Posts with the Toronto District School Board tag

Barris Beat

Social skill without a cellphone

Written by Ted Barris on . Leave a comment
Closing night flowers (“One rose is just fine”) to “Frankie and Johnny” co-stars Grant Evans and Lisha Van Nieuwenhove. Photo Michelle Viney.

This week I’ve visited the Uxbridge Music Hall a lot. We were moving staging, lights, props and actors into the facility for performances of Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune, Dec. 13-16. On Monday, as director Conrad Boyce and I opened the front door of the Hall to move a piece of furniture onto the stage, Benny, the custodian, greeted us with a big smile and handshakes.

“Isn’t it great? We don’t have to do this anymore,” and he mimicked avoiding somebody on the sidewalk the way we did during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“It is great,” I agreed. “But we almost have to learn how to deal with people face-to-face all over again.” (more…)

Barris Beat

The art and science of getting it

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Ontario Legislature at Queen’s Park. tvo.org

It took Opposition pressure at Queen’s Park, it took outspoken professional staff at libraries across the province, and it took members of a book club staging a read-in at the constituency office of MPP Sam Oosterhoff (Niagara West), but it appears as if some saner thinking has prevailed inside Doug Ford’s PC caucus. A clearly re-educated minister of tourism, culture and sport, has backed down on his planned 50 per cent cuts to Ontario Library Service-North.

“OLS-N will be reinstating their interlibrary loan program as of June 1, 2019,” Michael Tibollo said late last week. (more…)

Barris Beat

Friend in need

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Mustafa Ahmed in a spoken word performance. Photo SpeakOutPoetry.

Five days from now, he and a lot of young people in Canada will wrap up their summer holidays. They’ll all be putting away their T-shirts, cut-offs and flip-flops and starting to wear school shirts and pants again. Instead of baseball gloves or tennis rackets, they’ll all be carrying their smart phones and backpacks full of textbooks again. Only this teenager I met from Toronto’s inner city, last week, has something in addition to school on his mind.

“There are friends out there who bring real benefit to your life,” he said this week, “and there are friends who don’t. It’s important to know who your real friends are.”

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Barris Beat

Building better citizens

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Sgt. Isaac Ramos credits his years in Royal Canadian Air Cadets for his outlook and attitude about life.
Sgt. Isaac Ramos credits his years in Royal Canadian Air Cadets for his outlook on life.

The young man stole the show, when it was my job to do it. I had just finished a 30-minute talk at a military dinner in Etobicoke. There were about a hundred young people in the audience, members of the Royal Canadian Air Cadets (RCAC) No. 700 Squadron. I thought my talk – about the romance of aviation and the roots of national service – had gone well. I had managed to capture and keep the attention 12- to 18-year-olds. The end of my talk brought a genuine thank-you from a young warrant officer. Then a young man with sergeant’s stripes on his sleeve rose to speak.

“Four years ago, I was an irresponsible kid. I didn’t get along with my parents. I bad-mouthed everybody,” he said. “But today in the cadets it’s just the opposite.”

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