Updates from January, 2025 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts

  • Kate 21:02 on 2025-01-11 Permalink | Reply  

    CTV says the city has closed a downtown warming station because it’s not cold enough outside to warrant keeping it open.

    But the item says that warming stations are only opened when it’s -27°. We haven’t had weather that cold yet this winter and quite often we never do.

     
    • Joey 00:00 on 2025-01-12 Permalink

      I didn’t believe it either, but Denis Coderre flagged this as a problem when he was mayor: http://montrealgazette.com/news/local-news/refuge-from-cold-snap-sought-for-homeless-of-montreal

      [Adding archived version of this story for accessibility – K.]

    • nau 12:08 on 2025-01-13 Permalink

      Per Joey’s article, at that time, Projet was calling on Coderre to find the funds to change the opening temperature to -15° (Coderre was musing making it -20°). That higher threshold would accord with opening it around Dec. 21st and closing after Jan. 6th (though in-between the low was above -15° for some days and on Dec. 30th it was above 0°). So either CTV is out to lunch or the temperature used in practice is different from the unchanged official threshold.

  • Kate 12:50 on 2025-01-11 Permalink | Reply  

    There are snowshoe trails on Mount Royal, and the Journal describes an expedition.

     
    • Kate 12:48 on 2025-01-11 Permalink | Reply  

      Teachers without official qualifications certifications are teaching school all over Quebec. (CP story carried on various media.) But that’s been reported before, and what we can learn is that one doesn’t need an advanced degree to teach kids out of a formalized curriculum.

       
      • Nicholas 13:36 on 2025-01-11 Permalink

        I like the term uncertified, rather than unqualified. I had lots of great teachers who became teachers before an education degree was mandatory (it still isn’t for CEGEP and university), and lots of bad teachers who were officially certified. (Most of my teachers were great and certified.) I’m absolutely sure there are useful pedagogical tools learned in an education degree, but I don’t know how strong the correlation is between teaching quality and certification. And once a teacher gets permanence they’re basically impossible to fire. I come from an extended family of teachers (seven of eight in the generation above me) and it doesn’t do the teaching profession, or the students, any favours when teachers who just leave in the middle of their classes for an hour or two to go smoke or run their retail side business (both things that happened to me in high school) are protected.

      • Kate 14:54 on 2025-01-11 Permalink

        I’m fine with that terminology.

      • Nicholas 22:10 on 2025-01-11 Permalink

        Kate, I wasn’t blaming you, but the government, whom you just quoted. I think your commentary captured my thoughts as well, I was just expanding. There’s an often ever increasing push towards jobs requiring a certification, as using that as proxy for qualifications. Just because you passed a class, or a degree, doesn’t make you qualified to do something: a cardiologist can’t do a rheumatologist’s job, nor a contract lawyer a criminal defence attorney’s. You could teach CEGEP chemistry for twenty years and easily step into a high school chemistry class much better than an early elementary school teacher could, and same for a high quality daycare worker into an elementary school classroom than a grade 11 geography teacher. I think the article did a good job pointing out how those things are different, and you too. The government should look at alternate pathways into being certified in the teaching profession rather than a three year education degree.

      • azrhey 12:23 on 2025-01-13 Permalink

        And some people I know went to Ontario to get their certification (because it’s only one year instead of 3) and now they are certified in Quebec. Which is fine. What is not fine is, at the elementary school my friend works at, there are several teachers all with five+ years of elementary school experience and none of them can receive their certification w/o going back to uni for 3 years because they got their diploma and experience in exotic places like Roumania and Finland. The whole system is broken (and I am not opening the hijab can of worms, that’s 4 teachers in that school that left…. )

    • Kate 12:43 on 2025-01-11 Permalink | Reply  

      Crime news on a Saturday morning is about a teenager who got stabbed but is recovering, and shots fired at a parked vehicle in which no one was injured. Could be worse.

       
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