Opinion
Historical needs
Re: History and Heart (Letters, June 7)
“We all need to do more!”
We appreciate Sig Laser’s Letter to the Editor of June 7, supporting longer-term solutions to prevent situations such as the current one facing Winnipeg’s Holy Trinity Church. The Manitoba Historical Society, of which I am chair, is dedicated to historic preservation not only in Winnipeg, but across the province. Mr. Laser reminds us of the generous bequest from Miriam Bergen Edison Properties and the good work of the Winnipeg Foundation. Still, too often, individual groups or congregations face daunting financial challenges on their own while the clock is ticking. So, what is to be done? Obviously, more!
The society is volunteer-based and not a funder, however we need to enhance public appreciation of Manitoba history and heritage. On our comprehensive website, we track and publicize historically significant buildings in our province that deserve to be preserved and better known.
Annually, we announce our list of the 10 most endangered buildings and other structures, in order from oldest to newest.
Our 2024 list will be published in a few weeks and Holy Trinity will be on it. The purpose of those lists is to engage the public and raise their awareness, so they put pressure on elected officials to act, not to mention informing other potential funders.
Far beyond this, however, there is a need for a practical, longer-term strategy to preserve our heritage, engage the wider community, network on issues and resources in advance, to preserve the unique elements that enrich our lives. To be more specific, we need to better highlight current and future issues, develop and access resources to answer the question of “Who you gonna call?” for timely assistance. Time and time again community groups are faced with unprecedented challenges they are ill-equipped to address.
At the society, we wish to do more to facilitate earlier action, so that community groups can better access timely support and expertise. For example, seeking out and sharing past success stories, so those facing more immediate challenges can meet them more successfully.
As the song goes, “You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.”
Dan Furlan
Winnipeg
Hoping Pride succeeds
Re: Food truck operators drop out of Altona Pride after threats (June 6)
It’s sad and troubling to read about threats of vandalism or worse towards food truck operators that were going to set up for the Pride parade in Altona. What backwards and violent threats. I bet most these were sent anonymously.
People celebrate Pride because it wasn’t too long ago that they couldn’t be free to be themselves. I hope that these threats backfire and many more people show up to celebrate.
Leanne Hanuschuk
Winnipeg
Important corrective
Re: Questioning the value of provincial exams (Think Tank, June 6)
Jack McCreedy is to be complemented on his well-researched and insightful exploration of provincial exams. As a retired educator, it is most heartening and to read the voice of a young person’s progressive vision of the future.
Such writing serves as an important corrective for the tendency of us older folks to look only backwards rather than forwards.
McCreedy’s emphasis on the critical importance of feedback for student learning (and testing) is most important. I rue those early days of the “teach and test” approach I took.
It was only after working with students who were struggling with learning that I began to understand that without that constructive feedback loop, it is impossible to learn anything. Unfortunately, it is often the case that the only feedback students receive is that of a “grade.”
It is only when assessment is not understood as a “test” that such instruments can become yet another vehicle for learning.
I knew a professor of education who quipped that “The reason my students get good marks is because I am a good teacher”.
Though I suspect that some dismissed such a claim as a bit self-serving, it did reveal an important truth about teaching.
I have come to believe that effective teaching involves the courage to realize teaching and learning exist in a symbiotic relationship and that lack of success on evaluation instruments is not only about the students.
When I was in ninth grade, our class was doing poorly on tests based on a new math curriculum. At mid-year, the teacher announced that he was “starting all over” with most of the students while a few were allowed to “go ahead on their own.”
Bill Gates said it well: “We all need people who will give us feedback. That’s how we improve.”
Edwin Buettner
Winnipeg
Wrong solution to real problem
It has come to light in local news that our problems with intergenerationally traumatized people living lives of desperation have created significant problems in the operations of the Manitoba Centennial Centre.
The problems to this point have been addressed as elsewhere with police, such as they are, many more cameras, security, locked doors with intercoms, and now bullhorns. Nobody seems to feel safer because of it. These changes happened quietly, without fanfare, as though we can’t admit to ourselves that more of us are part of this problem than the poor and the people of the street.
The news item came to light because on a sunny Sunday at the end of March. I was out on my first bike ride of the season and rounded the southeast corner of the concert hall to escape the wind that had pebbles flying through the air. I stood on the lawn to address a small wound on my leg.
While working at stopping the wound from bleeding, a very loud and aggressive recorded male voice emanated from the building so loudly that the echo made some of it unintelligible.
The end of the message was clear enough though, I was on private property and should leave immediately. Before I realized the message was for me, people having conversations and two people reading books rose up from the lovely sidewalk benches alongside the hall on Market Street and left the area.
I believe this response, though it seemed practical, was racist, classist, and cynical. It made the area feel less safe. I let them know in a way I’m not proud of, I could have used a softer approach. The solution represented, to my mind, a much bigger problem than the ones on our streets that wouldn’t be so hard to fix if more of this society gave a damn about something other than creating prosperity for those who are already prosperous.
I have felt great inspiration within the walls of the concert hall watching Andrey Boreyko sculpt the air with his hands, the symphony responding with what can only be described as love. It still makes the hair on my neck stand up. I played in the Manitoba Schools Orchestra (junior) and have been on the stage to sing John Corleone’s Of Rage and Remembrance in a male choir as an HIV+ man for a “Winnipeg Cares” AIDS fundraiser. It still makes me cry.
We have lost our sense of civility in this city, if we had one, and are embracing our anger and fear. Embracing those things destroys, and will continue to destroy, the vitality of this place. Having returned to Winnipeg some years ago after an extended absence, I was taken aback by the lives being lived in utter chaos, vast areas of traumatized people left to their own devices, living largely ignored on nothing in a city that has wealth but is violent because of its past and present colonial-capitalist greed and the “zombifying” hubris of the race and class privilege it generates.
We can’t, with honesty, perpetually participate in racially-charged classist actions, especially while profiting from them, and say we aren’t those things as individuals.
It reveals in us a grotesque lack of self-awareness.
The solution to these things comes from love and community, not from protecting, in its entirety, the context that created this situation in the first place.
Herb Neufeld
Winnipeg
