Why I Wear the Poppy

for Robbie

I wear a poppy over my heart because I have always worn a poppy over my heart. And as with anything good, it starts off as unquestioned habit, is reconsidered for its merits, and is reapplied with greater conviction.

                This year more than ever I remember it also as a symbol of many things that matter to me, one a late friendship with a veteran; it’s a symbol of what brought us to be friends, a symbol of a connection we shared.

                “Sacrifice” and “valour” and “heroes.” “For our country” and “liberty.” Words and phrases people use to justify the wearing of the poppy.

                It doesn’t need justification.

                I am a pacifist. War is atrocious. Like greed and hate, it is one of man’s simplest and greatest evils. Impossible to justify.

                There are men and there are souls that once were boys, and did what they felt was right or what they were told to do. They justified it how they could and how they had to.

                They faced the awful in the world and in themselves. They lay their lives and their innocence on a cold iron slab knowing that they were guaranteed the loss of one or the other. No retaining both.

                For those that survived that insanity, they returned to the world and they lived lives. They went on. They justified and they compensated because they had to find a way to be human again. They never forgot and they never let it go because they couldn’t. Who could? To let that go would be to forfeit their humanity.

                Where I live, there’s a man who was amongst the first to hit Juno beach on D-Day. He had signed up, trained, shipped out, and finally attacked with a group of friends from home. He was the only one of that group who returned after the war. For the next sixty years, he established himself as essential to his community. He was involved in everything. He coached, he volunteered, he was a cheerleader and an organizer. Tireless. Just to make his town better. Because he felt an obligation. Because he felt like he was living more lives than his own.

                That is why I wear the poppy.

                It is the symbol of my friend, a man who grew to be the best man in my life, an essential bond, even though it was in his own twilight years. We first bonded when he told me tales of the bloodbath of Ortona. Of depravity and horror and what he had to do to come through it, both alive and as a man. He changed my life, and every Remembrance Day for ten years I called him to tell him I loved him and to hear about the life he had made after he had put his innocence on that slab. Heard of the normal he had made after that brief, altering horror.

                That is why I wear the poppy.

                This year I can’t call him. This year is the first that Remembrance has a double meaning.

                It’s not about death, it’s not about victory, it’s not about intangibles like liberty and way of life. These are the things that those that came after must tell ourselves. In our selfishness to justify why we do it we make it grander, we talk about our way of life saved.

                To me, it’s not about our way of life. It’s about lives: those that were ended, and those that continued, changed.

                That is why I wear the poppy. 

Teaching to the Touch Screens

I came into teaching at a pretty exciting time. The century had just turned, we were comfortably into a full

Who teaches who here?

assimilation of the Internet into daily life, and students were readily using Google and Yahoo to conduct research online. But early Internet nannies weren’t allowing them to view Mars Explorer because the domain name spelled “SEX” in the middle. Still some figuring.

Teachers were seeing that the kids already knew as much or more than they did, and many were resisting all of this “technology”—the term we still use for anything that, y’know, beeps and boops and crashes and freezes and we aren’t quite sure we fully understand and threatens EVERY ASPECT OF DECENT HUMAN EXISTENCE!

                At the time, us fresh-faced educators were being strongly encouraged to embrace these new tools, to learn them because they had awesome potential. The kids were adapting anyway, so may as well stay ahead of the curve. Most of us did. By the late 90s, being tech-savvy was a sure-fire way to get hired in everything from garbage collection to piano tuning.

                Flash forward a bit more than a decade and I’m an educator in the age of smartphones and tablets. High speed this, miniature that. Apps that unlock your car and set the seat warmer to “I just want to have a bottle of wine and cry.” The devices are small and powerful, they stun us with how quickly—daily it feels—the rules change, and there’s no longer a little paperclip to tell you how to do what it looks like you’re doing. Just a cold, greedy, soulless once-bitten apple, and a robot who looks scarily like a psychopathic extra from The Black Hole.

                We the teachers are still being encouraged to embrace, and we try. We are shown methods of bringing every form of device and application into the learning process. Much of this is wonderful and often useful rather than just trendy. Learning and its delivery are changing. I can text my students a reminder of their homework, I can create a website or blog of my lessons, I can chat in online rooms that are dedicated to me communicating with my kids and their parents all day and all night and all week and all year.

