Kara’s Blog

Oh hey, it’s a new year.

I usually do a round-up of my best 10 (and worst 10) books of the year and post it as a list. I’m fairly proud of the lists area of my site, but I also have ambitions to do a little overhauling this year, so the lists might be evaporating—hopefully temporarily. I’m going to keep it simple and simply blog about my year of reading.

Also, I’m not going…

I’ve been reading Hidden Figures, in anticipation of the movie coming out next week. It’s a fantastic book, and I already have so much I want to say in the review. This is one topic that would be too much of a digression, so I’ve spun it out into an adequate starting place for my blog posts of 2017.

Throughout the book, Margot Lee Shetterly discusses the attitudes of people towards Black, female computers…

I can’t take it any more. I have to say something, say something more than just tweeting how disappointed I am and retweeting other people. This Kinder Morgan pipeline approval is the final straw.

So what follows is a letter I am sending to my Member of Parliament, the Honourable Patty Hajdu, Minister of Status of Women.

Dear Minister Hajdu,

I am writing to express my unequivocal disappointment in the Government of Canada’s decisions to…

Today I showed someone how to long-tail cast on, and I can’t help but feel like I did a good thing for the world.

I was working in the evening at the gallery, and had just taken the vacuum cleaner out. Winter is upon us, which means people track salt de-icer from the walkway onto the carpet. Vacuum every day!

As I came back to the front with the vacuum, I saw a mother…

Last week The Globe and Mail ran an opinion piece calling for coding to become a mandatory subject in Canadian schools. I’m sympathetic to the idea, for I agree that computer literacy and an awareness of how the algorithms and programs that increasingly influence our lives is crucial to being an informed citizen. That being said, I disagree with almost all the points made in that article. More generally, as I continue to think…

I knit entrelac now. Entrelac is cool.

You can read the linked Wikipedia article for all the details, but entrelac is basically a knitting technique that involves working a series of rectangles (and triangles) to create a patchwork effect. Instead of knitting across all the stitches on a row, you knit back and forth across a set number of stitches (e.g., groups of 8) over and over. In the process of doing this, you create…

I had an excellent class this morning.

Previously I blogged about how, in this combined ENG3C/NBE3C Grade 11 English course, we looked at various texts to help students article their identity. We’ve now moved on to looking at the history of Indigenous peoples in Canada. We have watched three documentaries (Trick or Treaty?, Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance, and We Were Children), and the students are working on research reports…

I have two book reviews I really should be writing instead, and some planning to finish, because I’m off tomorrow afternoon to Sudbury (of all places) for a two-day workshop. So of course I’m blogging instead!

In the previous session (March to April) at the adult education centre, I taught a Grade 11 workplace math course (MEL3E). I’ve taught this course several times now, and I didn’t bring much new to the table content wise…

Should I be posting a knitting update? Probably. But I wanted to tweet some thoughts about The Magicians, and Orphan Black, and Supergirl, until I realized I should really just expand them into a summary of my thoughts about television shows! So this is a round up of some (not all) of the TV shows I’ve been watching regularly over the past few months.

Magic Sucks and You Suck Even More, Quentin

…

Oh, look! It’s another article about discovery vs rote math! Here we go again….

I thought I had solved this back in 2011 (twice!), but apparently a couple of people in the world didn’t listen, so now here I am, back at it again. It seems like every five years when the latest round of test scores shows that the sky is falling we’ll be doomed to have the same arguments over and over…