Saturday 29 October 2016

Ten Months As A Teacher by Dave Jaffe .Last Part - