Tim – Page 43 – Mechanical Sympathy

Smart Helmets

Part of my day job involves building virtual and augmented reality sets for classrooms. I have built dozens of systems and have tried all sorts of different combinations of hardware, we even build software that uses this tech. I get virtual and augmented reality and I’m looking forward this fighter pilot technology finding its way into motorcycle helmets.

I saw a tweet today that suggests it’s already here in the Cross Helmet. 360° peripheral awareness is a great idea that will no doubt save lives, and having hands free navigational information is another valuable safety feature, but I have a questions about this revolutionary lid.

Most of the articles I’ve read about the Cross Helmet are by tech websites that have a hard time containing their enthusiasm about disrupting existing industries. They typically suggest that motorcycle helmets haven’t changed in decades and that they are low tech, unimaginative things created by Luddites. It’ll take the blinding talents of a technology company to interrupt those conservative curmudgeons in the helmet industry (sorry, sometimes the hyperbole around high-tech companies gets a bit tiresome).

Helmets aren’t supposed to be an infotainment system, they supposed to be a light-weight, effective protective item that operates in incredibly difficult circumstances. Helmet manufacturers have thrown everything imaginable at this problem, producing carbon fibre helmets and pushing materials engineering to the limit in creating the lightest, most protective lids possible. They’ve also applied modern aerodynamic analysis to their products, producing quieter, less buffeting protection than ever before. To call them uninspired and backwards simply isn’t true.

The most concerning thing about the Cross Helmet isn’t the wiz-bang technology in the thing, it’s the thing itself. That is a massive lid. When was the last time you needed two hands to hold on to your helmet? This size is a function of all the technology crammed into it. A heads up display, rear facing camera, wireless connectivity, communications and the battery needed to power all that stuff weighs down the helmet and makes it big. The actual weight of it appears to be a mystery. Modern helmets weigh between one and two kilos, with the heaviest ones being mechanical flip top items with built in sun visors. I can’t find a weight listed for the Cross Helmet anywhere, not even on their website.

… that’s all you get for technical details.

I’m guessing, based on the size and tech in the thing that it’ll come in at over twice the weight of what an average helmet does, which doesn’t make it a very good helmet. On top of that, you’re looking at a slab sided thing that looks like it’ll catch cross winds like a sail. You might be able to see behind you and get navigational details, but you’ll be stopping often because your neck can’t take it any more.

I get that the first prototype of a new design is going to have problems; this is the worst smart helmet you’ll ever see because it’s the first one. As the tech gets smaller and designs improve, a smart helmet becomes a much more attractive idea, but I’m disinclined to dive into a (very) expensive helmet that is more of a concept than a usable thing.

Here is a list of some helmets currently on the market with their weights:

Arai DT-X 1619 grams (and check out the many technical details shared)
Roof Boxer Helmet 1650 grams (again with many technical details shared)
Roof Boxer Carbon 1550 grams (the lightest transformable/mechanical helmet I can find)
Nexx Carbon 1219 grams (the lightest helmet I can find)
Shark Evoline 1960 grams (the heaviest helmet I could find)

The lightest of them use every materials engineering trick in the book to produce helmets that meet stringent modern safety standards while also being comfortable, aerodynamic and long lasting. They are anything but an old-school product, Discovery Channel.

The Roof Carbon is the lightest transformable / mechanical helmet on the market. It’s 100 grams lighter than the standard Roof Boxer helmet – that’s what you get with carbon, 100 grams. The helmet industry is playing a game of grams, aerodynamics and safety effectiveness in a state of the art way.

If you put a 2000 gram limit on your smart helmet and required it to retain the aerodynamics and size of current lids, it would be in the vicinity of current helmets in terms of usefulness. I doubt it’s possible to cram cameras, heads up displays, communications and batteries into a helmet using today’s tech, but someday soon? Perhaps.

Under those awesome graphics are state of the art materials engineering resulting in unprecedented protection.

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Stripping a BMW Airhead

On the shortest day of the year, as the sun set in the middle of the afternoon, I found myself driving into the country to help Jeff the motorcycle Jedi lift the engine out of his BMW airhead cafe racer project.

