Tobi begins each class with a prompt for whole group discussion. In the narrative unit, it was “roses and thorns”. Now, in the information unit, it is a question which often promotes debate.

Today’s question meanders well past the allotted five minutes, and moves in ways that allow some quieter students to speak up and share, not only their thinking, but themselves.

Students are working on short videos which follow the Sink Reviews from TikTok (she got the idea from her paid subscription to O’Dell ‘s Substack). They had watched some versions of the reviews yesterday, and today they are developing and deepening their thinking; she is hoping to have them see objects in a new ways and create a video review which uses the same codes and conventions of this unique social media form.

The slideshow projects the question as the anthem plays giving students time to consider before the conversation begins. “What food requires reconsideration or what needs to be seen in a new way?”

Yesterday, they talked about corn. Today, the grade 9s begin raising hands and we talk about kombucha as a fermented tea with a scobi (symbiotic culture of bacterial yeast, which I happen to love 🙂 and kimchi and grains and the weirdness of food which is ancient and good. They weigh and measure the qualities of modern processes and wonder who came up with grinding grains to make bread and the combinations involved which leads to a sharing of cultural traditions, foods from home, naan and bannock, chipatas and sourdough.

“My mom stopped buying the large bag of unbleached flour because we found bugs in it and all flours probably have bugs so you’re eating them whether you know it or not.”

“We went to the museum this one time, and they had suckers with bugs in them and they didn’t look like crickets – they looked like cockroaches.”

I see his head whip around and his mouth and eyes open wide. “Cockroaches?”

The conversation continues developing into considerations of bug eating as the future of protien until this morphs into the problems of chemical preservatives and dyes and simulated flavours and the banning of these foods in Europe. I marvel at the knowledge of these students as the teacher deftly manages the conversation, nudging it gently towards a recognition of the possible cultural bias implicit in our responses to food.

I leave the classroom smiling and somewhat hungry.

“I need some help.”

My father sat at the head of our dining room table with two fragments of paper filled with hand written notes, trembling all caps and numbers, doctors’ names, and medication, an address label for his medical clinic, and I could hear hesitation in his voice. I felt the friction this moment created in him. Frustration spread across his face as these words were squeezed out, though I see he is getting somewhat practiced at this now, in his ninety-eighth year.

We often hear him well before he enters a room. His slippered feet slide across the hardwood floor in a set of sweeps and swooshes. When seated in our front room, we hear him above moving about in his bedroom. We began to spin tales that he has a secret extension, like platorm 9 and 3/4, which appears as he magically births an addition to his cramped quarters. It must be, because how can he be taking so many steps in such a small space? We reason that he has transformational powers.

We heard the laboured steps as he descended the staircase, one step at a time, tapping out the morning greetings, “G’morning, George, G’morning, Melanie,” in his Sean Connery style voice.

“George, can you help with my computer?”

We heard his heavy breathing, loud gasps for breath growing, the volume increasing as his hearing vanishes – one ear is now completely deaf and the other, supported by a hearing aid, labours to make sense of the auditory world. (He often reads lips, mouthing the words back to me as his panicked expression reaches out.) George turned to me and whispered in a gravelly Darth Vader voice, “I am your father.”

We have often used this form of lightness during the dark times and while it might seem cruel from the outside, I know there is a deep love, but the situation demands balance. This lightness has become a way of managing the struggles of disability, diagnoses, and looming death all contained in one small home.

“I need some help with my tv.”

In the past, he would never have asked for help with physical tasks. He still refused to use the stair lift system installed primarily for my disabled daughter to ferry heavy bodies up and down the steep stairs of this early 20th century house. Even with pneumonia two years ago, he didn’t want help and we needed to engage the directions of his doctor for compliance on the use of the lift, a walker, and a cane.

But that has now changed. And he asks for help as we listen and read the sounds of my father still here and holding up the light.