Canadian R&B singer Jully Black honoured at AFN ceremony for NBA anthem rendition

Manitoba’s students are settling into a new school year. Whether you graduated in 1986 or 2006, today’s classrooms look very different from the ones you remember.

Students reflect the changing makeup of our communities — differences in social, emotional, physical and cognitive abilities and socioeconomic stresses are all increasingly present and adding to the complexity of our classrooms.

Meeting these differing individual needs is no easy feat. It requires manageable class sizes, school counsellors, social workers, specialized resource teachers and investment in the systems that can help students thrive. But when those supports aren’t available, students’ needs don’t disappear. Increasingly, it falls to classroom teachers to try to fill the gaps.

When I started working as a teacher more than 30 years ago, we had budgets for resources when we needed them. Today, the needs of students have diversified and increased, but the funding for our public schools is failing to meet them.

My mother-in-law, Malka, came to Toronto in 1958 from postwar Poland. She came with unbearable losses authored by the Third Reich fascist fantasies that had destroyed her world.

She suffered the murder of her husband and second child, a newborn. She endured a hatred of her very being that defies reason and reckoning, yet she came, nonetheless, with profound wits about her and a courage groomed by the black market in Siberia where she somehow kept her first-born toddler alive by placing her in an unlit closet where the child would be safe while Malka bartered for food.

After the war, she married a survivor whose wife and children and been exterminated. Together, they had a son; I married that son, his story and the longest hatred it embodied.

Even given the profound and forbidding ugliness of the world Malka fled, she somehow created, in her third act, a single piece of art she found beautiful.

Fighting the good fight

Re: Transit, roads and city council’s priorities (Oct. 2)

Many thanks to Erna Buffie for once again speaking up for transit.

When will Winnipeg finally make the shift from a car-dependent culture to a greener and more efficient way?