By Josh Tyler: 2009-01-12 00:10:36
Even before it won the Golden Globe tonight, Slumdog Millionaire was the odds on favorite to win Oscar’s Best Picture. It’s one of the year’s best reviewed films and the reviewers who have praised it justify their love of the film by calling it “upbeat and colorful”, ”inspiring, ”a feel good” movie, a ”delightful spectacle”, ”a rousing celebration of life, love, and hope”, a "fairytale", and my favorite ”joyous”. That’s just a tiny sampling of the intense hyperbole being thrown at the film. You’d think this was Hoosiers with saris. But I’d like to throw another word into the mix. Here it is: Exploitation.
If you haven’t see Slumdog Millionaire yet and don’t want me to hit you with spoilers, then read no further. If you’re still reading then know that I’m not here to paint Slumdog Millionaire as a poorly constructed. It’s directed by Danny Boyle a guy who knows what he’s doing behind a camera. It’s hard to imagine even the worst script failing under his direction. This is a well put together endeavor. No my problem here isn’t with the nuts and bolts of Slumdog Millionaire, but the message contained within it. Wait! Hold on to your pitch forks and torches, you’re going to want them later.
The movie being described by these critics is not the film that I saw several weeks ago in a darkened movie theater. Instead what I saw was a cynical collection of third-world clichés sold with pretty colors and an uplifting soundtrack. Slumdog Millionaire is the story of a little boy living in a society which happily allows his mother to be murdered by a roving mob for being Muslim, and then abandons him to live in the streets alone, scrabbling in the mud.It’s the story of a boy sold into slavery by his countrymen, a boy who once he escapes slavery can only survive by repay the kindness of tourists with theft. It’s the story of a boy whose brother treats him like garbage, betrays him and threatens to kill him so he can rape the beautiful woman his sibling loves. It’s the story of a boy who grows up to be beaten and hideously tortured by the police for doing well on a game show which tries to cheat him. It’s the story without a single moment of genuine virtue or morality demonstrated by anyone around the movie’s protagonist. It’s a story full of crime, murder, and child abuse. The only time our hero Jamal is ever really happy in, he’s robbing people. Even the film’s so called happy ending is paper thin. Having watched him live a life in which each tiny success is brutally punished by a culture of bigotry, corruption, and abuse there’s every reason to believe that after our Jamal walks off camera he’ll immediately be stabbed and left for dead in a Mumbai alley.
Yet Donald Monroe of the Fresno Bee says this “Indian tale is delightful.” What? This is a movie which portrays Indian culture as bankrupt and evil. As shown in Slumdog Millionaire the Indian way of life is one of poverty and callous disregard for basic human rights. I have no idea if that’s the real India, but that’s the one portrayed in this movie. This is the story of a boy surviving in a civilization of vicious murderers and hate-mongers. This is the story of a boy scrabbling about in the dirt heaped upon him by a national heritage of brutality, learning to lie and steal as his birthright, desperate to survive in an entire nation of evil people. Yet Duncan Riley of The Inquisitor insists, “it taps in to Indian culture in a way not really seen in movies shown in the West.” If the way he’s talking about is one of savagery, then he’s correct. Somehow I don’t think that’s what he meant.
Maybe Donald Monroe and Duncan Riley are right. Maybe this is the real India. I won’t pretend to know, though I suspect most Indians would take issue with their country being portrayed as a heartless nation of beggars and child killers. Actually that’s not fair. There are some people in the film who show the movie’s protagonist Jamal some kindness. They’re tourists, white tourists who treat him politely, kindly, and even save him from a beating. In return Jamal robs them and the film plays happy music.
The real question for me here is what is it that everyone finds so “uplifting” about this movie? Why would anyone describe such a film as joyous? What are we celebrating here? If this were an American movie about an American child going through precisely the same miserable life of abuse on the streets of New York, I have a hard time believing it would be described as anything other than disturbing and frightening. If this story were set in South Central LA, it would be decried as racist. This is the story of a good boy forced to become a thief by a morally bankrupt, despicable society. What a horrible world he lives in. There’s nothing joyous or celebratory here, unless we’re celebrating the superiority of our own culture over the vile Indian one portrayed in the film. Or is it simply that we expect less of these people, because they’re from somewhere else? Are we supposed to work on a sliding scale? Maybe that’s why it’s a triumph of humanity. Simply managing not to get killed is an accomplishment of its own in this India, and we should find that uplifting. I’m not sure that’s an India I want to believe exists, but if it does I have no intention of celebrating it.
