A Peek at the Canvas: January
by Frank Caracciolo
The most recent episode of The Blank Canvas with Frank Caracciolo is out now. Released on February 26th, this celebratory 50th episode features a conversation with the Director General of the Lester B. Pearson School Board, Dr. Cindy Finn.
They discuss the arts, and education, and the state of the school board and the world!
Frank Caracciolo: What are you feeling about this year? Like how it’s moving along and there’s a lot of stuff to that is going on in our school and the world…
Cindy Finn: Yeah, there always is something going on. You’re quite right, and every year is different, and yet every year has some of the same sort of challenges.
And I think some of it is the year goes by really, really quickly. Right now we’re at the end of February, so we’ve got one foot very much still in the camp of this year, we’ve got term 3, we’ve got to help our students get ready for exams, their students who are going to be graduating, moving on, so we’re very much in that. But we’re also now thinking ahead to next year, so wanting to see you know how many students are registered, what sort of surprises does the ministry have for us? We don’t know our budgets and so every year is quite different.
Cindy Finn: And as you say, the backdrop right now is we live in a world of uncertainty. There’s that acronym that gets thrown around that we live in a VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous) world. You know it’s volatile, it’s unpredictable. You know, it’s hard to control things and we see it on the world stage. So as much as we have great things going on within our schools and centres and a great sense of community and collaboration, it’s stressful for everybody because we see what’s going on in the larger world… we have, you know, difficulties around the globe: politically, socially, socioeconomically. I think there’s there’s a lot of anxiety out there and so people are, you know, we’re all trying to do our best and pull together.
And so, yeah, this year has been in some ways a little unpredictable. Some of the things that we didn’t see at the beginning of the school year have popped up in terms of, you know, some pressures the government has with finances and our budgets and so we just adjust. That’s the one thing we do well in education, we adapt, and as anglophones in a francophone province we’re used to being flexible and making things fit our reality. And so that’s not terribly different, but yeah, every year brings new surprises and some of them good, and some of them just require us to be resilient and just adapt as we go.
Listen to the entire episode on Spotify here:
https://open.spotify.com/episode/2xO1WN8SKyPHjLw3A59Uw9?si=CuioMauCTluDuy_JQXOYXg
…or on Apple Podcasts here:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-blank-canvas-season-5-ep-6-with-director-general/id1548791725?i=1000696371231
