apartment in St. James Town, and had begun to make the city my own. I was 23 and had grand designs on my future, one that I couldn’t possibly imagine filled with housework and home-making. I had spent my adolescence on internet forums, making far-away friends through dictionary-length posts and emails, sometimes even visiting in-person and creating real-life bonds. Everything Lily wrote about life in the city, about her ambivalence towards domesticity, about connecting with friends you knew only through words, felt intensely and bizarrely relatable. Every time I stepped onto the Line 1 subway, I would think of Lily, running her errands on the Yonge Street streetcar. I felt a kinship with her, like we were blazing trails together. And yet, Lily would sometimes disappoint me. I wanted my pants-wearing great-grandmother to be my post-feminist hero, but she was a woman of her time, and some of her rhetoric made me uncomfortable. At the onset of World War Two, she wrote a scorn-filled lecture about the danger of working mothers: Being a mother is a twenty-four-hours-a-day job. The next best thing would be a grandmother while the mother worked, but to leave the children to their own devices doesn’t add up right to me. Right now I’m itching to go out and work and I flatter myself that I could be used very advantageously in several branches of business, old as I am, but I can’t bring myself to leave the youngest, who is 11. How these young women can leave two or three of pre-school age and not much more is beyond me. That is where the Government should step in and forbid these weak-minded and avaricious girls to work unless competent care is provided and paid for by the mother first. We don’t need the Government to provide shelter and care for these poor little waifs. Let the mother pay for them out of her fat cheque. I took the scrapbook back to my dinky apartment, and even with its central mystery resolved, I couldn’t stop turning its fragile, yellowed pages, searching for more clues about Lily, the kind of person she was, and the life that she led. The act of touching the pages she assembled -- columns carefully cut out and reconstructed on the page, her little handwritten notes -- decades ago felt chillingly like reaching out and touching her long dead hand. At a time in my life when I was forging a new identity for myself, Lily’s scrapbook, filled as it was with its vintage housekeeping advice and arguments about drug store hours, felt like it could have been my own. And yet for every relatable observation, another one would emerge that was foreign and repellant. It defied the logic I wanted to ascribe to it.
The scrapbook has moved with me to three apartments, surviving the nearly eight years I’ve lived in Toronto with impressive resilience for a document so old. I find myself drifting back to it -- on late nights, rainy days, when I wonder about myself, my past and future -- and trying to read the tea leaves my great-grandmother left for me in her scrapbook.
Michelle Blanchard is a teacher candidate and arts administrator living in Toronto with her fiance Paul and two cats, Rufio and Wolfgang. Her great-grandmother, Lily Eleanor Horswill, passed away on May 12, 1972 in Davisville.
Success is no accident. It is hard work, perseverance, learning, studying, sacrifice and most of all, love of what you are doing or learning to do. ~ Pele, Brazilian soccer player
My Skates
Michael Molinaro
I remember the day I got my first pair of hockey skates to a tee. It was a snowy Christmas morning in 2004 and I had only one item on my Christmas list to Santa this year. It was the brand-new Bauer Vapor X60 hockey skates. These skates were slick looking with the infamous Bauer logo on the boot of the skate and Vapor X60 at the top. They changed colour from a dark grey to a very light grey going from back to front with this electric red detailing near the laces and on the tongue of the skates. Immediately when I opened the box, I was blasted with that well known new skate smell similar to a new shoe smell. The blades of the skates looked sharp as good be, but I wasn’t trusted enough to touch them considering I was only 5 years old. The excitement I had for these skates was like none other which was shown with the smile on my face that stretched ear to ear. When I tried them on, they were a little big, but it was nothing another pair of socks wouldn’t fix. They gave me immediate belief I was going to be the next Wayne Gretzky of my time. A couple hours after opening my new skates it was time to put them to the test on my backyard rink my dad had built. I remember it being freezing cold wearing multiple layers of clothing and a hat under my hockey helmet. Moments after getting onto the ice my skates went from my favorite thing in the world to my worst nightmare. It was wipe out after wipe out and after about 10 minutes of trying to learn to skate I burst into tears, yelling to get the skates off my feet. It was after a couple of days that I realized I can’t give up when the going gets tough, so I asked my dad to give it another shot. This was the first lesson my skates taught me. They showed me at a very young age that some things in life will be hard and you have to work hard to overcome those challenges. This mentality I gained from my skates gave me the motivation to keep learning to skate. The next couple of days consisted of multiple skate sessions in my backyard and I was slowly getting the hang of it. There was good progress, but frustration was at an all time high. My skates were slowly teaching me another valuable lesson and that was patience. I was realizing that I won’t be an amazing skater overnight and it would take a couple of days or weeks before I got good which was exactly right. In no time I was ripping up the ice doing crossovers and figure eights. I never would have thought a little bit of patience is what it would take to finally reach my goal of learning to skate. Now that I was finally skating, I