Slumdog Millionaire is only a joyous and uplifting film if you don’t hold the people in it to the same minimum, moral standards you might hold your neighbor too. Slumdog Millionaire is only a magnificent celebration of Indian culture if your view of Indian culture is one of inhumanity and evil. It’s as if we’re saying we don’t expect any better from “those people”. Sure the police chief is a torturer, but he talks nicely to people while he shocks their testicles. Sure the gangsters blind children to make them more effective beggars, but they feed them! We can’t possibly expect any better from “those people”, because they don’t know any better. Count me out. The world of Slumdog Millionaire doesn’t get a morality exemption just because the people in it are on a different continent and Slumdog Millionaire is not a joyous celebration of anything, except a heinous culture of vicious, primitive, immoral people which can only be survived by a miraculous act of divine intervention. I don’t care if it does end with a Bollywood dance number, that’s not “upbeat and colorful”.
http://www.cinemablend.com/new.php?id=11514
Monday, January 12, 2009
Friday, December 5, 2008
Consumerism taking its toll on our society
Consumerism taking its toll on our society
Dec 05, 2008 04:30 AM
Re:Battling the cult of consumerism,
Dec. 1
What better timing for this article – in the midst of a deteriorating economic situation.
Stuart Laidlaw points out how the state-of-the-art advertising techniques have created a culture that emphasizes high consumption, compulsive acquisition and instantaneous gratification. The deceptive notion that happiness consists of possessing things, regardless of the price one has to pay, needs to be subverted.
Our insatiable urge to acquire things, whether or not they are necessary, has indeed reached epidemic proportions. It generates severe social and cultural dislocations and warps the basic values of our society. Overspending and overconsumption engineer a variety of problems such as social fragmentation, excessive egocentric mentality and chronic stress, factors that seriously imperil social harmony.
Shopping has become the most preferred activity of North Americans. Impulse shopping, Internet shopping, shopping to amuse oneself, shopping as a form of therapy – these have become the core values of a post-modernist culture. Advertisements are essential for the promotion of a product, but employing unethical means by throwing to the winds decency and moral values is a sad scenario we are witnessing today.
Even children are not immune from this consumption mania. "Children are especially vulnerable," laments Laidlaw. One of the most distressing aspects is how marketers and advertisers have discovered that colonizing the imagination of the child is the most effective way of securing a life-long consumer.
Consumer activist Ralph Nader describes advertisements aimed at children as "corporate child abuse." Advertising-driven consumerism has thus invaded and desecrated the most sacrosanct segments of human relationships.
Another aberration that crass consumerism creates is "chronic self-absorption." The unremitting craving for things leaves people with little time and patience to think about others. Hence most people are unmindful of the maladies of their surroundings. For instance, how many of us know that the child poverty rate in an affluent country like Canada has climbed to 17.4 per cent nationwide.
Alongside cultivating mindful consumption habits, a more fruitful strategy would be to strive for a new social order based on equity and social justice that would minimize if not totally eliminate alienation, one of the root causes of consumerism.
Javed Akbar, Markham
http://www.thestar.com/comment/article/548703
Dec 05, 2008 04:30 AM
Re:Battling the cult of consumerism,
Dec. 1
What better timing for this article – in the midst of a deteriorating economic situation.
Stuart Laidlaw points out how the state-of-the-art advertising techniques have created a culture that emphasizes high consumption, compulsive acquisition and instantaneous gratification. The deceptive notion that happiness consists of possessing things, regardless of the price one has to pay, needs to be subverted.
Our insatiable urge to acquire things, whether or not they are necessary, has indeed reached epidemic proportions. It generates severe social and cultural dislocations and warps the basic values of our society. Overspending and overconsumption engineer a variety of problems such as social fragmentation, excessive egocentric mentality and chronic stress, factors that seriously imperil social harmony.
Shopping has become the most preferred activity of North Americans. Impulse shopping, Internet shopping, shopping to amuse oneself, shopping as a form of therapy – these have become the core values of a post-modernist culture. Advertisements are essential for the promotion of a product, but employing unethical means by throwing to the winds decency and moral values is a sad scenario we are witnessing today.