Since it came out of the shed it had been hibernating in for over a decade, the old R90 has been stripped down to its bits and pieces. Jeff is going to get the frame powder coated which was why I was there to help get that big air cooled lump out.

A BMW R90 stripped down to its component parts emphasizes just what a simple and elegant machine this is. We were both able to easily lift the boxer engine out of the frame. I doubt it weighed much more than a hundred pounds. Even with all the pieces laid out on tables, the BMW seems to be made of less parts than you’d need to put together a working motorcycle, let alone a touring model.

So far the only new piece purchased is the cafe racer seat in the photo. Jeff intends to take a sawzall to the frame over the holiday break and then industrially clean all of the components before reassembling the cafe resurrected R90.

With the parts laid out it doesn’t look like there’s enough there to build a motorbike. The R90 is an elegantly simple machine.

The home-made motorcycle stand is doing a fine job on its first big project.

That air cooled boxer engine is a piece of industrial art!

A naked R90t frame prior to some modification.

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Todd Blubaugh’s Too Far Gone

It took me almost a month to slowly work my way through this complex piece of media. I originally came across an excerpt from it in Bike Magazine and it was so moving that I immediately purchased it. I’m generally not a fan of coffee table books. I’ve always thought of them as flash over substance and a decoration for yuppies to strategically place in their perfect living rooms to impress guests. It took some powerful writing in that excerpt to overpower my prejudice about this format, and I’m glad it did.

Writing is only a small part of this ‘book’, and calling it a book isn’t really fair to it. This is a piece of art; it feels more like you’re walking through an emotionally powerful art exhibit. The author, Todd Blubaugh, was a photographer by trade, so this all starts to make sense as you fall into his aesthetic. Between the pages of powerful and technically complex photography you find short pieces of narrative text that pin down the corners of Todd’s six month quest for meaning after his parent’s unexpected death in a car accident.

If you’ve lost a parent in unexpected circumstances with things left unsaid, Todd’s meditative ride around the continental U.S. will raise a lot of your own ghosts. This was one of the reasons I savoured it so slowly. After reading each emotional upper cut, you’re immersed in several pages of photography of life on the road. Working in black and white on a film camera, Todd’s images tend toward startlingly frank personal portraits of the people that he meets on his travels. Todd must be a particularly disarming fellow as he’s able to catch people with almost animal like honesty – were I able to do this, I’d be much more interested in human portraiture. As it is, it’s a joy to see a master like this at work.

As you travel with Todd further into his trajectory away from the things that anchor most people to their lives (job, family), he surprises you with artifacts from his parent’s lives. At moments like this the book feels more like a scrapbook or family album, with news articles about his Dad’s tour in Vietnam and his mother’s paintings offering you further insight into the scope of his loss. The letter from his Dad at the end of the book had me in tears.

Todd tells two entwined and complex stories in Too Far Gone. His disassociation from the habitual, stationary life that most people live reaches a climax in a conversation with an old sailor that will leave you, along with Todd himself, staring into the abyss. Free from the responsibilities most of us labour under, Todd is able to focus on his loss with such a startling clarity that it will shake you.

This book pressed a lot of buttons for me. As a photographer I greatly enjoyed Todd’s eye, even (and especially because?) it is so different from my own. Todd’s relationship with motorcycling (old Harleys and biker culture) is also about as different from mine as can be, yet the sense of brotherhood still felt strong because Todd is never once preachy or superior about his infatuation. Instead, his honest love of motorbikes comes across loudly, and that is something we share.

As someone who lost a parent and experienced that same phone call out of the blue, Todd’s experience is something that cuts me deep. In coming to understand Todd’s relationship with his dad I can’t help but reflect on my own difficult and distant relationship with my father. I lost the parent that I most identified with and have a challenging relationship with the other one, but Todd’s parent’s were still together and he lost both at once. It’s the things left unsaid that gnaw at you afterwards, and losing both parents together while they are still paragons in your life is something I can only imagine.

We all lose our parents eventually. If you haven’t yet, this book will give you an emotionally powerful idea of how it feels, and how someone has worked through the scars of that experience. If they’re already gone, your sympathy will create powerful echoes.

