Most of the 88 students from the Philippines at Toronto’s Forest Hill Collegiate are adjusting to more than a new country and new school system….These polite, affable children of those who work as caregivers to the world have spent a good part of their young lives on the other side of the world from one or both of their parents….“These kids are going through an often wrenching change of downward class mobility and that’s a shock at any age, let alone for teenagers,” said York University geography Professor Philip Kelly in the Toronto Star June 1. He’s studying why only 35 per cent of the second-generation Filipinos born here earn university degrees. Read full story.
Bad moon rising
Here’s a quirk to look for when you read your youngster a storybook about a good little boy or girl heading off to bed: Is the moon in the illustration backward?…Scientists have actually taken action in the past when physics banged heads with art, as astronomer Paul Delaney of York University noted in the Edmonton Journal June 1. He says it was once common to find pictures of a star twinkling through the inside of the crescent moon – which isn’t possible because there’s still solid moon in the way. “That has been since corrected because a lot of amateur and professional astronomers started pointing it out to publishers,” he said. “I actually still put it as a test question [at York]: ‘What’s wrong with this picture?’ And you would be surprised how many people don’t clue in to it.” Read full story.
Oshawa: the GTA’s final frontier for development
Oshawa, the land development forgot for the last few decades, is now the final frontier in the rapidly growing GTA….Christine McLaughlin, a PhD candidate in history at York University, is writing her thesis on Oshawa between 1950 and 1975. Her concern is that the move toward a knowledge economy will hurt the blue-collar community that formed Oshawa’s backbone since its beginning. “A lot of people in the community have been left behind by this progress,” said McLaughlin in the Toronto Star June 3. “Those deep roots don’t just go away – these people are born and raised in Oshawa, deeply defined by its manufacturing industry. They are not just going to go out and become professors.” Read full story.
Pantex gets hands on with purple martin conservation
Pantex is taking part in a national effort to conserve some song birds that are nesting here in the panhandle right now.…Kevin Fraiser is a postdoctorate fellow at York University in Toronto, which is the Purple Martin Conservation Association’s partner in the effort to research the migratory patterns of purple martin birds. “We’re interested in doing that because we know purple martins are declining, but we don’t really know why,” Fraiser said on NewsChannel 10 June 3. “To be able to conserve them properly and figure out what’s going on, we need to figure out where they’re spending the rest of their time when they’re not with us here in North America.” Read full story.