Just got a phone call from my friend Mike Mearns, who is the Executive Director of the Aboriginal Financial Officers Association of BC, an organization that supports First Nations financial and management capacity through training and workshops. They are looking for an Executive Assistant, but don’t let the job title fool you. The main duties are developing training materials and organizing workshops for First Nations administrators working “at the coal face” as it were: “The Aboriginal Financial Officers Association of B.C. (AFOA-BC) requires an Executive Assistant to provide support to the General Manager and Board of Directors. Our association is …
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I was facilitating a very difficult process last week with a complex group. Over three days, my plan for the work changed constantly, responding to the internal and external pressures that were flowing all around us. At the end of the second day, I felt slain, as if anything I tried to do had the opposite of its intended effect. It was a tough day for all of us. On the third day, during which some remarkable transformations came forward from the group, one group member told me a story in a break. He was a commercial fisherman, who has …
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In case you’ve always wondered where all those performers at Cirque de Soleil come from, check out Cirkids. Located in Vancouver, I have known about this group for quite awhile, due in no small part to the fact that they have a whole day of training for homeschooled kids every Wednesday. Today our family went to see their annual show, this year based around a theme of mermaids, pirates, and love lost and found. The show is a full on professional circus performance in the spirit of Cirque de Soleil or Cirque Eos, except done with kids, some of them …
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Rob Paterson is blogging some fierce (as they say down east) about John Holt and unschooling. Rob quotes from Holt: “Education, with its supporting system of compulsory and competitive schooling, all its carrots and sticks, its grades, diplomas, and credentials, now seems to me perhaps the most authoritarian and dangerous of all the social inventions of mankind. It is the deepest foundation of the modern and worldwide slave state, in which most people feel themselves to be nothing but producers, consumers, spectators, and “fans,” driven more and more, in all parts of their lives, by greed, envy, and fear. My …
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Silence by Valentin Bazarov John Cage’s piece 4’33” – the infamous four minutes and thirty three seconds of silence – is commonly thought of as a joke. Even serious music criticism has a hard time treating it as little more than a novelty: “At the first performance in 1952 it was played (if that’s the right word) by a pianist who indicated the movements by raising and lowering the piano lid; and it made an arresting point about the nature of silence – as something other than an absence of sound and a way to make the human ear aware …