Day #10 Variety Show

Conference continued. Great sessions. And tonight was the Variety Show... the Canadian delegation presented "I am a Canadian teacher" by Mark from Toronto and then the 'winners' of "So You Think You Can Dance Canada - the Prairie Dancers" from Manitoba. The poem is included below and you'll have to imagine the slideshow and the dancers....

I am not a farmer, a lumberjack or an eskimo ... I am a Canadian teacher.

I don't teach in an igloo - thanks to global warming.

We say project not prawject,we say you all, not y'all and we say eh, eh!

I teach students that the alphabet ends with zed, not zee, zed - through we call this a zebra, not a zedbra.

We love our neighbours to the south, and while team does not have an I, neighbour does have a you, and so does colour, flavour, behaviour and confratute - even if spell check doesn't recognize it as correct.

In Canada, Yukon starts with a Y. And our Yukon has huskies that might pull dog sleds, but the stink when it comes to basketball - then again nobod cares.

We are the first nation of hockey. We play even when the temperature dips below -20C that's about -4F. We believe false teeth and concussions are just part of the game. When a Canadian team loses at hockey, we might take it too personally. Still, I can cheer for the Bruins, or the New York Rangers, Florida Panthers, Dallas Stars or any other American team, even the Atlanta Thrashers, oops - now the Winnipeg Jets - and still be patriotic as most of their players are Canadian.

I put the Canadian flag on my backpack so when I meet Americans they can ask me if I know John from Toronto, Nicole from Montreal, or Sean from Vancouver - and through I don't know they, I'm sure they are polite, nice and deserving of enrichment opportunities.

We believe a rising tide raises all ships including our canoes and kayaks, and when a high tide freezes it makes for a bigger ice surface for hockey.

We believe football should have three downs, a baseball world series should involve other countries.

We use the metric system - why because it's base ten, it's elegant and it respects the decimal!

We don't have freshman, sophomore, juniors or seniors, we have grade 9, 10, 11, and 12 so our kids understand place value.

But then out money is colour coded so our kids don't need to know numbers. Two blues equal a purple, two purples equals a green, two greens and a purple equals a red, and two reds equal a brown. We call out dollar coin a loonie and our two dollar coin a toonie.

We don't have state wide testing - we don't have states. But now that we know how much you like it we're just wondering which state's tests to adopt.

In Canada, Renzulli is a pasta dish and Reese is a peanut butter cup coated in chocolate and you'd never put the two together. But they go together well here.

A teacher in Quebec gave a class a Type 3 challenge of creating a recipe for a new food. They took fries, smothered them in gravy and topped that with cheese curds and called it poutine, and we believe it is the pinnacle of creativity, the crowning achievement of SEM in Canada.

We believe coffee is ordered black, regular or double double. We believe Tim Hortons coffee (named after the hockey player) is better than Starbucks....

We believe in sharing and that is why we have given you Justin Beiber, Celine Dion and William Shatner. Please keep them - we insist.

We believe in high taxes, universal health care and that winter is the best season of the year.

We are Joe Canadian and this is our Canada.