learned how good it made me feel. It was the first thing I was able to do by myself, so it gave me a sense of maturity and freedom. I felt like I was a big boy who could do anything he wanted. Skating as fast as I could with the cold air hitting my face was so peaceful and fun it was all I ever wanted to do. I even started to play hockey on my rink, imagining I’m in the NHL and scoring the game winning goal. All my fun and games quickly came to an end as spring rolled around and I couldn’t skate anymore. It was then when I realized how important my skates are to me. All the progress I made and fun I had made me excited as ever for hockey season to come around. The time I was waiting for finally came around, it was hockey season. Everything was amazing until I was hit with devastating news. My hockey skates didn’t fit me anymore. What was brand new and clean a year ago was now beat up, smelly and too small. My heart was broken because these were my first skates and I loved them so much I didn’t want to ever get new ones. However, I had to face reality and understand I needed new skates for the
upcoming year. I remember holding my skates for the last time in my garage and thinking about all the good things they did for me. I never would have thought my skates would teach me valuable life lessons and give me such freedom and happiness. They gave me the dream of playing in the NHL and I will always cherish the lessons I learned from My Skates. I am Michael Molinaro, teacher candidate, son, friend, and boyfriend. I am a caring, loving, respectful and energetic person. I am a big family man who loves to spend time and do things with my family. I am a very outgoing and active person who loves sports, especially hockey, soccer, and golf. I love the outdoors and going for walks in the woods or by the lake. My dream is to have a big happy family and to be an amazing teacher who my students look up to.
Steel Toe Boots Jeevan Singh Lattar
Whenever I see a pair of steel toed boots, regardless of if they’re my own pair or not, I’m immediately transported back into one of dozens of associations that I’ve developed with them. The exact memory will depend on the context of course, what I’m doing at the moment of sighting the shoes will change which exact memory I see, but they’re all related to my transformation from adolescence and into adulthood. Thinking now, I can remember the end of my first full shift wearing a pair of steel toed shoes, limping in pain, and seeing my mom who had come to pick me up in tears at the sight of me working for the first time. I got my first pair of steel toe boots at the age of 17 when I got my first job doing manual labour at a retail store. At the age of 17, I wasn’t even legally allowed to use most of the equipment that would be central to my work, but since my birthday was soon, I was told to buy my boots and report to work. The exact boots I had at the time were black with a green cross pattern, and they caused me great pain to wear, in part because I had a few issues with my feet, one of which was as of then undiagnosed flat feet and collapsing ankles. When I showed up to my first shift, my manager made a point of stepping on my feet with all her weight to make sure that I was indeed wearing the protective equipment that I was supposed to, and with that test done I was sent to go learn on the job from the disparate collection of other young men, all of us wearing those similar boots. While those first boots hurt so much that I would spend Monday through Wednesday at school limping, I eventually got pairs that hurt less, and I eventually got treatment for the few conditions that made wearing them so painful, still though the emotional connection to them remained the same. What the shoes meant to me then, and more so now as evocative objects, relate a lot to how I see the world around us. I see steel toed boots and envision capitalist exploitation, I envision inequality, pain, danger, and even the gratefulness of having some form of physical protection against danger. One thing I also feel, warranting distinction from the others, is the nostalgia of a time passed, of the camaraderie and friendships I would develop with those other young men; the ways in which we would skirt the rules around things like snacking or resting, or even smoking, to make a shift more bearable. While the first set of associations may seem more self-evident, with the gratefulness coming from instances of actual bone crushing danger being blunted and averted, the nostalgia as a separate association deserves more explanation. The other boys that I worked with at the time were of similar ages, ranging from high school juniors to all sorts of post-secondary students or young men in transition to other careers. That workplace existed as a transitional state for all of us, we each knew that it wasn’t our destination, we knew that it couldn’t be. We knew that we wouldn’t be going in the same directions either, which made the antics even more so varied, as we all took the opportunity to experiment with our actions and learn what we could for the next parts of our journeys; “will I get in trouble if I do this?”, “can I earn a raise if I follow their rules to the T?”, “what do I want to do after all of this?”, “will I still be friends with these guys after?” Clearly, steel toed boots mean a lot more to me than they may for others. I learned a lot about the world at that job, and I’m reminded of that every time I see steel toes. I formed a dense outer shell working there, transitioning into adulthood; the ways in which