Even children are not immune from this consumption mania. "Children are especially vulnerable," laments Laidlaw. One of the most distressing aspects is how marketers and advertisers have discovered that colonizing the imagination of the child is the most effective way of securing a life-long consumer.
Consumer activist Ralph Nader describes advertisements aimed at children as "corporate child abuse." Advertising-driven consumerism has thus invaded and desecrated the most sacrosanct segments of human relationships.
Another aberration that crass consumerism creates is "chronic self-absorption." The unremitting craving for things leaves people with little time and patience to think about others. Hence most people are unmindful of the maladies of their surroundings. For instance, how many of us know that the child poverty rate in an affluent country like Canada has climbed to 17.4 per cent nationwide.
Alongside cultivating mindful consumption habits, a more fruitful strategy would be to strive for a new social order based on equity and social justice that would minimize if not totally eliminate alienation, one of the root causes of consumerism.
Javed Akbar, Markham
http://www.thestar.com/comment/article/548703
Tuesday, November 4, 2008
At-risk youth 'living the dream'
At-risk youth 'living the dream'
Regent Park student gets help from scholarship program to continue studies
Oct 29, 2008 04:31 AM
Comments on this story (1)
Kristin Rushowy
Education Reporter
Of his group of friends growing up in Regent Park, four have died. Two are "into street life." Two went from high school straight to the workforce.
Ismail Aboobakker is the only one to go to university.
"We had dreams of doing great things together, and only one of us is doing it," said the 22-year-old in a recent interview. "I am living the dream for all of us."
Aboobakker is in his fourth year at the University of Toronto's Scarborough campus, studying math with plans to be a high school teacher. This is also the fourth year he has received a scholarship for teens who grew up at-risk.
The scholarship, from the Yonge Street Mission, will benefit 30 youths this year who either attend the Yonge Street Mission's Evergreen Centre for Street Youth or the community centre in Regent Park.
It provides them with a yearly stipend to help offset the cost of their studies and matches them with a volunteer mentor. The mission is holding a gala fundraiser for the scholarship at the Royal Ontario Museum on Thursday.
"University is a total change from high school," said Aboobakker, who volunteers at the mission and has himself been asked to be a mentor. "It either makes you or breaks you."
Strong family support helped get him through elementary and high school. But he had trouble adjusting to post-secondary life. He was skipping classes and in the first semester of his first year failed two courses. He was subsequently suspended from the campus's junior varsity basketball team.
When he appealed to one professor to bump his calculus mark from the high 40s to a 50 so he could pass, the professor told him that "just passing" wasn't good enough, that he should strive to be better.
That got his attention. "I pulled up my socks – to my waist," he said, adding he repeated the calculus course and earned an A-plus.
Domanique Grant is another scholarship recipient. She just started her first year at York University, studying theatre and psychology.
"The scholarship helps me put a lot more time into studying rather than worrying about work" and how to pay for school, says the singer and actress, who performed at the Luminato Festival last summer.
Barbara Walkden, the mission's director of development, says the scholarship program began back in 2003, with a group of supporters raising $150,000 and matching funds from the government. Then, in 2005, a donor gave $1 million to set up an endowment fund for teens from Regent Park or those who had lived on the streets, and since then the mission has given out 20 to 30 scholarships a year, ranging from $1,500 to $3,000. Students also receive a reconditioned laptop from Dell.
"The (students) are from struggling families in the Regent Park area, some are raised by their grandparents," she said. "For the street youth, so many have suffered abuse of one form or another that's led them to the street. I think we are able to take youth that might not otherwise have an interest in furthering their education."
Students can use the money to attend the post-secondary institution of their choice. George Brown is a popular option but students are spread out across the province and beyond: one is studying nursing at the University of Windsor, another international relations at Concordia, and another political science at the University of Toronto.
Walkden said, "The only way out of poverty is education."
http://www.thestar.com/article/526449
Regent Park student gets help from scholarship program to continue studies
Oct 29, 2008 04:31 AM
Comments on this story (1)
Kristin Rushowy
Education Reporter
Of his group of friends growing up in Regent Park, four have died. Two are "into street life." Two went from high school straight to the workforce.
