Cracks have already formed in concrete recently poured in the Louis‑Hippolyte‑La Fontaine tunnel. The quality of the material is in doubt.
Updates from October, 2024 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
-
Kate
-
Kate
A McGill study shows that babies who learn two languages from the beginning have more efficient brains – a situation that arises organically when each parent speaks a different language to the child.
Tee Owe
I thought that Wilder Penfield (founder of the Neuro) had made this case already in 1939, maybe for slightly older kids- someone who knows better than me should comment
PatrickC
@TeeOwe, My parents were well aware of Penfield’s argument back in the 1950s. He influenced their decision to start my schooling in French. I went into kindergarten not speaking a word and just picked up the language. It didn’t seem to be that big a deal. My mother taught me to read English at home.
-
Kate
With the service centre having failed the students of Bedford School, Bernard Drainville blames the teachers’ union for not doing the service centre’s job.
Adding: Patrick Lagacé also thinks the union should have done more to effect change rather than protecting its members. He still calls the teachers’ actions religio-rétrogrades although I’m still not seeing any evidence of proselytizing mentioned at the school.
(Uatu’s comment below was in reference to Drainville, which I posted first, not Lagacé.)
Uatu
Well he’s right. I mean it’s the service centre’s job to change oil and rotate the tires and not take complaints lol
jeather
I am entirely shocked that every one of the dysfunctional levels is blaming a different one.
Joey
Re: proselytizing, one of the things that irked me in Lagace’s earlier column was the causal xenophobia that has started to creep in to some of his writing. I think it’s a rite of passage into middle age for most Quebec columnists. Anyway, he called out the fact that the school had made efforts to connect to the local Muslim community; I think that this assessment is backwards. What proportion of the student body consists of Muslim kids? If it’s significant, I think it’s valuable for the local public school to make outreach efforts to the religious organization supporting and engaging with those kids and their families. The assumption seems to be that the Muslim teachers were evangelizing to non-Muslim students, but I suspect that many of the kids are already Muslim, and thus would not need to be proselytized to…
The arguments about the structural roadblocks to any kind of meaningful improvement to the situation or legitimate consequences for the teachers in question are much more compelling. No need for Diet Racism…
jeather
They suspended the teachers’ brevets, and are now of course blaming religion. (As I said, I didn’t find much suggesting they taught anything religious, and if you think that only Muslim teachers are sexist do I have news for you.)
Chris
>What proportion of the student body consists of Muslim kids?
There’s no such thing as “Muslim kids”, there’s only kids of Muslims. They are too young to understand or consent to that label, grade school especially. If a Liberal/Conservative/NDP parent had kids, would you call them “Liberal kids”? Likewise no. Being Muslim is an opinion, a choice, a lifestyle, it’s not a genetic trait you get from your parents like skin colour.
>but I suspect that many of the kids are already Muslim, and thus would not need to be proselytized to
Even if I granted “Muslim kids” exist, this doesn’t follow. To get people to believe anything, constant proselytized helps. A kid may be barely Muslim due to parental teaching, but could be convinced further by reinforcement from school teaching, or dissuaded by school teaching of the opposite. So it very much matter if the teachers were evangelizing or not!
Kate
I disagree, Chris. There are Muslim kids, by which I would mean children in families, chiefly from Muslim-majority countries, in whose households Islam is a way of life, and who practice its tenets because their parents do.
No, it isn’t genetic, but it’s a very strong bond to family and community. It isn’t a choice as you so airily put it, like a white westerner telling everyone they know that they’ve decided they’re now a Buddhist. It isn’t even an opinion, as it comes before opinions form, when you’re a kid. It’s much deeper than that, and it’s why people sometimes write whole books about their process and pain in pulling away from a religion and its consequences in loss of family and connections.
-
Kate
The first composting plant in Montreal has opened (although the stuff shown in the photo looks more like garden waste than household food scraps). It’s on Henri‑Bourassa in St‑Laurent and the article says it doesn’t stink up the neighbourhood.
-
Kate
There’s been a third car firebombing in three days on a residential street in Cartierville.
No media are confirming that these vehicles all belong to the same person or family, let alone reporting what the beef is.
Derek
I can’t unsee the illegally parked car.
Honest question: does the owner of that torched vehicle still get a ticket for that?
Nicholas
If I were their insurance I’d be rushing to cancel their policy. Not sure why anyone would give them insurance. Maybe they should start taking Bixi and transit.
Reply