After a bit of a hiatus from formal teaching life to move part time to another province and take on a job as a post-secondary curriculum and instructional consultant, I find myself preparing to return to the classroom.  It will be my second sojourn into teaching post-secondary, and my first time teaching in the college context.  It’s also my first time teaching primarily online. 

I‘m excited, and have been preparing to practise what I preach in terms of using and sharing clear learning goals and success criteria, triangulating (and diversifying!) assessment, and offering variety and choice in learning activities. My first sessional at Holland College will — I hope — be as engaging and practical for my students as it is for me to prepare for it!

As I work to bring to life my syllabus for Communication and Technology in the Arts, the blended course I’ll be facilitating for first-year college students in the Fundamental Arts program this September, I am struck by an interesting realization:  Once again, I‘ll be teaching the same „grade“ as my own children! 

This will actually mark the third time in my career that I‘ll be working with students who are the same age as Alex and Simon. The first time I played this game was the year I taught a Grade 3 class: At the time, my own babies were in Grade 3, too (albeit at a different school), and I often compared mental notes to see how aligned my classroom was with theirs, developmentally.  The edu-stars aligned again a few years later, when I moved from a Grade 7 & 8 Math and Science gig to Grade 6 Core… the same year Simon and Alex moved into Grade 6! And once again, I followed with interest what their respective teachers were up to and compared it to my own teaching and learning journey that year. (The boys even came to visit my students one day, as their school board and mine had different PD day schedules.)

I must be getting old. Either that, or I’m suffering from low grade depression or something. When my partner invited me to join her on a layover in New York for New Year’s Eve 2019, all I could think about was how awesome it would be to instead get home from work, change into my jammies and lounge around on the couch.

If Seinfeld had the summer of George, I’m having the NYE of Vera... and so far, it’s awesome!

After a horrible week spent mostly in bed with fever and a resultant loss of appetite on account of having an awful cold/sinus infection, I found my tastebuds slowly regaining their passion this afternoon. Consequently, I elected to order in through Uber Eats, and tried out a new Indian restaurant.

With my partner away at work and my kids away at a party, I had a whole quiet evening to myself. And after getting ripped off with Christmas, being sick and all, I was looking forward to some quality downtime with myself!

Unlike George’s summer, this evening did not disappoint: In addition to devouring my tasty Indian dinner, I reviewed a little math, studied some flight stuff, and started a new music app to learn to play blues chords on the piano.

Afterwards, I spend some time prepping a handout for one of my Airbnb Experiences, “Learn German and Eat Potato Salad”, for which I have a booking tomorrow.

In an effort to add value but reduce paper, I’ve been creating and providing electronic “handouts” for some of my experiences, which I use during the experience itself. Last week I made a plane spotting “bingo card” for my “Discover the Secret World of Aviation” experience, and tonight I made a visual language reference for the “Kartoffelsalat” which we’ll be making and eating tomorrow.

Since it’s new year’s, I’m all alone, and I don’t really drink, I decided to splurge on a bubble tea, delivered directly to my door through Uber Eats. What with the delivery charge, small order surcharge and tip, it was ridiculously expensive, but kind of fun in a naughty sort of way - not the type of thing I would normally do! But, I haven’t had a bubble tea in SO. LONG. And besides, I would have spent way more had I actually hopped on the plane with my partner to New York. So I thought, hey, why not?!

The poor delivery guy got lost of course, as do all folks who trust in Google to get them to our secret, off the beaten path hideout, with with a few custom directions from the convenience of my couch, I soon had my bubble tea in hand.

If I were really on my own, I’d probably wrap up the NYE of Vera shortly, walk the dog, and then head to bed. But being a responsible parent of independent, young teenagers who are attending their first “real” party (their words, not mine), I feel somewhat compelled to stay up and ensure they actually arrive home at the appointed hour. (My colleagues with older kids warned of this stage years ago, when Alex and Simon were babies screaming all the time and wouldn’t sleep, and I was complaining of being tired - they wisely shared that the tired part wouldn’t end when the kids got older, since I would then/now be awake worrying about whether they were okay, and whether they’d get home safely. I guess we’ve finally entered that stage!)

Also I want to talk to my honey when the clock strikes 12 and she calls me in a drunken stupor from her dinner out with the crew at the hotel restaurant in Newark.

So it’s off to the next item on agenda of the Boring Old Person’s Stay-at-Home Guide to NYE: A little Netflix and dog snuggling... still in my jammies!

Good night, y’all, and in case I fall asleep on the couch before midnight, happy new year 2020!

For many, the advent of Christmas marks a season of anxiety and stress. Money is tight and fuses are short as extended families bicker about who goes where for Christmas, and what happens once they get there. Stores and online ad campaigns pull at your heart strings and play on your guilt to try to get you to loosen the purse strings and spill all your hard-earned cash into their coffers, so that you can have a faint glimmer of hope of living up to wildly unrealistic expectations. Even the most pious among us can get swept up in the superficiality and busy-ness of the season.

For me growing up, this intensity was seldom apparent. In fact, quite the contrary was true.


