Storytelling — Video

Laughing, losing and learning: All part of the game of growing up

A christmas delight: Kevin Herod's next show at the Comedy Bar will help get you in the holy-jolly mood.

In Grade 3, Kevin Herod proudly marched to school clutching The Two Detectives, his first movie script. He thought for sure it was grade “A” material. When his teacher handed it back to him, full of corrections, Herod felt like he had failed.

“I was one of those kids that wished the teacher said, ‘Hey this is a good story.’ She only corrected the spelling mistakes, but in my mind it was like the story was bad. But, it actually influenced me to do better the next time,” he said.

From sports to report cards, a child learns that losing and failing are part of life. Stuart Shanker, a research professor of philosophy and psychology at York University, considers losing the most important stepping-stone in a child’s development. From learning to walk, an infant will fall before it can stand strong. A parent cannot always be there to pick up the pieces or protect a child from losing, failing or struggling.

“Whatever the activity is, you have to learn how to do it… you’ve got to take risks. You’ve got to face the fact that you might fail because that is the nature of life,” Shanker explained. “And you may fail over and over. Success and satisfaction comes from picking yourself up and trying again and mastering it.”

While Herod’s strength in dealing with failure may have started with The Two Detectives, the now-seasoned comedian and scriptwriter chose his career despite the risks of getting booed off stage; he loves the hecklers.

“One time I was booed and it actually settled me down,” he said. “I was really nervous and not prepared and having the chance to make a joke at the heckler made me relax and do my show.”

The art of laying out a magazine

Laying out a magazine is a tedious process. I’m sitting next to my three partners as we attempt to pull an all-nighter (we’ll see how far into it we get). They’re much more adept in the ways of inDesign and Photoshop than I am, so as they organize the page layouts and artwork I’m on blog duty.

The one thing I can do, however, is observe. And through my observations I have seen Meghan battle font sizes, hyphenation and line spacing as she expertly places all of our articles into an inDesign layout. And Michelle is at the end of the row, cursing Photoshop because it won’t let her place an arrow where she wants it on the picture. Luke is to my right. He had been editing a story. Then he helped solve Michelle’s arrow issue, and now he’s preparing our cover photo.

Now Meghan’s got the inDesign handbook out and is flipping pages to find the one dedicated to wrap sidebars. Not quite what one imagines when plans are made to lay out a magazine. Where’s the fun? The creativity? The enjoyment? Well, it’s there if you look hard enough.

We got to bring in a real goat brain earlier for our cover shoot. That was fun, placing it on the anchor desk in the news room for pictures with Katie, who happens to be Meghan’s sister and our cover model. Before that, Michelle and I had to try and fasten both halves of the brain together by hand with a paper clip and a staple.

The people in the computer lab are a lot of fun to be around, and help keep each other laughing through this long day.

Pizza and lasagna and juice was a very welcome dinner.

Meghan just mentioned that this experience has brought us closer together.

Michelle is drinking Meghan’s bubble water. Luke’s outside for a quick smoke. Meghan’s still fighting the good fight against line spacing and font sizes. And I’m blogging.

This is a good team.

The sign of the times

When Stephanie Curtin fed her seven-month-old daughter, Sepheria, she would touch her hand to her mouth and say the word “eat”. When Sepheria started to cry, Curtin would touch her hands to her chest and turn them, showing her hands were empty, and would ask her daughter, “All done?”

“I had read that babies could learn sign language well before they could speak,” Curtin said.  “I had been around a lot of other babies that seemed pretty frustrated and could not get their desires across, so I thought I would try it.”

Teaching babies American Sign Language (ASL) offers parents and hearing infants the ability to communicate with each other well before a baby can learn to speak.

Teaching the child sign language releases the frustration in the household Curtin explains. ASL makes it possible for both baby and parent to understand early “wants” and “needs” and to engage in learning at a very young age.

Promoting self-esteem leaves kids behind

At the age of four and a half, Denise Basse arrived Montreal from Jamaica. When a teacher mentioned that Heron struggled in her classes, her mother decided to try a different school.

Basse never failed a grade in school and to this day she still struggles with reading and writing. While she understands her mother only wanted the best for her, Basse, now 26, still feels it was wrong to let her pass.

“I struggle to this day with reading and writing. It is a constant thing, at work I have to read over emails, to make sure there aren’t any mistakes,” Basse said.

