A team of prominent Canadian educators and race relations experts has been appointed to help the country’s biggest school board figure out how to go about the controversial practice of gathering race-based statistics on its students, reported the Toronto Star June 7. The 21-member Advisory Committee on Student Achievement and Equity, announced by the Toronto District School Board Tuesday, held its inaugural meeting Monday night to consider a proposal on how the board might research information on its students’ gender, race, ethnicity, mother tongue, income and address. It will spend the summer considering how schools might collect that information reliably and report back to the board in the fall. Of the 11 non-school board members, four are affiliated with York: education Professor Carl James; retired law Professor Fred Zemans; anthropology Professor Carol Tator; and criminal lawyer Aston Hall, who graduated from Osgoode Hall Law School in 1993.
The lure of small-town life
In a June 7 Toronto Star column about living in a small town, Sarah Petrescu talked to Cathy Duong. The 23-year-old Duong came to Canada when she was 6 from Quang Ninh, a village near Hanoi. She first lived in Calgary, but had a hard time making friends. It wasn’t just because she’d never lived in a city of strangers before. Being a minority has different challenges, she points out. “The whole school was white. There was this one group I wanted to hang out with, but they called me names,” she said. She will graduate this year with a bachelor’s degree in political science from York University’s Glendon College and says she’s open to the small-town life. Just not necessarily in Vietnam. “I’m not much of a consumer and I care about the environment I live in, so I think a small town might suit me. I’d even go to Nunavut, just to explore,” said Duong.
Hockey players try ‘Sinden System’
New York Rangers boss Glen Sather and other hockey GMs and coaches were at an airport-area arena Monday for the first of three days of rules experiments, and things got started with a look at the “open game” concept put forth by the Boston Bruins, reported Canadian Press in a story printed June 6 in The Globe and Mail and June 7 in The Standard in St. Catharines. Club president Harry Sinden contends that offences would be liberated and neutral zone trapping obliterated by removing the centre red-line and the bluelines. Phil Knapp, a York University forward from Athens, Ont., was one of the skaters taking part. “There’s so much room out there that there’s not much checking going on,” said the fourth-year kinesiology and psychology student. “It’s really open. When the puck leaves your end, you can just stand there in front of the other team’s net.”
- A photo next to a Toronto Star story June 7 about the National Hockey League replacing standard hockey nets with bigger ones featured York goalie Scott Della Vedova. At 6-foot-2 and 205 pounds, the third-year history student still left plenty of room to shoot at.
On air
- Andy Barrie interviewed “The Flyerman” Mark Vistorino, about handing out rock concert flyers to club and concert patrons and how two York-educated filmmakers – Jeff Stephenson, BFA ’98, and Jason Tan, who studied film from 1993 to 1997 – have made a documentary about him on CBC Radio’s “Metro Morning” June 6.