Nunsense

This past week was another action-filled adventure, filled with parent-teacher interviews, CSL webinars and other appointments. I'm going to focus today's reflection on some collaborative units I'm teaching, and a particular outfit I wore. (No, it doesn't have to do with Fluevogs; sorry Wendy and Kim!)

I really enjoy teaching with Lisa Daley. She encourages me to bring my "A-game" to every lesson. We are co-teaching a series of history lessons based on the time period from 1713-1800. There's a lot of background knowledge that students might need, especially if our eventual goal is to pursue inquiry projects based on student interest. Our most recent lesson introduced some of the settler groups from this time in pre-Canadian history, and I used "teacher in role" to give students the chance to allow students to ask questions "directly" to a coureur du bois and to a nun.

I was a bit worried that the activity would go "off the rails" because the students would get too riled up at this alternative way of obtaining information. However, I was pleasantly surprised. The students actually grasped the format of "teacher in role" and asked really powerful questions. I had to remove my head gear / habit - a gesture in drama that means that I was "stepping out of role" to respond as myself - to acknowledge that some of their questions were ones in which I did not know the answer. (One such question that blew me away was "What was the opinion of the Church and the nuns towards the American Revolution?")

When I mused about the experience afterwards, I realized that, in our public school system, students have very little exposure to religious figures. The students associate nuns with being solely residential school villains who beat and mistreated Indigenous children. The culpability of nuns in some of the atrocities committed while residential schools were in operation is not in question, but as a Catholic myself, it's a shame that this is often the only connection that students make with nuns. Religion has been the catalyst for both bad and good things in the world; sometimes we focus on the bad and forget the good. I've actually renewed my volunteer commitment to the church recently by becoming a lector (reader) at Mass. A little known fact about me is that when I was young, I once suggested to some friends (Anita Cicco, do you recall this?) that if I wasn't married by age 30, I'd consider becoming a nun. I think I make a much better wife and mother than I would probably be if I took different kinds of vows!

It was also quite revelatory for the students to demand hard questions and hear some in-character answers. I had to remind the Grade 7s, when they asked my nun persona, that the residential school system did not begin in Canada in earnest until the 1880s. It was also a foreign concept for students in our pluralist society to consider that some groups believe that they have the right answer and that others are wrong. Many nuns felt that they were in the business of saving souls and that their method was the best, guaranteed way to get to heaven. 

I had planned to re-use my nun outfit with the Grade 4 students. They are studying societies from the past. We are examining Medieval England and Ancient Rome, so I thought it'd be useful for them to have a conversation with a nun and a goddess. I had to postpone that lesson to complete some others, but I look forward to donning the robe again for some interesting dialogue.

Something that is more NONSENSE than nun-sense is this ear situation I'm facing. On Friday, November 1, something got lodged in my ear. It's negatively affected my hearing and giving me soreness and pain. I went to my doctor's clinic on November 10 and was told that I had to treat the ear infection that developed first before dealing with the blockage. I had a migraine on November 11 and an even bigger migraine on November 14 which knocked me out for the entire day - it's not normal for me to sleep from 9:30 am - 4:00 pm as part of my recovery. I returned to the clinic on November 17 to learn that this procedure is de-insured. Even if I wanted to pay the doctor to help me, they aren't allowed to remove the blockage. I have to locate an audiologist to pay for the removal. This is going to mean more time off work. I know it's (hopefully)  a temporary problem but I'm really frustrated. We can never take our health for granted. I've seen how quickly people can go from able to infirm. Saturday, November 16 was the funeral service for a wonderful woman who used to volunteer in my school library - Pat McNaughton. She had a stroke / brain aneurism in the spring and never fully recovered. A lung infection took her a few days after her 77th birthday. It was rather challenging to try and hear what others were saying and I apologize to anyone who had to face my odd contortions as I navigated my head so that people could speak into my "good ear". Let's hope my hearing impairment gets resolved so that things don't get worse.