There are a few motorcycling themed books that plumb philosophical depths. Zen And The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Shop Class As Soulcraft in particular have spoken intelligently and deeply about the meditative nature of motorcycling. Too Far Gone is a multi-media, large format book that takes you to the same place through different mediums, but it does it while also offering an emotional intelligence that is hard to find anywhere else. Immerse yourself in this book, you won’t be disappointed.

What you need and nothing else. After six months on the road Todd looks as homeless as he is, and has to make a decision…

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Three Wheeled Dreams

Once again I’m thinking about a Morgan3. I found out that Ontario is offering a ten year pilot program for three wheeled vehicles, meaning you can drive one here now. The federal requirements for three wheeled vehicles are just borrowed from other jurisdictions where they are already allowed, so the Morgan should be good to go.

It’s probably the Polaris Slingshot and the like that have forced this to finally happen, but what I really want is that Morgan3. With a big air cooled twin out front and a super wide stance, the Morgan3 is a silly amount of fun to drive and looks like an instant classic rather than the offspring of the USS Enterprise and a TIE fighter. If you want to go fast, get an even number of wheels, but if you want something with character, go odd, and the Morgan3 is nothing if not full of character.

Of course Ontario can’t do anything without making it pointlessly political and difficult, so anyone driving a three wheeled vehicle has to act like it’s a motorcycle and is required to wear a helmet. Like I said, pointlessly officious, it’s the Ontario way.

At least there are some stylish (though probably illegal) options for piloting the Morgan3. A couple of World War 2 inspired fighter helmets along with aviator jackets and we’d be ready to roll.

As it happens, the Morgan factory is but one hundred miles north of us when we’re on holiday in the UK and offers rentals. That might warrant a day trip! There is another option even closer to where we’re staying. Berrybrook is in Exeter, just down the road from the cottage we’re at.

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Roof Helmets: enjoying the cultural dissonance

I’m a big fan of Roof Helmets. It’s the best lid I’ve ever owned, and one of the only ones that offers me full face protection when I want it and the freedom to easily go open. I’ll often start a ride open faced, flip it down to handle the wind when I’m out on the road at speed and then flip it open again when I slow down, even if it’s just riding through a town.

I saw my first Roof Helmet when Jo Sinnott wore one on her Wild Camping series through Europe. It took some maneuvering to get one to Canada, but it’s been my go-to helmet since I landed one a couple of seasons ago.

I keep a close eye on Roof these days. Their newly redesigned Desmo hemlets are on my wish list, and the new Carbon Boxxer is a work of industrial art.

Roof is selling that new Carbon hard, but if you think it’s your typical helmet commercial you’ve forgotten how French they are. See if you can keep up with the cultural dissonance, make sure to hang in to the end:

I’m wincing at the hooliganism at the beginning, but you start to have faith in the rider and end up letting them ride well outside of sensible because of your increasing faith in their skill. Then they suddenly get into tiff with a couple at a cafe, and things go from there. The reveal at the end? Brilliant!

I don’t think many Bikers for Trump alt-right Harley types will enjoy it, but I suspect that doesn’t bother Roof too much. It worked on me.

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A Slippery Slope

Fortunately, the ark didn’t have to worry about any of
those pesky fictional icebergs…

Over the past couple of days the concept of professionalism seems to keep popping up, usually after it’s been lit on fire. It began when someone posted a quote on Facebook based on a Twitter storm. It was described as ‘interesting’ on Facebook and lots of people on there were very happy to prop it up. I would have called it asinine. My first instinct was to write back, ‘it’s important to remember that amateurs built the starship Enterprise but professionals built the space shuttle.’ But I didn’t.

Beyond the amateurs-are-really-good-at-building-things-that-don’t-exist thinking, I was more put off by the implicit attack on professionalism. Ironically, it’s the lack of professionalism in our news that’s accelerating this anti-professional bias. When you share media created to force an opinion rather than declare facts, you’re pouring gas on the ignorance fire. From patients spending half an hour on Google and then telling their doctors what their self-diagnosis is and demanding they medicate them for it (self assured arrogance is a wonderful byproduct of everyone’s-an-expert), to shady business men taking over super powers (dido), the idea that we don’t need professionals any more because we all have access to information, and therefore know everything, is rampant.

The problem with our information deluge is that it isn’t vetted. With no oversight or fact checking, alternative facts become facts when they are repeated often enough. Opinions become truths when you find enough people to repeat them. Part of this comes down to the shear volume of information around us. We’re living in a tsunami of data, and we’re very bad at curating it.

That quote is from 2010. The revolution happened, but it hasn’t been the touchy-feely future of knowledge that we thought it would be. Maybe AI can sort it out, because we’ve made a mess of it.

The flood of social media data has us awash in information, much of it crap. With a waning (professional) fourth estate and everyone on the planet rapidly getting to the point where they can broadcast their opinions no matter how factually bereft, we are living in dangerous times. There was some hope, early on, that crowd sourcing would help manage this onslaught, but it turns out a large proportion of the crowd doing the sourcing are idiots.

Our willingness to absorb untruths are amplified by the idea that we customize our social media feeds based on our own beliefs. Doing so turns our ‘news’ intake into an echo chamber of ideas that only support our world view; a sort of self-fulfilling propaganda. This quickly takes on Orwellian proportions as people who once kept their racist thoughts to themselves suddenly find themselves at the virtual equivalent of a Clan meeting. Those embarrassing prejudices are suddenly worth broadcasting. This process is a powerful one, and its tail is wagging the political dog in 2017.

Alternative is right – this ‘headline’ photo is taken from a
2007 HBO film. Welcome to 2017.

It isn’t just the alt-right who are happy to take this neo-propaganda and make use of it. With no oversight, everyone with a strong opinion is happy to take pictures from a film and publish them as if they are news, just to convince people that what they think is right.

Way back in the naughties (’06 I think) one of my media studies students brought in a video that prompted tears and a lot of conversation. The inevitability of what they proposed in that video caused a lot of anxiety in our class, me included. At the time, social media barely existed so this seemed like a real stretch, but in the dystopian future they describe in the film the traditional news media has fallen apart, eaten by the internet. What’s left is a shallow, sensationalist mediascape that caters to the quality of thought most people aspire to. In the past year I’ve begun to think that this quality of thought isn’t anywhere near where I thought it was.

The description at the end might be starting to feel all too familiar:
“At its best, edited for the savviest readers, EPIC is a summary of the world, deeper and broader and more nuanced than anything available before. But at its worst, and for too many, EPIC is merely a collection of trivia, much of it untrue, all of it narrow, shallow and sensational, but EPIC is what we wanted…” It’s what we have today.

We’re too busy, distracted and incompetent to vet and even critically analyze the media that engulfs us, and we’re too cheap to hire people to do it for us. It turns out we weren’t just paying for information from the fourth estate, we were also paying for critical analysis. But if we can get sensationalism for free why pay for hard truths?

A philosophical underpinning to all of this is the idea that anyone can do or say anything they want simply by wanting to do it. Effort to develop mastery in a skill (ie: professionalism) is frowned upon. We’re told by wealthy people that doctors, politicians, teachers and other professionals are shysters who are trying to take advantage of us, and we buy it! We idolize the mega-rich who are so simply because of the situation of their birth rather than because of any professionally developed skill. The lies we tell ourselves every day are part of a vicious cycle made possible by an information revolution that made everything except learning the truth easier.

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Kawartha Highlands Loop

On Friday, July 13th, while thousands of people lined up to get into Port Dover, I left the cottage early (just before 7am) and headed out on my planned circumnavigation of the Kawartha Highlands Park. It was already well into the twenties Celsius and humid when I left. The fire roads into the cottage are a roller coaster rally stage of gravel over muskeg and Canadian Shield with tough, weedy firs and birch trees growing in the cracks. It’s fun in a car but a bit nerve wracking on a bike.

It’s tourist season in the Haliburton Highlands and on the weekends the roads actually have some traffic (like, a few vehicles: Canadian country traffic), but on this Friday morning it was quiet. I was lucky to see another vehicle pass me in any five minute span when I set out and the cottage road was just me and the bears.

I was out to Lovesick Lake Restaurant just before 8am for breakfast, only to discover it doesn’t open until 9am… for breakfast… in the middle of the summer. Having not eaten and already on the road for an hour, I was disinclined to hang around for seventy odd minutes. Fortunately, a couple of years ago we did a family Thanksgiving at the Viamede Resort just across Upper Stony Lake so I figured I’d give them a try.

