Legos, Polls, and Gifted Kids

Plus: A damning report on Canada’s foreign worker program

Polls! Polls! Polls! Everywhere you look, it’s Blue Wall this or Mark Carney that. We can hardly get through a day without a new set of numbers telling us what we think of our current or potential leaders. In a 2019 piece, Max Fawcett zeroed in on our obsession with political polling, as well as some of its flaws:

Over the last two decades, Canadians (like people in most countries) either abandoned or stopped answering the landlines that used to be at the heart of the polling industry. According to the Pew Research Center, telephone-survey response rates have dropped in the US from 36 percent, in 1997, to just 6 percent, in 2018. Those that do still answer those calls tend to be from a smaller subset of demographics (generally speaking, older and less culturally diverse), which makes it far more difficult to get that all-important random sample—and far more likely that the poll’s findings will be wrong. [Read more]

A UN envoy has called Canada’s foreign worker program “a breeding ground for contemporary forms of slavery.” In “Exploitation and Abusive Bosses Plague Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker Program,” Marcello Di Cintio charted how government efforts to help vulnerable workers frequently fall short:

What would deter employers from exploiting their workers? Migrant allies have long campaigned the government to ensure permanent residency status to all migrant workers upon arrival. This would give migrants the same workplace protections and freedoms Canadian workers take for granted. Permanent residency also allows workers to bring their families to Canada. … As an interim measure, however, advocates demand the government offer open permits to all migrant workers, vulnerable or not. This would prevent workers from being bound to terrible bosses—and, ideally, compel bosses to be less terrible. [Read more]

A British fisherman has caught a very rare shark—a Lego shark, from the 1990s, that’s estimated to be worth hundreds of dollars on the resale market. For a history of how the little toy building blocks became ubiquitous, consider Kyle Carsten Wyatt’s “Block by Block”:

Lego began in 1916, in the modest carpentry shop of Ole Kirk Christiansen, who built ladders, stools, and ironing boards for the farming community of Billund, Denmark. He turned to more affordable wooden toys during the Depression, selling his abacuses, pull-along ducks, and building blocks door to door. Kids, he noted, kept clamouring for construction toys that would enable them to build taller, more complex structures. … In Lego, the Christiansens conceived of a “system of play” that required no glue, knives, or specialized tools, and that would never wear out. [Read more]

Memes poking fun at former “gifted” students have been taking off, pointing to larger questions about what it means and the baggage that comes with being singled out for smarts as a child. Katrina Onstad looked at the label, and its impact on kids and classrooms, in her 2018 cover story, “Who Gets to Be Gifted?”

Ruben Gaztambide-Fernandez, a professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto who has researched inequity at specialized arts schools, notes that both gifted and arts-school parents are small but mighty cohorts. “These are really wealthy, really savvy people with really good connections,” he said. “Students don’t end up in gifted education, in French immersion, in specialized arts high schools by accident. They end up there because their parents have the resources, have been mobilizing these resources to craft a certain kind of childhood from the moment these kids are born.” [Read more]

Check out our new books podcast, What Happened Next, hosted by Nathan Whitlock . This week’s conversation is with Jackie Khalilieh, about her YA novel Something More.

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