                We do it, we do it. We’re such great teachers because we’re teaching on the kids’ terms.

                BUT.

                There are cameras everywhere. In the locker-rooms, in the hallways. Kids are Snapchatting every time I turn my back to refresh my Activeboard. Altercations between staff and students are filmed and posted, out of context and out of control. Two kids can bait a teacher into losing her cool in class and a third can film, edit, and post the ensuing rant to the delight of millions. Zoiks! I didn’t sign up for this. How do we monitor every way we can be viewed and assessed and especially judged?

                Worse, the teachers who are the least savvy of social networks tend to suffer its backlash the most.

                I try to stay current. I Facebook, I Instagram, I blog. I’ve got like three clouds going, two sets of online documents, and a good half-dozen online personas. I don’t Snapchat, I don’t Vine, I don’t tweet. A student told me recently that she was tweeting about my classes—she sort of overblew how much it was all “trending”—and even though she meant it as a compliment to my teaching, I got a little uneasy. When you put it out there, it’s out there, and open to the world.  One of the biggest generational differences is how we view the Internet. I see it as the ocean: huge, sprawling, endlessly flowing. Awesome but potentially dangerous. The kids see it as a glass of water: sure there’s more out there, but I’m only worried about this little bit I have here.  

                We have entered an age where Millennials are now teachers. They are pretty darn good at keeping up with the kids, but they also appear to have the greatest issues with seeing the lines of the public and the personal. That’s the double-edged sword. The person who uses all these advancements in how we can interact with our learners appears to be the most susceptible to having issues removing the public from the private.

                Take Facebook. Let us just for a moment ignore the fact that this website has the most porous security system in the world, subject to retroactive and inane changes at the drop of a hat. Most teachers I know have a Facebook identity. Some of them are friends with students: former, current or both. Perhaps you can see the issues.

                -Make friends with a kid, you are communicating with a minor on a website where that kid will post and say anything, no matter how inappropriate. Even if you’re not being inappropriate, you’re still linked to that.

                -If you have a policy of only adding kids as friends once they’re adults, they are friends with minors still, and you’re connected to those minors via that newly-minted adult.

                -You don’t add any kids or their parents or their family dog as friends, but then a friend of yours takes a photo of you sucking the hose from a keg, tags you, and because you are—forgivably—unaware of the latest change of Facebook’s infamous opt-out security re-do (the one from five minutes ago), everyone with a pair of fingers and a search engine can see that friendship-ending Instagram share.

                Many teachers avoid Facebook, and then are told by tech-loving administration that it’s good to keep up with the kids. Others (guilty) create two Facebook profiles: public and private, but that doesn’t allow you to break the law, nor does it give you complete anonymity. Especially if you have the same friend on both.

                Point: we, your kids’ educators, are trying really hard to keep up with the world Steve Jobs put in fast forward. Our bosses and professional counsellors encourage us to learn about the newest website or networking site or whatever that sounds like it’s been named by a two year old. I’m really keen on it.

                BUT #2. A teacher has to be extremely careful about keeping private and public separate. This is difficult when you are “out there” in so many rapidly-changing ways. It’s worse when you’re being drawn, blinking and scared, from your deep, dark cave in which you have sworn you will remain forever oblivious, forever lost in a time when Christian Slater was a bankable actor.       

                Who we are and what we do are becoming one, and there are few professions where that may have as resounding an effect. 

Five Rules to Help You Keep Your Soul in November

1. Candy is not breakfast. 

Hand-picked for the Senate by the PM

2. If you're growing a moustache but doing nothing for charity, you're a Grade 11 hockey player. Congrats, A-hole.

3. Christmas is in late December. You're not Wal-Mart. Have some class and shaddup about it for at LEAST a month. You're making it impossible for those of us trying to find a reason not to hate it.

4. Of the major holidays/events of October through December, Remembrance Day is the most important. (Then Grey Cup, this year only). Show some respect for the only one of these not whored-over by capitalism, wouldja?

5. Winter is going to happen now. Go outside and enjoy it because it's awesome.