Ismail Aboobakker is the only one to go to university.
"We had dreams of doing great things together, and only one of us is doing it," said the 22-year-old in a recent interview. "I am living the dream for all of us."
Aboobakker is in his fourth year at the University of Toronto's Scarborough campus, studying math with plans to be a high school teacher. This is also the fourth year he has received a scholarship for teens who grew up at-risk.
The scholarship, from the Yonge Street Mission, will benefit 30 youths this year who either attend the Yonge Street Mission's Evergreen Centre for Street Youth or the community centre in Regent Park.
It provides them with a yearly stipend to help offset the cost of their studies and matches them with a volunteer mentor. The mission is holding a gala fundraiser for the scholarship at the Royal Ontario Museum on Thursday.
"University is a total change from high school," said Aboobakker, who volunteers at the mission and has himself been asked to be a mentor. "It either makes you or breaks you."
Strong family support helped get him through elementary and high school. But he had trouble adjusting to post-secondary life. He was skipping classes and in the first semester of his first year failed two courses. He was subsequently suspended from the campus's junior varsity basketball team.
When he appealed to one professor to bump his calculus mark from the high 40s to a 50 so he could pass, the professor told him that "just passing" wasn't good enough, that he should strive to be better.
That got his attention. "I pulled up my socks – to my waist," he said, adding he repeated the calculus course and earned an A-plus.
Domanique Grant is another scholarship recipient. She just started her first year at York University, studying theatre and psychology.
"The scholarship helps me put a lot more time into studying rather than worrying about work" and how to pay for school, says the singer and actress, who performed at the Luminato Festival last summer.
Barbara Walkden, the mission's director of development, says the scholarship program began back in 2003, with a group of supporters raising $150,000 and matching funds from the government. Then, in 2005, a donor gave $1 million to set up an endowment fund for teens from Regent Park or those who had lived on the streets, and since then the mission has given out 20 to 30 scholarships a year, ranging from $1,500 to $3,000. Students also receive a reconditioned laptop from Dell.
"The (students) are from struggling families in the Regent Park area, some are raised by their grandparents," she said. "For the street youth, so many have suffered abuse of one form or another that's led them to the street. I think we are able to take youth that might not otherwise have an interest in furthering their education."
Students can use the money to attend the post-secondary institution of their choice. George Brown is a popular option but students are spread out across the province and beyond: one is studying nursing at the University of Windsor, another international relations at Concordia, and another political science at the University of Toronto.
Walkden said, "The only way out of poverty is education."
http://www.thestar.com/article/526449
Friday, October 31, 2008
Taking charge of the future
Taking charge of the future
This country depends more on what happens in our schools than what happens in our banks
This country depends more on what happens in our schools than what happens in our banks
Oct 31, 2008 04:30 AM
Comments on this story (7)
Annie Kidder
What is the role of schools in creating the Canada we want?
It's time to start thinking about what kind of country we want to live in.
That was the message of a forum this week sponsored by the Canadian Education Association and People for Education.
Do we want to live in a country of engaged citizens who feel they "belong" to something? Do we want to be a nation of innovators contributing to the rest of the world with our strong environmental policies, our dedication to global citizenship and our examples of social responsibility? Do we want to be able to harness the power of our population's diversity?
Or do we want to continue to lead the world in our rate of consumption? Do we want to watch passively as the gap between the rich and everyone else continues to grow, as we lose hundreds of species from our environment, and as fewer of us choose to vote?
According to Glen Murray, former mayor of Winnipeg, president of the Canadian Urban Institute and chair of the Canadian National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy, Canada is at a crossroads. Our population, our economy and our environment are being transformed.
So we have to decide what we want. Then we have to decide how we're going to get there.
Our best chance to influence our country's future may lie in our publicly funded schools. More than 90 per cent of Canada's young people go to public schools (in Ontario, that percentage is even higher) and those schools can be the leaders of the change. As Penny Milton of the Canadian Education Association put it, "Schools should condition social progress, rather than be conditioned by it."