I was treated by authority figures contrasting so sharply based simply on the time of day or day of the week. If it was a weekday from 8-3, authority figures in my life tried their best to teach and guide, yet just hours later I could be berated simply due to the imbalance of power that our way of organizing economic activity needs to function. People have different ideas on work and life, but those work boots serve as the ultimate reminder that my own life matters much more than the job needed to facilitate it. Teaching is one of the few exceptions where I’m willing to go beyond the baseline, since the job itself is inextricably linked to affecting the lives of others, and young people need people who can look out for their best interests. On the topic of young people, another thing I learned through that transition is that people live very different lives even if they share contexts with others living other kinds of lives. It’s impossible to know what occurs outside of a classroom for a student, and I clearly remember a time where I limped into class having forgotten to do a reading, and my grade 12 law teacher asked why I worked when I could get A+’s instead of B+’s and A’s if I spent that same time studying. He couldn’t fathom why I worked, and it was simply because I needed to as a child of immigrants saving for university. My evocative object and the associations I have with it carry implications for my future teaching practice. I need to ensure that I am being empathetic to the fact that young people have a lot going on in their lives outside of the classroom, and that they may be struggling due to a multitude of factors. I owe my future students my empathy, because teachers who were empathetic to me helped me through difficult times that affected my classroom performance and paying it forward is the best way I can add good to life. Another thing to keep in mind is that I must keep inequality and equal access in mind when shaping lessons and teaching. Not every student will have access to the same resources, time, or locations that can help them excel with different kinds of pedagogical application. Keeping that in mind is one way I can utilize what I learned. To close it all out, I’ve chosen a small slice from an article about a fire fighting service visiting a classroom, and the steel toed boots that form part of their uniform. While the quote seems innocuous on its own, and the visit may even seem a positive way to inspire dreams among children, I cannot help but think of the relationship between the way we do schooling and the world into which we send young adults to go work and live in. The ways in which we prepare them, and the ways in which we are unable to do so, and the ways in which their view of the world may change based on why they may also end up wearing a pair of steel toe boots. 25th October 2021 — The three-year-olds at Danes Hill Pre-Prep, affectionately known as Bevendean, gathered on the playground in anticipation for the fire engine to arrive. Every child got a turn using the fire hose, dowsing an imaginary fire on the playground Pirate Ship. The children explored the fire engine and were taught about some of the important equipment the firefighters use in emergency situations. Back in the classroom the children had the opportunity to grill the fire crew about their important jobs. One child asked, “do you help cats and dogs if they get stuck up trees? The boys and girls also had the opportunity to examine the fire uniform, learning that their coat is as thick as ten jumpers and their boots have steel toe caps so they feet are protected from any falling objects. (https://attain.education/schoolnews/daneshillsurrey/danes-hill-school-pupils-inspired-by-local-heroes)
1988 SUZUKI RM80 PAUL PASQUARIELLO
In the summer of 1987, immediately after completing grade 3, my parents packed up our family’s belongings and moved us to our new home further in to the suburbs. It was an exciting time in that we had been anxiously awaiting our new home to be built, but it was also an unsettling time leaving friends and memories behind for the unknown. Moving further away from the city was intriguing to me as a child. Beyond the boundaries of our small subdivision were dirt roads and farms which brought to mind images of grassy fields, animals and lush greenery. Later that year, in grade 4, I made two new friends, Joey and Steven, who would go on to become my best friends for all of elementary school. Both Joey and Steven lived even further north and had to take the bus to school from a smaller village about 15 minutes away. In fact, Steven lived on a 10-acre farm, while Joey lived on a 1-acre lot surrounded by forest. We found that we shared many of the same interests and hobbies like sports and drawing but none like our passion for dirt bikes. For the next few years, we collected magazine clippings, books, and followed stories of famous motocross riders while we dreamed of one day having our very own. Joey was the first who managed to convince his parents to buy a small dirt bike. For years still, try as I might, I was not able to do the same. My parents were terrified of motorcycles and particularly of those that jumped and bounced, so I had to live vicariously through my two friends who enjoyed riding together on their properties. My parents were adamant that I would never get a bike, and told me that I could kill myself on a dirt bike! Until one day I found an Ad for a 1988 Suzuki RM80 in the Autotrader magazine and asked (if not, begged) that we go see it. The years of passionately expressing my fascination with dirt bikes finally paid off when my dad ended up purchasing me that bike that had been the object of my dreams since I was 8 years old. Having never ridden a motorcycle before, my first task would be to master the operation of the dirt bike alone. The throttle, the levers, the gears and the brakes were all new to me, and yet vaguely familiar. I would ride around our small backyard for hours, much to the disappointment of my neighbours. The small 80cc dirt bike was a two-stroke model, which meant it was obnoxiously high pitched and very loud. It was started with a lever that was kicked with the leg and often would take dozens of kicks before starting. The fuel it took needed to be mixed together with oil before being poured in to the fuel tank, often being spilled in the process.
It let out a distinct smell of burning fuel that I knew well by watching other neighbourhood kids riding from a distance in the past. But now was my turn. After tearing apart the grass in the backyard, I was ready to take my adventures to new heights. At first, I would blast through the streets of our neighbourhood, careful to avoid cars and more importantly, any police officers who may have been called because of the screaming exhaust pipes. With every passing day, my confidence grew as did my sense of invincibility. Soon I was meeting up with friends in empty fields that were under development near our house to create small tracks complete with berms and jumps. The feeling of soaring through the air, knowing that disaster was one wrong move away was both arousing and exhilarating. One day, while out riding there on my own, I was chased down by a strange man in a Jeep Grand Cherokee who I later learned was the developer/builder of the property. I could have outrun him, but chose to stay behind to see what he had to say. As expected, he told me I was trespassing and that I could get hurt, vowing to call the police if I ever came back. The threat of serious injury was an ever-present danger that made me love the RM80 more and more each day. On another occasion, a co-worker at a summer job who also had a dirt bike of the same size asked me if I had ever been to “Big Core”. Embarrassed that I had never heard of it, he decided to take me himself. We loaded our bikes on to the back of his pickup as he was older by several years, and off we went to the motocross track. That day, my co-worker Kevin attempted an enormous jump of more than 10 ft. in the air and flew over the handlebars, knocking himself unconscious and was motionless for several minutes. As the firetrucks arrived, I was again reminded of how dangerous the sport of motocross really was. Thankfully Kevin was ok, despite suffering a minor head injury. The RM80’s engine blew not long after the ordeal at Big Core. But the connection I felt to the dirt bike was everlasting. I remember going in to the tool shed where we stored the bike to sit on its shiny vinyl blue seat for hours as the bike stood perched up on an old milk case. The distinct smell of half-burned fuel still filled the shed. I would hold on to the rubber grips, one yellow and one blue and pretend I was maneuvering through the dirt. When I finally earned enough money, I brought the bike to a garage mechanic, Freddie, who was referred to me through some friends in the neighbourhood. I knew that Freddie was paralyzed from the
waist down, but somehow, I was still surprised to meet him in his garage as he recounted the story of how he was paralyzed in a motorcycle accident a few years prior. The yellow and blue RM80 was an extension of me. An extension of my body. When I rode it, I felt a sense of connectedness that no other object had ever given me. The bike was the ultimate gift of freedom, of adventure, masculinity and joy. Despite everything I was ever told or ever saw about the perils of riding, I never once thought of abandoning my passion. The bike taught me that some of the greatest pleasures in life tread the line of extreme risk and sometimes even death. It taught me to respect the boundaries and limitations in life while still making the most of every living moment because we are only here for a short time after all. These lessons set the groundwork for how I would see and live my life. Always cognisant of the risks but never too fearful to miss the opportunity to experience a blissful moment. I sold the RM80 when it became too small for me. My parents always thought that they would buy me that dirt bike so that I would “get it out of my system.” It didn’t work. Ten years later, I bought my first Ducati street motorcycle because I longed to recapture the feelings, emotions and lessons that my RM80 gave me as a child.
Paul Pasquariello is a teacher candidate in his 1st year of studies in the Bachelor of Education Program at York University. Paul has studied business at the undergraduate and graduate level, and worked in the field of marketing for a number of years before returning to his passion for teaching and learning. Now the parent of two young children of his own, Paul continues to carefully ponder the costs and benefits of various risky activities as a condition of excitement, enjoyment and of development.
“Risk-taking behavior is behavior that endangers the personal safety of those that carry it out and, in some cases, the safety of others. This type of behavior is enacted in order to provoke excitement and strong sensations and is extremely common in adolescents. At this point in their development, not only are boys and girls constantly faced with new possibilities and alternatives, but they also feel the need to make new commitments and reinforce those made previously (Bosma and Jackson 1990) and to experiment with roles and behavior different from those that are characteristic of childhood. In this kind of experimentation, inherent in the process of personal growth and maturation, adolescents often find themselves acting out behavior that can put their physical, psychological, and social well-being at risk. Numerous studies have shown that risk-taking and experimenting with actions and sensations during adolescence can play a role in overcoming the developmental tasks tied to the achievement of autonomy (Jack 1989), adult- hood, and individualization (Palmonari 1997). Pursuing new activities and taking initiative are characteristics of typical adult behavior; however, some- times this need to take on new tasks can lead to, for more or less extended periods of time, experimentation connected to challenging personal limits and assuming, at times, even serious risks (Irwin and Millstein 1986). While it is true that involvement in risk is very common during adolescence, it is also true that risk-taking is not limited to this period of development; many adults seek risks in a variety of different environments, first and foremost in sports but also in driving, games, the stock market, and betting and gambling.” (Bonino, et al., 2005, p. 99)
Bonino, S., Cattelino, E., & Ciairano, S. (2005). Adolescents and risk : Behaviors, functions and protective factors. Springer Milan.
“So avoid using the word ‘very’ because it’s lazy. A man is not very tired, he is exhausted. Don’t use very sad, use morose. Language was invented for one reason, boys - to woo women - and, in that endeavor, laziness will not do. It also won’t do in your essays.” ― N.H. Kleinbaum, Dead Poets Society
My First Thesaurus Jennifer Pritsker
When asked what I wanted for my eighth birthday, I told everyone I wanted a scooter. On the day I turned eight, I received three of the same Razor scooters - two of which were returned to the store the next day. My uncle, who gifted me my third scooter, returned a week later with a new gift for me. He brought me a beautifully wrapped reference set, containing a dictionary, a thesaurus, and an atlas. While I was grateful, I was incredibly disappointed with the replacement gift. Of course, it was my fault for telling everyone I wanted the same gift, but a scooter seemed significantly more fun than a bunch of books. I already had a dictionary, and my dad had an atlas that I flipped through once and found uninteresting. I brushed off the gift and put it on my bookshelf to collect dust. Weeks later, out of boredom, I decided to take a closer look at the third book in the set - the thesaurus. I had never seen or used one before but it caught my attention. I was amazed that the fairly little book was such a powerful tool, so useful to help you express a message so specifically. As a child, I always felt big emotions. My parents were new immigrants to Canada and spent much of their time working labor-intensive jobs or studying for their new careers. I was very well-loved and cared for, but I was often left alone with my inner thoughts and feelings. Despite this, I had a very difficult time sharing with others what I felt. Not only did it feel insignificant to talk about my feelings while my parents worked away to create a better life for us, but I also had a keen awareness of specific feelings that I couldn’t quite articulate. My mother always encouraged me to share what I was feeling, but I remember feeling frustrated that I couldn’t accurately describe to her exactly what I needed to get across. I knew I was sensitive and emotional, but the depth of my emotions could not be described by any words I knew. As I flipped through my new thesaurus, I was amazed at how many words can be used to describe a seemingly similar idea but were exactly what you needed to express yourself in a given context. I found myself lingering at the words that were used to express emotions. “Happiness” was no longer just that - was I satisfied or thankful? Was I at peace or optimistic? When I felt sad, was that disappointment, loneliness, or just low-spiritedness? At that moment, a portal opened that allowed me to be specific about my emotions, and subsequently, communicate my needs. I would flip through the pages of the thesaurus every night, like my favorite fairy tale, and think about the words, what they meant and what they felt like. For many years, I viewed my emotional sensitivity as a negative obstacle in my life. I hated that I took everything so personally, and that I cried during nature documentaries when polar bear cubs got separated from their mamas. I thought that being in touch with my emotions meant that I was weaker than
my peers and I looked up to those who were seemingly unphased by life’s fleeting emotions. In high school, however, when my friends began to experience life’s hardships, I found the value in being empathetic and sensitive to others’ emotions. My ability to communicate my own emotions so well helped me understand and comfort others in their time of need. I came to see my sensitivity and compassion as a gift, and truly believed that helping others using my empathy was my calling. As an educator, my empathy allows me to be a trusted adult for many of my students. I help my students by creating a space where they feel safe and comfortable to share as much or as little as they like. I recognize the depth of emotion my students are feeling, and am sensitive to that in my pedagogy. I work with my students to build environments where they can thrive, emotionally and educationally. And when they do feel the need to share, I hope I’ll always find the right words to comfort them in the way they need. Jennifer Pritsker has been an informal educator for over 10 years. After five years of experience in the corporate world, she left to pursue her dream of becoming a teacher. Jennifer is currently a teacher-candidate in York University’s Faculty of Education in Toronto. In her practice, she strives to create safe and engaging learning spaces conducive to inclusivity, inspiration, inquiry, and exploration. She currently lives in Maple, Ontario with her family, including her Yorkie, George.
1986 VW Scirocco Mark Branciere
When I was a child, I could not wait to turn sixteen. I would hit a significant milestone, getting my license. This meant I could finally get my own vehicle on the road. Leading up to this moment, I had already purchased my first car, a black 1986 Volkwagen (VW) Scirocco. This car would be my “Object of Passage and Transition” as described in Sherry Turkle’s Evocative Objects. It was a turnkey in my professional and personal development. I bought this car with my money that I had been saving over the past couple summers. My dad was clear on his stance that parents who buy vehicles for their children. He believed he wouldn’t actually be helping me in the long run. I worked very hard during summer breaks in high school. Earning money from various jobs doing whatever I could to hit my goal to acquire the Scirocco. I was not planning on spending a fortune on this first car, and I wasn’t afraid of a project. Once I had enough money saved, I started browsing. It took a lot of searching to find the perfect car for me, but then I found it - a used, mid eighties, as-is, VW with the “sewing machine” engine. The car was sitting far away from me in Mississauga in a downtown Toronto garage. I had no easy way of getting there. Conversing with the seller, I discovered that he lived in my neighborhood. They sensed my excitement, and wanted to help. He asked his wife to give me a lift to Toronto to assess. Looking back at this situation, it seems like an unsafe decision. As a young man, I did not care. They were kind people that understood the excitement of a first car to a sixteen-year-old. When we arrived at the storage garage, the wife disappeared through the side door. Moments later, the garage door opened, and there it was. I knew right away this car was going to be mine. It was covered in layers of concrete dust. You could see impressions of a past faux air scoop on the hood that was peeled off. I opened the driver’s door to the sound of “La Cucaracha” playing. That was the door chime Volkswagen used on their older vehicles. I turned my attention to the interior, which had great character compared to vehicles at the time. The vinyl on the dash had some cracking due to drying out from hot summers. The steering wheel and shift knob felt worn in. The seats were worn, but felt like they were hugging the driver in the most engaged position for twisty roads. The smell was musty, mixed with a crayon-like smell. The wheels had a repeating pattern of teardrops. I was sold. Later that week, I went back with my father equipped with a dealer plate. This car would be a transitional object into adulthood. Loud music and the ability to drive anywhere my heart desired signified an early glimpse into freedom with a truly personalized experience. Of course, true passion for old cars comes with an enduring level of patience, which grew from troubleshooting the Scirocco's quirks. With little experience, I approached problems by starting simple. If it were raining or any bit humid, it wouldn’t restart. Within a month of making it road worthy, I was pulled over due to its noisy muffler. It was a rainy day and I dreaded turning it off, when I knew it wouldn’t restart. Luckily, the officers gave me a boost, and let me off with a warning. I replaced the muffler soon after. Eventually, I managed to repair the starting issue. Through these repairs and more, I was forced to learn patience and my craft. This was the passageway that led me to my career as an automotive technician. There was a wide household income range in my school, but the wealthier students had expensive new vehicles, typically sponsored by their parents. There was a time when I wished I could have the same, but I came to realize that this car had deeper value. It would introduce me to the car enthusiast community that I
connected with. This community was collaborative and brought more insight to me than I would have accessed in a newer model. My car’s uniqueness and battle scars were a symbol of pride to me, but I wanted more. I added modifications to express my identity, but this came with a lot of tough lessons. The complicated modifications made the engine lock up. Herein I learned the balance of indulgence and a teenager’s income. All my money went towards the improvement of that car. After countless problems, it struck me that it was time to move on from flare to practicality. The car is a great equalizer; it makes every driver powerful and dangerous, yet it also signals individual diversity. We read car choice the same way we read clothing choice. A car can signal taste, money, or their lack. (Evocative Objects : Things We Think With, edited by Sherry Turkle, MIT Press, 2011.)
While working full time at a VW dealership in south Mississauga, I discovered a coworker’s slightly newer VW GTI for sale that offered more reliability. I felt torn as this felt like a sacrifice for identity. The Scirocco and I would have to part ways. Sadly, the car was worth more in parts. One part at a time, I stripped it down to a hollow shell, selling part to friends in the VW community. I remember the day I got it picked up for scrap. This object delivered a moment of loss as I left my mother with instructions for the tow driver. I came home to an empty garage. Today, I have a few different cars, each with their own unique purpose. While they’re all very special to me, their impact on my development cannot compare to the Scirocco. I have a newer VW Golf, but it serves more as an appliance than anything else. It lacks personality by being such a good car. From my experience, an older model has more to serve adolescents in life lessons. You learn far more out of failure than success. I think that first car really taught me more than I’ll ever know in life through blood, sweat, and sometimes tears. Reliability is so boring.
Mark Branciere is a student at York University in the Bachelor of Education Technological Education program and currently resides in Muskoka, Ontario. He was a licensed automotive technician working in the trade for over seventeen years at various Automotive repair shops and dealerships training apprentices and completing various specialty courses offered by the Honda Training Academy of Canada. This passion for automobile repair and knowledge has led him to take his career to the next step of teaching the young minds of tomorrow at a highschool level.
On December 25, 2005, I walked down the stairs to find loads of presents under the Christmas tree. That being said, I only cared about one. I was not looking to see whether my
I still love my XBOX, but after having it for more than a decade, I started to develop a different relationship with it. As a child, my XBOX was a source of enjoyment; however, as a young adult, my XBOX was a source of stress. What once evoked feelings of joy, creativity, and wonder, began to evoke feelings of shame, loneliness, and anger. The feeling of escape that brought me joy as a child, brought me anger as an adult. I realized that I was addicted to video games. I realized that I was wasting my life in a world that did not even exist. My XBOX allowed me to escape from the real world, but it also allowed me to figure out what it was that I was trying to escape. Was I playing video games on a Friday night instead of seeing friends because I had social anxiety? Was I hoarding money in the game because I was scared of being poor in real life? My XBOX allowed me to become a video game addict, but it also allowed me to learn things about myself that I would not have known had I not been so in love with my XBOX. I still play the Elder Scrolls games and I still find myself getting addicted to them. However, the difference is that I realize this is an addiction. As I mentioned above, my XBOX originally evoked feelings of joy, creativity, and wonder. It eventually evoked feelings of shame, loneliness, and anger. Now, it evokes feelings of nostalgia, but also of growth. I loved my XBOX, I still do, but now I recognize what I learned from it, namely, control. In short, if I did not have my XBOX, I would not be who I am today.
I was born on April 12, 1995 in Toronto, Ontario, but I grew up on a farm in Aurora. I used to ride my pony around the farm pretending that I was a medieval knight on a quest (this probably explains why I got so addicted to roleplaying games). Luckily, my obsession with fantasy movies, books, and games transformed into an obsession with history and my obsession with history eventually became an infatuation with philosophy. Suffice to say, I completed both a bachelor and masters degree in philosophy. Now, I’m completing a bachelor of education so that I can share my love for history and philosophy with the next generation. Turkle, S. (2011). Evocative Objects: Things We Think With. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
“In today’s society there appears to be an aversion to risk; yet without risk-taking we do not reach our potential. Outdoor play provides open-ended, dynamic, varied opportunities which are unpredictable and at times risky. However, the risks and challenges of being outdoors provide rich opportunities for learning, problem-solving and developing social competence. We are all too aware that there are multiple political, educational, cultural, social and economic objectives laid at the door of early childhood and compulsory education (Moss, 2003). We need to find a balance between these agendas, the rights of children, and the values to be upheld. For example, finding a balance between safe environments and equipment while enabling exploration, challenges and risk-taking. It is well acknowledged that children’s outdoor experiences are critical to their intellectual, social, emotional, physical and spiritual development (Greenman, 1998; Henniger, 1999; Pica, 1997; Walsh, 1991). I propose that the starting point for our dialogue on playgrounds needs to be our values. What do adults, teachers, children and society value about the outdoors? Some of the things I value include providing many opportunities for children to explore and experience the natural world outdoors. I value outdoor spaces as places of flexibility; places where ordinary moments are filled with possibilities, and many projects and adventures. I value opportunities for children to ‘create their own play’. “ - Cheryl Greenfield, Exploring the Value of Outdoor Play
