Teachers Unite Against The Provincial Government!

Well, it has come to this: strike action.

If you're looking for me, you can see a peak of my red hat on
the far left of the pic. (working hard, Jen!)

This is my first picketing experience. During my past public school teaching gigs (in Ontario and New Brunswick), the threat of a strike always seemed to be looming (I honestly don't know how serious it was, but there always seemed to be talks about strikes during our meetings), but an agreement came to the rescue before the teachers ever hit the picket line. 

Not this time.

At 7am, on a Monday morning, I was in good company.
(we look at little bit too cheerful!)

In solidarity we stand against education cuts. For more info: http://www.cegep-heritage.qc.ca/savequalityeducation/ and a video clip: http://ottawa.ctvnews.ca/video?clipId=735606

An appreciation of the Gatineau Hills as our backyard. 

To Inspire: The Haunting Past

This is an oral presentation that my brother wrote when he was in grade 7. I was fifteen at the time, wearing ripped jeans, plaid work shirts, cool hats and Converse shoes. I was into The Breakfast Club and would spend hours in front of the VCR rewinding and pausing to jot down the dialogues of my favourite scenes.

Notice the second last line.
Wish permanently granted! ;)

Happy March

It's my March break and I'm suppose to be marking essays right now. I have about 60 compositions to correct. I started at 10 am this morning and I have done three so far (it's 10:30 am)
Needless to say, I'd rather do something else: enjoying this sunny morning, knitting , reading Out of Africa, organizing my yoga dvds.
I did my yoga practice this morning, which was lovely! Yoga Today rocks! If I don't do my yoga practice early in the morning, I lose all interest. Before a shower, a cuppa tea and checking my emails, I need to do yoga. If I don't, the day just unwinds and before I know it it's the afternoon and other things take priority.

A new month. I can't believe we're in March already! It just kindda crept up.

Random things (because I love randomness):

Margot loves looking at videos of herself on the computer. This is how we survive the "witching hour":

"It's an odd thing, but anyone who disappears is said to be seen in San Francisco. It must be a delightful city and possess all the attractions of the next world," - Oscar Wilde

When you need to refresh a room, sometimes just moving the furniture around does the job. This is what we did to our bedroom and now it's so inviting: there's a little reading nook, the bare wall isn't so overbearing and there's a little trinket bookcase that use to be our console table.

But now our entrance looks like this. It's a bit empty, but that's alright as Margot excels in reorganizing the baskets full of tuques, mitts, sweaters.

Glorious Wednesday!

This is the first Wednesday since the beginning of the semester that I have enjoyed the morning and afternoon with my feisty lil' girl (who is napping as I write this).
As you probably know, my teaching schedule is rubbish this semester. The closest to a day off I get is on Wednesday when I only have 1 class (from 8-9am). For the last 7 weeks, I have stayed at school for meetings, auditions and prep. But today, I rapidly left school at 9 am. My tea was still warm...

The weather is gorgeous! (refreshing after a rainy and grey weekend and beginning of week). Went to the Marcel-Chaput park (our little street park) with Margot and stayed there much longer than anticipated. Suddenly, it dawned on me: what is there to do at home? Might as well be soaking in the rays of sunshine, breathing fresh air and getting visual stimulation from the colourful leaves.

Then, Margot and I had a rendez-vous at the Language Development Lab at the University of Ottawa. This research was on "The Effect of Stress Differences on Infants Learning Phonetically Similar Words". This is my second participation at the LDL at Ottawa U. The first one was when Margot was 13 months and was about being able to differentiate different accents: "Do Babies Notice when a Sound Influences its Neighbour?" I am proud to contribute to research, especially second-language studies. Margot gets a free t-shirt and an outing and I get free parking (!)
For those who are curious, this is how the "meeting" unraveled: We were met by a lovely young Ph.D student, Sophie (from Moncton), who explained to me the nature of her study while Margot played with toys (she especially liked the truck). Then, Margot and I were led into the testing room which had a chair, a screen, a hidden camera, and a set of headphones for me (playing 1990's Jann Arden hits). Margot was seated on my lap in front of a screen. A picture of an object was shown and accompanied with a gibberish word (in this case, they had two objects: a fennel "bica" and a stapler "capoul"), so over and over they show those objects with the words. What do they test? Margot's reaction to the stimuli by the amount of time she looked at the screen. There were two rules for the parent: no pointing and no talking (I did well).  The testing took about 5 minutes. Afterwards, we returned to the lobby where Margot continued to play (this time with the toy phone) and the grad student asked me questions about Margot's exposure to language.

 Tonight, Simon and I are going to see the dance company EASTMAN, original choreography by Cherkaoui and Jalet in their latest dance creation, Babel (words)