Our schools are doing a pretty great job in their drive to improve students' literacy and numeracy – test scores are up, Canadian students are among the top 10 OECD countries in reading, writing, math and science, and our graduation rates are among the highest in the world. But is that enough? What kinds of students are we graduating? Do they have the right attributes to allow them to succeed? Are they really the creative thinkers and innovators that we need? Do they have a sense of citizenship and social responsibility? Do they all – rich, poor, newcomer, aboriginal, those who live in cities and those who live in rural areas and the North – feel they have an equitable chance for success? Probably not.
Our future is going to be determined much more by what happens in our schools than what happens in our banks. So what do we need to change?
Herveen Singh, one of the panellists at the forum, formerly a "student at risk" and now a graduate student at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto, says that first of all our education system has to acknowledge the change in the world around it. "We've got to listen to the voices of students, we've got to build more bridges between schools and the world, and we have to expand our notion of what equity means."
Glen Murray says we've got to do a much better job at breaking the pattern of mass marketing and mass consumption in this country. And he says the only place we can do that effectively is in our schools. We have to figure out how to instill the value of citizenship in our students. In the U.K., for example, citizenship is taught as a fundamental ideal. They challenge students to be critical thinkers; they get them to solve real problems and debate scary things like values and politics. They assume that young people can think independently and can participate in effecting change.
But in Canada these days, in their consumerism, people identify more with the economy than with their country, and our schools have shied away from challenging that.
At the forum, people wanted practical ideas about what needs to be done. Everyone agreed that our hope lies in our schools. And everyone agreed that schools have to lead. And everyone even agreed that the shift in our collective thinking about schools – from viewing them as something that was good for the country to something that was more a private good, focused on individuals' economic success – was part of the problem.
So what needs to be done? The school system itself has to do a much better job at making the connections between schools and the world around them. It has to be less afraid of tackling world issues and values. In fact, it has to see it as its responsibility.
If critical and creative thinkers are what we need in the 21st century, we have to rejig what has become a two-tiered curriculum, where we have relegated the kinds of courses that produce those very attributes to the bottom tier. We have to redefine success in education beyond simplistic targets for test scores, because they don't tell us much about the overall health of our education system. We have to look critically at our focus on literacy and numeracy and make sure that political targets haven't gotten in the way of truly educational ones.
And to answer one of the biggest questions asked at the forum: Why should anyone else (outside of parents and teachers) care about what happens in our schools? Because our country depends on it. Because our schools have the potential to lead the change and the potential to create a brighter future for all of us. But only if we demand it of them.
Annie Kidder is executive director of People for Education, an independent parent-led organization. Clips from the forum will be available on the websites of the CEA and People for Education: www.cea-ace.ca and www.peopleforeducation
http://www.thestar.com/article/527799
This country depends more on what happens in our schools than what happens in our banks
This country depends more on what happens in our schools than what happens in our banks
Oct 31, 2008 04:30 AM
Comments on this story (7)
Annie Kidder
What is the role of schools in creating the Canada we want?
It's time to start thinking about what kind of country we want to live in.
That was the message of a forum this week sponsored by the Canadian Education Association and People for Education.
Do we want to live in a country of engaged citizens who feel they "belong" to something? Do we want to be a nation of innovators contributing to the rest of the world with our strong environmental policies, our dedication to global citizenship and our examples of social responsibility? Do we want to be able to harness the power of our population's diversity?
Or do we want to continue to lead the world in our rate of consumption? Do we want to watch passively as the gap between the rich and everyone else continues to grow, as we lose hundreds of species from our environment, and as fewer of us choose to vote?
According to Glen Murray, former mayor of Winnipeg, president of the Canadian Urban Institute and chair of the Canadian National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy, Canada is at a crossroads. Our population, our economy and our environment are being transformed.
So we have to decide what we want. Then we have to decide how we're going to get there.
Our best chance to influence our country's future may lie in our publicly funded schools. More than 90 per cent of Canada's young people go to public schools (in Ontario, that percentage is even higher) and those schools can be the leaders of the change. As Penny Milton of the Canadian Education Association put it, "Schools should condition social progress, rather than be conditioned by it."
Our schools are doing a pretty great job in their drive to improve students' literacy and numeracy – test scores are up, Canadian students are among the top 10 OECD countries in reading, writing, math and science, and our graduation rates are among the highest in the world. But is that enough? What kinds of students are we graduating? Do they have the right attributes to allow them to succeed? Are they really the creative thinkers and innovators that we need? Do they have a sense of citizenship and social responsibility? Do they all – rich, poor, newcomer, aboriginal, those who live in cities and those who live in rural areas and the North – feel they have an equitable chance for success? Probably not.