I pulled in just as the breakfast buffet was underway. It was twenty bucks for breakfast all in, but it was all you can drink quality coffee and real juices along with a buffet all you can eat hot breakfast with fruit and all the other odds and ends you’d expect from a high end resort. If you’ve got the time and you’re up that way, Viamede is a nice way to start a day of riding, and you’re looked after by a fantastic staff while eating a great breakfast in a beautiful environment. It’s probably cheaper than a lousy hot dog at Port Dover and no line up.

When I came back outside it was heating up but I was full of beans (literally and figuratively) and percolating on that freshly pressed coffee. Northeys Bay Road east out of Viamede was a roller coaster, weaving through outcroppings of rocky Shield as it worked its way around the end of Upper Stoney Lake. At one point I came down into a valley only to discover a rafter of wild turkeys the size of sheep standing on a rock outcropping eying me as I went by; it was like riding through a herd of dinosaurs. Northeys Bay turned onto County Road Six, which took a less sinuous and more severe route through the woods. From Six I was onto Forty-Four and the twists were back on again until I got to 46, but even the bigger roads were still constantly weaving, just with fewer gear changes.

With the slower, technical roads around Stoney Lake behind me, I struck north, deeper into the Shield. 46 and the 504 were both full of fast sweepers that seldom had me on the crown of my tires. I pulled into Coe Hill Cafe about 10:30am. After three hours on the bike my knees needed a rest, so it was coffee time. It was me and four tables of retirees all talking politics and telling ‘in my day’ stories (they’d all owned bikes at some point).

A couple of cups of coffee and I was ready to tackle Lower Faraday Road. This little road out of Coe Hill is twisty, turny thing. Last time on it two years ago I was disappointed at just how rough it was, but sections of it have been resurfaced since my last attempt and this time I could exercise the sides of the tires a bit. The top end of it was still rough, but that’s one of the many benefits of riding a ‘big trailee’ adventure bike: they can handle Ontario’s terrible pavement when it gets rough.

Out the top of Faraday I pushed on up to the 648 ‘Loop” road through Highland Grove, Pusey and Wilberforce. I was initially thinking about extending the loop through Bird’s Creek and Maynooth, but it was touching forty degrees with the humidity and a swim in the lake that afternoon held more appeal.

I wasn’t on the 118 for long, but once again I was reminded what a lovely thing it is. If you like fast, sweeping corners through beautiful scenery on well finished roads, the 118 won’t disappoint. I think I prefer that kind of road to the super tight, technical, twisty roads that get all the attention and usually have lousy surfaces.

From Tory Hill I was dropping south along the western side of The Kawartha Highlands Provincial Park, once again on near empty roads. The Tiger had burned off most of a tank of gas and was light and eager, and after six hot hours in the saddle, I was looking forward to a swim in the lake. Like that post breakfast section around the end of Upper Stoney Lake, this road felt weightless and easy. I get to the end of sections of road like that and realize I’d forgotten where I end and the bike begins.

I was back at Nogie’s Creek before I knew it and riding the seventeen odd kilometres down increasingly small and twisty gravel fire roads into the lake…

I did the SMART off road training course a couple of weeks ago and was looking forward to seeing how my usually white knuckle approach to riding on gravel had changed. I was in and out of the cottage a total of six times over the four days there and never once got a hand cramp. In most cases I was resting my open hands on the bars and letting the throttle sort out any wobbles. If you’re anxious about riding on loose surfaces something like the SMART program is a great way to acclimate yourself to it and lose your fear of it.

I was back at the cottage by 2pm and in the lake shortly thereafter. Once again the Haliburton Highlands had impressed, offering an assortment of interesting roads that are vanishingly rare in the table-top flat South West where I live. The Tiger was once again a rock star, prompting discussions wherever we went and starting at the touch of a button. It carried me and two panniers full of tools and rain gear around the Kawartha Highlands while soaking up bumps on some truly awful pavement and feeling like an eager sports bike when the going got smooth and twisty. Best of all, we managed it on near empty roads with no delays and some spectacular scenery.

Best Friday the thirteenth ride yet! About three hundred kilometres on near empty roads through picture postcard scenery and not a crowd or line up in sight. That’s what riding is about for me.