Immigrant Song: Learning English outside of the classroom

Natalia Tchalova has some advice for immigrants who are struggling to learn English in Canada: sit down, relax and turn on the television.

When Tchalova moved to Toronto from Russia 10 years ago, she struggled with the daunting language barrier. And while ESL classes were widely available Tchalova, like a large number of immigrants, learned to employ strategies in her everyday life to improve her English skills. For starters, she turned to the tube.

“All the time you’re at home, it should be on,” Tchalova said. “It’s especially good to listen to news channels because during the day it repeats over and over.”

Shahnam Ma, who came to Canada from Iran seven years ago, agrees. In his late 20s, he found that his own learning methods helped him learn English quicker than ESL classes did.

“Whenever I’d see a new word on the closed captioning I’d write it down or look it up right away,” Ma said. “So if you learned one word a day, you learned 365 words a year. The progress is slow but you still learn everyday.”

Back to the blackboard: Starting over at middle-age

When David Bagley stood in front of his class at Seneca College to lead an aerobics session, he felt like an old dog among pups. At 41, he was more than twice the age of some of his classmates. But by the end of the program, this old dog found that new tricks aren’t so difficult to learn.

For 20 years Bagley worked as a machine operator for the federal government. When his plant closed and he was offered a chance to go back to school to begin a second career, he leapt at the opportunity. Bagley chose to become a personal trainer.

“I wanted to try something new,” Bagley said. “I was interested in it and I was in pretty good shape so I thought it would be a good thing to do.”

Going back to school in middle age can be daunting. For people such as Bagley, it means returning to a routine they left behind decades ago and a strong sense of being out of place.

From cinnamon roll to honour roll: How a healthy breakfast propels students to the top of the class

Fresh Start

The first rule of Breakfast Club: everyone talks about Breakfast Club. Precisely why sixteen-year-old Malcolm Wyllie stands over a grill in the family studies kitchen at George Harvey Collegiate Institute. He’s palming a fresh loaf of whole wheat bread.

“Sometimes I go through eight of these in a day,” he said.

In all, three grills operate, churning out grilled-cheese sandwiches as fast as possible. Behind Malcolm, students peel and slice apples and prepare juice, stack plates and organize cutlery. Then, the first voices are heard down the corridor leading to the room.

Thursday, Oct. 22, 2009 stands as the busiest day in the nine-year history of the George Harvey breakfast club. In total, 140 students passed through the kitchen.

I-sight: Independent living for the visually impared

A middle-aged man, identified only as Robert, sits at his computer. His long, skeletal fingers are perched uneasily across the home row. Through his thick Jamaican accent he confesses that when he feels nervous, he holds the computer keys down for too long. A glance at his screen reveals three-and-a-half solid rows of the letter “A”.

Across the city, 81-year-old Marie McIntosh makes her way to a doctor’s appointment. She moves cautiously, wary of any crevices in the pavement that she can no longer see. A life-long driver, for the first time in over 60 years McIntosh takes the bus.

For those who suffer from vision loss, the most routine tasks become daily struggles. But in the fight to maintain their personal independence, many – like Robert and McIntosh – search for ways to assist them in adjusting to life without sight. Sue Marsh-Woods, a regional supervisor with the Canadian National Institute for the Blind (CNIB), says the key lies in acceptance.

“When you can no longer recognize a face, that in itself can be very devastating,” Marsh-Woods said. “So it’s giving people strategies to deal with the impact of the psychological process.”

Traditional tales find a place in the classroom

Aaron Bell stands before children now quietly watching. “Sago and Awnee” he says in Ojibway for “Hello.”

The children, in unison repeat it back to him, transfixed by the Ojibway Storyteller.

Bell slowly begins to tell the story of Creation. He teaches the children and the parents the hand motions for the characters in the story. He rounds his hands over his belly and says woman. The children do the same.

“Storytelling lets your imagination come in and lets you experience things and then you learn from those experiences and you take that into your adulthood,” Bell explains.

Storytelling involves the whole body. It engages children through eye contact and motions. Sometimes there are props such as puppets and drums. Occasionally, like when Bell tells a story, the children become apart of it.

“You slip in teachings with storytelling. The children don’t realize they are being taught, but they walk away with all this knowledge,” Bell said.