Our future is going to be determined much more by what happens in our schools than what happens in our banks. So what do we need to change?
Herveen Singh, one of the panellists at the forum, formerly a "student at risk" and now a graduate student at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto, says that first of all our education system has to acknowledge the change in the world around it. "We've got to listen to the voices of students, we've got to build more bridges between schools and the world, and we have to expand our notion of what equity means."
Glen Murray says we've got to do a much better job at breaking the pattern of mass marketing and mass consumption in this country. And he says the only place we can do that effectively is in our schools. We have to figure out how to instill the value of citizenship in our students. In the U.K., for example, citizenship is taught as a fundamental ideal. They challenge students to be critical thinkers; they get them to solve real problems and debate scary things like values and politics. They assume that young people can think independently and can participate in effecting change.
But in Canada these days, in their consumerism, people identify more with the economy than with their country, and our schools have shied away from challenging that.
At the forum, people wanted practical ideas about what needs to be done. Everyone agreed that our hope lies in our schools. And everyone agreed that schools have to lead. And everyone even agreed that the shift in our collective thinking about schools – from viewing them as something that was good for the country to something that was more a private good, focused on individuals' economic success – was part of the problem.
So what needs to be done? The school system itself has to do a much better job at making the connections between schools and the world around them. It has to be less afraid of tackling world issues and values. In fact, it has to see it as its responsibility.
If critical and creative thinkers are what we need in the 21st century, we have to rejig what has become a two-tiered curriculum, where we have relegated the kinds of courses that produce those very attributes to the bottom tier. We have to redefine success in education beyond simplistic targets for test scores, because they don't tell us much about the overall health of our education system. We have to look critically at our focus on literacy and numeracy and make sure that political targets haven't gotten in the way of truly educational ones.
And to answer one of the biggest questions asked at the forum: Why should anyone else (outside of parents and teachers) care about what happens in our schools? Because our country depends on it. Because our schools have the potential to lead the change and the potential to create a brighter future for all of us. But only if we demand it of them.
Annie Kidder is executive director of People for Education, an independent parent-led organization. Clips from the forum will be available on the websites of the CEA and People for Education: www.cea-ace.ca and www.peopleforeducation
http://www.thestar.com/article/527799
Thursday, October 23, 2008
"Against The Clock"
"Against The Clock"
You are working against the clock when you are trying to finish your work within a limited amount of time. Example: "We worked against the clock all day to get that report done by five."....GoEnglish.com
You are working against the clock when you are trying to finish your work within a limited amount of time. Example: "We worked against the clock all day to get that report done by five."....GoEnglish.com
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
Proud graduate overcame brain injury
Proud graduate overcame brain injury
After massive damage caused in car accident,
York program assists woman to get degree
Oct 21, 2008 04:30 AM
Comments on this story (1)
Shabnam Janet Janani
Staff Reporter
After Rosanne Wong was in a horrific car accident 11 years ago, doctors said her brain was so badly damaged she would not be able to do anything for the rest of her life.
She was, according to them, in a persistent vegetative state.
Saturday, Wong stood on a podium at York University wearing a flowing black gown as she graduated with a B.A. in sociology. Her remarkable achievement was made possible with the help of York's Office for Persons with Disabilities.
"I never give up," said the 29-year-old east Toronto woman in a phone interview, her speech still slowed by the effects of the brain injury she suffered while living in Apopka, Fla.
Wong had just received a full scholarship from the University of Florida and dreamed of becoming a computer engineer.
Then, on Sept. 19, 1997, she was driving on her way to tutor underprivileged students when she made a wrong turn, into the path of a 16-wheel tractor-trailer.
Wong spent 10 days in a coma at the Orlando Regional Medical Centre in Florida.
Over the course of nine months, despite what doctors had said, she began to regain basic functions. She slowly started to breathe, eat, talk and walk on her own. She was released from the hospital, but it would be two years before her brain could do more complex things.
"Gradually, her ability to read came back," said her father, Ray Wong, "but she had to read a page more than 10 times to remember details."