Here are some full 360° images from the ride:

The cottage fire road out of Bass Lake. – Spherical Image – RICOH THETA

The twists and turns of the Haliburton Highlands. – Spherical Image – RICOH THETA

Lakes, woods and Canadian Shield. – Spherical Image – RICOH THETA

The on-bike 360 footage was captured by a Ricoh Theta set to auto shoot every 30 seconds, so you can set and forget it. The images are screen grabs from out of the 360 panoramas. You can lean how to do this yourself (it’s easy!) here.

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Easy Money

There is a strong undercurrent of animosity about what teachers get paid and a lot of misinformation about teacher average pay. Like anything, it’s more complicated than it appears. Here’s my stab at trying to explain how Ontario teacher pay works, though the people complaining about it probably aren’t interested in any facts:

The latest Ontario secondary teacher salary grid from my board:

http://www.d18.osstf.ca/-/media/districts/d18-staging/ugdsb-occasionals/2017_2/central-agreement/1-electronic-collective-agreement-signed.ashx?la=en-CA

To get your foot in the door on this grid you need to have spent 4 years in an undergraduate degree and then another 2 years getting your bachelor of education. If you’ve ever had any trouble with the law you’re already out of contention. You need to have a clean criminal record to be a teacher.Your average cost for a university degree in Canada these days is about $6500 a year.
https://www.topuniversities.com/student-info/student-finance/how-much-does-it-cost-study-canada
So you’re about $40,000 in debt before you even get a whiff of that ‘super’ teacher pay. Ontario is (of course) one of the most expensive places in Canada to get your post-secondary education:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/733512/tuition-fee-for-full-time-canadian-undergraduates-by-province/

So that $6500 Canadian average turns into almost $8000 a year and your Ontario teacher is typically sitting under about fifty grand in debt to get onto the grid.

Six contract sections don’t exist for new teachers these days. From what I’ve seen, you’d be hard pressed to find any Ontario teacher under 30 years old who has six contract sections (full time equivalence – six sections is a full year of work). It’s fair to expect most teachers to take 5-6 years to get to full contract these days, many give up on the process. There are a number of teachers who, for various reasons, never get to six contract sections and are part time throughout their career.

It takes the typical Canadian student 10 years to get out from under student loan debt, so I put that in too – but didn’t count the ongoing debt required to pay for your teacher training.

Remember that salary grid? To get up the sharp end of it you need to have an honours degree in what you’re teaching and then take additional qualification (AQ) courses after teaching experience to earn your ‘honours specialist’ and get into the top ‘level 4’ section of the salary grid.
https://cpl.oise.utoronto.ca/public/category/programStream.do?method=load&selectedProgramAreaId=18104&selectedProgramStreamId=18599
https://www.oct.ca/members/additional-qualifications/prerequisites

A number of teachers never get there because they don’t have the university background or aren’t willing to spend thousands more dollars when they aren’t teaching to get additional qualifications. You can look up any teacher on OCT to see what their qualifications are and whether they’ve spent more of their own time and money to get additional qualifications.
https://www.oct.ca/Home/FindATeacher

So, to get up to the top end of the teacher’s salary, currently $96,068 in my board, you need to have dropped at least fifty grand on university degrees plus another couple of thousand on honours specialist additional qualifications. Most teachers don’t stop there and get other AQs in other specializations as well (I have 2 other subjects I’ve AQ’d in as well as my honours specialist).

Because of all these variables, calculating what the actual average teacher salary is in Ontario is a tricky business, which is why no one has bothered, but I’ll give it a go:

Your first year you’re teaching as an occassional teacher at the bottom of the grid. Let’s be optimistic and say you’re teaching six sections (full time) on a short term contract, but many aren’t. From years 2-6 let’s say you’re getting one contract section a year and are still able to fill up the rest of your time table with short term contract jobs (again, many aren’t). Let’s assume you’ve got an honours degree in what you’re teaching. In your third year you drop another couple of thousand bucks on getting your honours specialist and move up to level four on the salary grid and keep climbing year over year.