Stability and Peace

With virtually no extended family, my mom, Omi and I had few if any competing expectations. As far as gifts were concerned, modesty won out over both extremes of abundance and scarcity. And as Europeans, we would generally forego the traditional Canadian turkey dinner in favour of homemade German potato salad (kartoffelsalat) and wieners w crusty buns and Dijon style mustard, followed by Weinachtsstolle (German fruitcake) and Dominosteine, served on the evening of Dec 24, as soon as my mom got home from work. It was an exciting family gathering, but not a noisy one.


When I was little, my uncle formed part of the small group around the table for dinner. After he died, it was just the three of us for a few years. Later, as a teenager, I remember my mother’s friend, Horst, joining us for Christmas Eve.

Ironically, this annual holiday ritual represented one of the most stable seasons in my otherwise chaotic and unstable upbringing! Despite the schizophrenia, suicidal depression and clinical anxiety that wreaked general havoc my single parent, immigrant family life, Christmas Eve and the events leading up to it seemed like the glue of reliability that held us together year after year, and kept me — as the only child in the midst of this mayhem — sane.

The Reliable “Weinachtsbaum”

Come hell or high water, there was some form of real Christmas tree every year, with the same damned decorations, including the „Strohsterne“ that had been carefully preserved by my great-aunt in Germany and then my grandmother and my mother after her. There were the red balls packed neatly away in yellowing cardboard egg cartons, and there was the always-too-short string of yellow lights to emulate the real candles my grandmother‘s family‘s tree would have sported when the Tannenbaum was unveiled on Heilig Abend in their modest living room each year. (Oh how I longed for the multi-coloured lights and too much tacky tinsel that festooned the plastic trees of my Canadian school chums!)

Symbols of Stability

Unbeknownst to me at the time, that meagre tree, the gifts that surrounded it, and the simple supper of Wuersten with Senf, Kartfoffelsalat and Dominosteine that preceded the opening of said gifts each year provided a beacon of hope in my emotionally tumultuous childhood and adolescence. Where so much uncertainty prevailed, our family’s Christmas rituals represented the security so lacking in other areas of my life.

My family‘s Christmas Eve tradition is one I‘ve insisted on emulating each year into my adulthood, in spite (or perhaps because?) of the fact that my mother died 2 days before Christmas when I was 21, and my grandmother and mom‘s friend Horst are also no longer with us.

My 14-year-old twins lead even more scrambled lives than I did at their age (along with a competitive helping of insanity and chaos in the emotional states of the adults around them!), and my hope is that the predictability and structure of our Christmas Eve traditions — and in particular, the tree — provides them much-needed stability each year, as it did for me growing up.

What’s on My Tree

Our tree features a combination of old- and new-world tradition. The lights that serve as the base each year are not multi-coloured as I‘d pined for as a child, but the string of soft white mini lights that adorn the tree is sufficiently long so as not to leave giant gaps even those years when we splurge on a larger tree! And in lieu of tinsel, we usually include some form of sheer, golden ribbon poking out here and there. (Reusable, of course!) Next come the red balls in assorted hues and sizes. They are not the same ones my mother used (those have long since broken), but they reflect the overall feel of my childhood Christmas trees.

After the red balls, the homemade wooden stars, painted yellow, that my roommate and I bought on Roncesvalles in my mid-20s after eyeing them in a shop window for some time one year (the same year we stayed up until 4 a.m. baking gingerbread for a house that looked considerably more pathetic in the end than the photo accompanying the recipe on the cover of some Sally Homemaker style holiday magazine that had inspired this foolishness in us!)

And so our Christmas tree finds its way into our annual routine, predicable in both its appearance and content, offering up its cherished heirlooms to whomever in our little circle might appreciate or benefit from these varied traditions.

I hope it will do so for many years to come!

While we've worked hard in our personal life to surround ourselves with influences that positively portray the fluidity of our people, the mainstream world around us apparently continues to wallow in a quagmire of clearly defined roles, rules and gender stereotypes.

The literature, activities and announcements on board harp on these stereotypes, and while no one was outright homophobic, it was generally assumed that everyone aboard was "normal", ie straight and aligned with the gender binary.

In the middle of our cruise, there was a game show, based on an actual TV game show, called "Love and Marriage", held in the theatre. It was here that Tats and I elected to challenge the somewhat stifling straight culture that surrounded us.

On a whim, Tats and I auditioned (if an impromptu queer interpretation of the required ultra-hetero Tarzan scene could be called an audition).... And the next thing we knew, we had won the audience over and found ourselves on stage as one of the three couples selected for the show!

Wedged in between two newlyweds and a husband and wife who had been together for over forty years, Tats and I representated "mid range" (over five years and under 20). We were also the only lesbian couple, and -- I suspect -- probably the only LGBTQ couple they've ever had on the ship's show. As a result largely of this latter fact, we found we gained considerable fame and notoriety; for the remainder of the cruise we kept getting "recognized" wherever we went. This consisted largely of people coming up to us with a big, friendly smile and telling us how much they had enjoyed our performance, and the occasional person yelling, “sing in Russian!“ across a room at Tats, because of a response I had given to one of the questions asked during the game show.

While it was a little disconcerting to be thrust into the public eye like that, it was in some ways a not altogether unfamiliar feeling. As a parent of monozygotic twins, I've become accustomed some level of notoriety (this was especially true when Alex and Simon were small and more easily recognizable as a “pair”).