As her insurance coverage ran out – and the company refused to renew her policy – bills for her medication that reached $6,000 a month prompted her family to return to Canada, where they had moved from Jamaica 30 years earlier.
She enrolled in York University's Information Technology program in 2001, still hoping to become a computer engineer.
"When disabled students register at the university, they meet with case counsellors first," said Karen Swartz, director at the Office for Persons with Disabilities at York. Case counsellors review the students' difficulties and then build a plan based on what kind of accommodations they need to proceed through their university career.
In the 2007-2008 academic year, 2,533 students were accommodated for their disabilities at York. Of these, about 50 had brain injuries, Schwartz said.
Students with disabilities are usually expected to write the same exams and assignments as other students.
After Wong failed courses in the Information Technology program, a neuropsychology assessment suggested that parts of her brain that process information related to math and science had been destroyed along with her short-term memory. That indicated she should change her major.
"She is very hard working and dedicated," said Annette Symanzik, a case counsellor at York.
But before her transition, Wong faced another shock when her mother died from a heart attack.
"She was so close to her mother and was so depressed that she wasn't able to do things properly," said her father.
She received therapy and was eventually able to recover from the grief."It was a big loss for me," she said. "My mother really wanted to see my graduation day."
Wong is independent now, and looks forward to starting a job in her field.
As for the doctor who told Wong's father his daughter would never do anything for the rest of her life, he is still annoyed but said, "We let it go."
http://www.thestar.com/article/520884
After massive damage caused in car accident,
York program assists woman to get degree
Oct 21, 2008 04:30 AM
Comments on this story (1)
Shabnam Janet Janani
Staff Reporter
After Rosanne Wong was in a horrific car accident 11 years ago, doctors said her brain was so badly damaged she would not be able to do anything for the rest of her life.
She was, according to them, in a persistent vegetative state.
Saturday, Wong stood on a podium at York University wearing a flowing black gown as she graduated with a B.A. in sociology. Her remarkable achievement was made possible with the help of York's Office for Persons with Disabilities.
"I never give up," said the 29-year-old east Toronto woman in a phone interview, her speech still slowed by the effects of the brain injury she suffered while living in Apopka, Fla.
Wong had just received a full scholarship from the University of Florida and dreamed of becoming a computer engineer.
Then, on Sept. 19, 1997, she was driving on her way to tutor underprivileged students when she made a wrong turn, into the path of a 16-wheel tractor-trailer.
Wong spent 10 days in a coma at the Orlando Regional Medical Centre in Florida.
Over the course of nine months, despite what doctors had said, she began to regain basic functions. She slowly started to breathe, eat, talk and walk on her own. She was released from the hospital, but it would be two years before her brain could do more complex things.
"Gradually, her ability to read came back," said her father, Ray Wong, "but she had to read a page more than 10 times to remember details."
As her insurance coverage ran out – and the company refused to renew her policy – bills for her medication that reached $6,000 a month prompted her family to return to Canada, where they had moved from Jamaica 30 years earlier.
She enrolled in York University's Information Technology program in 2001, still hoping to become a computer engineer.
"When disabled students register at the university, they meet with case counsellors first," said Karen Swartz, director at the Office for Persons with Disabilities at York. Case counsellors review the students' difficulties and then build a plan based on what kind of accommodations they need to proceed through their university career.
In the 2007-2008 academic year, 2,533 students were accommodated for their disabilities at York. Of these, about 50 had brain injuries, Schwartz said.
Students with disabilities are usually expected to write the same exams and assignments as other students.
After Wong failed courses in the Information Technology program, a neuropsychology assessment suggested that parts of her brain that process information related to math and science had been destroyed along with her short-term memory. That indicated she should change her major.
"She is very hard working and dedicated," said Annette Symanzik, a case counsellor at York.
But before her transition, Wong faced another shock when her mother died from a heart attack.
"She was so close to her mother and was so depressed that she wasn't able to do things properly," said her father.
She received therapy and was eventually able to recover from the grief."It was a big loss for me," she said. "My mother really wanted to see my graduation day."
Wong is independent now, and looks forward to starting a job in her field.
As for the doctor who told Wong's father his daughter would never do anything for the rest of her life, he is still annoyed but said, "We let it go."
http://www.thestar.com/article/520884
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)