That eighty-three grand average is mighty optimistic. It ignores the endemic under-employment in new teachers these days. It also ignores maternity leaves and any other family or medical leaves that happen in people’s lives. I’d estimate that the average Ontario teacher is making something more like seventy grand a year, with many making substantially less.Wild eyed conservative leaning reporters will bleat on and on about how the average Ontarian should rise up against these overpaid teachers, but when you look into statistics around pay and education level, the typical degree carrying Ontarian makes about $85,000 a year. Your average teacher salary is less than that:

https://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2016/as-sa/98-200-x/2016024/98-200-x2016024-eng.cfm

Playing that rhetorical game and equating people who have spent years of their lives and tens of thousand so their own dollars to earn a qualification with people who haven’t is a nasty bit of neo-con politics. The people playing that game are trying to sell you on equality when they’re actually selling the opposite. We live in a society that rewards dilligence, competence and effort, don’t we? Maybe we don’t.

The benefits and pension piece are another angle that gets a lot of air play. I pay almost eight hundred bucks a month into my pension. If everyone paid that much into a pension plan, they too would have a good one waiting for them. The only difference between teachers and everyone else is that we’re forced to do it. My take home pay as a teacher only equalled my take home pay as a millwright in 1991 after fifteen years and tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debt. I’ll have a better pension when I retire as a teacher than I would have as a millwright (though National Grocer’s millwrights were well looked after until they broke the union and fired them all).

I’m always left with the vague feeling that there is some good old fashioned sexism in conservative attacks on teachers. Almost 70% of teachers in Canada are women, and there is no glass ceiling in it because we’re paid equally for the work we do. I imagine this grates on the nerves of the manly conservative men who are looking for reasons to hate on the job and the unions that enabled this equity, but I gotta tell ya, most of those dudes wouldn’t last five minutes in a classroom.

If you’re able to handle the crushing student debt, the hatred of people who couldn’t or wouldn’t do what it takes to do the same job and have the resiliency to survive in classrooms (stats show that typically about 30% of people who do the degree work drop out of teaching), then teaching is a rewarding profession and one of the few remaining that let you lead a middle class life.

If you think you can handle all that and don’t mind being attacked and belittled publiclly by the very government you work for while producing educational outcomes that are envied the world over, then go for it, but don’t ever assume it’s easy money.

I just spent most of the day making no money and walking the picket lines
for better learning conditions for my students while we all struggle under
an almost psychotically vindictive provincial government who seem intent
on hurting the most vulnerable students in our system.

Some stats to consider:

Ontario pays less per student for education than most other provinces while producing results that raise us into the top 10 world wide – but this is Ontario so expect to be attacked for that.

Canada is close to the world average in terms of education spending as a percentage of government spending. Again, Ontario is the largest single system in the country, so we wag that dog too, but expect to be attacked for it.

In terms of cost we’re pretty much neck and neck with the USA, but Canada is top 10 in the world, the US isn’t in the top 30. If you want to be acknowledged and rewarded for a job well done don’t teach in Ontario.

There has been a lot of mis-information around Ontario teachers making the highest salary in Canada. That’s not true either: https://www.narcity.com/life/these-are-the-highest-and-lowest-paying-canadian-cities-for-teachers Toronto is 4th out of 8 on this 2018 list. Teachers get paid more in Nunavut, Alberta and Manitoba, and only make a couple of grand more than teachers in Nova Scotia and Saskatchewan. I’m sure you can quickly figure out the difference in housing costs between Toronto and Halifax or Toronto and Saskatchewan…

Still want to earn that easy teacher money?

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The End of Google Plus

I was an early adopter into G+. I was already getting the willies about Facebook back in 2011 and was looking for a way to curate links to thinkers and artists that wasn’t designed around monetizing my existing relationships. Facebook serves a purpose – keeping you in touch with extended friends and family, but that echo-chamber doesn’t help you develop new ideas and perspectives, it tends to be a pretty insular place… even a petri dish for spreading fake news. I know a number of people who have since radically diminished or backed right out of the increasingly caustic environment on Facebook, but I was looking for ways out way back in 2011.

That Facebook is an advertising company built around monetizing my personal relationships has always bothered me, so into G+ I leapt. G+ allowed me to curate connections that Facebook wouldn’t. Over the years I’ve developed links to thousands of people, almost none of them based on personal relationships. Those links exist because these people are not mainstream (most celebrities don’t use G+, there’s no money in it). G+ was my go to for intelligent, curated content that I wasn’t seeing anywhere else on the internet.