THE YELLOW BIKE Ashley Rooney
An eight-year-old, and her two-wheel yellow bike. This bike was a surprise, I had been learning to ride every day during the summer of 2007. My parents would take me downstairs to a nearby park where I would do laps balancing on the two wheels of my four-wheeled purple bike. This previous bike was used as a trainer for what was to come. My parents tried their best to keep my siblings and I busy with new activities and things to do especially during the summer in order to take advantage of the outdoors and to have fun doing so. The training wheels on my old bike were lifted for me to learn to ride on a two-wheeler but were not fully taken off so I would still have some comfort in knowing that if I were to lose balance, I would have my training wheels to catch me. The day my new two-wheeler yellow bike arrived I was taken by surprise. I was used to my dad getting home at a specific time every day. This particular day he did not come home until an hour later, I wondered where my father was while my mother kept me busy with different activities. When he finally did arrive, he told me he had a surprise he then brought forth a sparkly yellow two-wheeler bike with purple accents. I was so excited and shocked as I was not expecting a new bike, in that moment I felt a sense of maturity as this bike signified that my parents thought that I gained enough confidence and balance to ride a two-wheel bike without training wheels. I tried my best to not act surprised even though I was to continue my stride of being mature. I thought that as a mature child I would have to suppress my emotions in order to be taken seriously. I was wrong, my parents so wanted that reaction I didn’t give them. They even had to ask me if I was excited because I did a very good job at pretending not to be. After I broke character, I was excited to ride and examine my bike. The bike appeared yellow but under the sun it was a beautiful sparkly gold, with purple accents that had a foil finish. It was not very big as it was the perfect size for an eight-year-old, it was a one-speed bike but it was fast enough for me as when I managed to gain more confidence I would ride down big hills near my home in order to catch the speed I craved. My first ride on this bike was one I was excited for as I never rode a bike without having my training wheels there to catch my fall. To ensure that I would not scrape myself on my first ride my parents told me to ride down the carpeted hall in our apartment, I was scared but I rode and fell hitting my head on the wall. This broke my sense of what I thought maturity was as I tried my best to be so cool but ended up falling the first time. My parents made sure that I continued to practice to one day be comfortable enough to ride with ease which did end up happening. When this confidence was finally built and at a peak, I remember wedging a plastic bottle between the tires to create a “motorcycle” sound. My friends and I would do this and continue to think and feel as if we were very cool until one day I attempted to unnecessarily be a hero. As I made my way up a large hill I could not wait to feel the speed on my bike so I rode down with excitement, a little boy ended up crossing the same path I was riding on and I thought I was going to hit him even though there was time for him to move, without hesitation I jumped off of my bike halfway down the hill in order to “save” the crossing child who happened to just move over as he saw I was coming down. I ended up with a pretty large scar on my knee that I still have to this day!
Throughout owning this bike I’ve learned that showing emotions is a good thing, especially when you’re excited! Being happy is a great feeling that we often take for granted, maturity does not necessarily mean that you need to stop having fun and showing that excitement. Owning a bike was a big deal as I had a mode of transportation, a form of exercise and something to enjoy with my friends and sister. As for playing the role of a hero, I think I could have done well with a bell if I really did have anxiety about possibly riding over a child. Riding this bike helped me to gain confidence as I worked on trying to improve riding this bike every day, I attempted to master riding in order to prove to myself that I could while enjoying my time out. Being granted the opportunity to engage in outdoor play allowed me to gain traits that exposed me to be aware of my surroundings, although I did not ride over a child, I was aware of doing so. Ashley Rooney is a teacher candidate at York University who is working towards a Bachelor of Education degree to teach English/Social Sciences in the Intermediate/Senior division. She is constantly working towards changing the taboo surrounding teachers in order to best suit the needs of her students. Sharing personal experiences and past failures in order to assure students that their needs and comfortability will be tended to. Ashley is a hopeful teacher who is also a “forever student” as she is always learning new ways to adapt to better help those within the classroom. Sharing exciting experiences big or small can always be turned into a learning lesson for students to learn from, including those that may stem from the story of a bike.
Greenfield, Cheryl. “Transcript: ‘Can Run, Play on Bikes, Jump the Zoom Slide, and Play on the Swings’: Exploring the Value of Outdoor Play.” Australasian Journal of Early Childhood, vol. 29, no. 2, June 2004, pp. 1–5, doi:10.1177/183693910402900202.
Photo by Christoph Oberschneider
Evocative Objects of Learning