Google recently announced that is was shutting down Google Plus under what everyone agrees are pretty flimsy circumstances. While other social media giants are leaking data and monetizing fake news in tangible ways, Google is shutting down G+ because of a security vulnerability that never happened. Why it’s really shutting G+ down is because it isn’t what social media is expected to be these days: an efficient way to capture as many people’s personal information as possible in order to monetize it. The problem with G+ is that it’s actually a social media network – people go on there to share ideas and often create long form discussions with each other. G+ isn’t mainstream, doesn’t cater to idiots and don’t produce easily monetizable lies that you can advertise from.

A G+ user recently posted this:  Educators, niche groups will miss Google+

“the people on G+ are just better at the ‘social’ part of networking” – true that. I can expect a constant boil of political negativity and outright nonsense often based on outright lies on Facebook, which has established itself as the low bar for social media because it’s the one everyone is on. We underestimate how many stupid people there are in the world, but Facebook hasn’t and it has become a giant catering to them.  It might have been smaller than other social media, but G+ was a carefully curated, rich source of content I wasn’t seeing anywhere else. I’ll miss it.

The early 21st century attention economy feels a lot like robber baron capitalism of the 19th Century. In that time industrialization was driving new economies in natural resource extraction and manufacturing in an entirely unsustainable way that produced obscene amounts of wealth for a small number of people. Sound familiar? The new resource these days is our attention. If you’ve developed a low relative use (G+ had millions of active users, which isn’t Facebook’s billions) social media platform that encourages long form reading and benign, drama-free interaction between its users you’re not churning through the resource as efficiently as you could be. As a result you’re not aggressively pursuing the marketing money like every other corporate social media platform is.

The upside of this is that the end of Google Plus has me looking for alternatives, and people like Tim Berners-Lee and others are trying to pry your personal data out of the tax dodging attention economy robber barons. Think you could leave the Google mothership? I’m trying.

Some alternate social media sites I’m trying:

GooglePlus users are pretty handy at self organizing (the best they could hope for from Google was benign neglect). Many are working to organise the diaspora.

MeWe: https://mewe.com/myworld
Engineered with privacy-by-design, MeWe turns the table on Facebook and other social media companies with a revolutionary service that emphasizes privacy and social sharing where people can be their true, uncensored selves. No Ads. No Spyware. No BS. MeWe members are #Not4Sale and enjoy the protection of MeWe’s Privacy Bill Of Rights.

Pluspora: https://pluspora.com/stream
A favourite landing spot of G+ users that offers strong user-focused privacy controls.

My next steps are to look into blockchain driven encrypted networks that offer adamant user protections from the powers that be… here’s a link to some early research on that.

Eventually this will mean pulling up stakes at Blogger (Google’s blogging platform), but that’s a tricky business. I’ve migrated to WordPress with Mechanical Sympathy and import blog posts from my three Blogger blogs (Dusty World, Tim’s Motorcycle Diaries and Kingfisher Imaging), but I’ve found blogging in WordPress to be needlessly fussy. Blogger’s great advantage is it’s simple to use which is vital when I’m concentrating on writing. If I can get WordPress to give me a WYSIWYG editing tool that isn’t so annoying when formatting text and inputting digital media I’d be looking at migrating there too.

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A New Roof

My favorite helmet company has come out with a new evolution of their unique helmet. Lots of companies make a lifting visor helmet but what they don’t tell you is that your swinging chin guard doesn’t pass any safety standards; most of those modular motorcycle helmets only pass open face testing (as though there were no chin guard at all). The Roof passes stringent safety tests as both an open AND closed face helmet making it a rarity in convertible lids.

I’ve been the happy owner of a Desmo for over a year now and it has surpassed expectations. It’s much better than any other helmet I’ve tried at handling turbulence in a straight-line and especially when you turn your head (it barely registers side winds at all). It’s as quiet as most closed faced helmets but can also be opened up when not travelling at high speed. The visor lets you go from open face to jet to fully closed a second, one handed.

Roof has updated the Desmo to the RO32 Desmo with a variety of updates and improvements. If I can find a retailer I’m in for the upgrade.

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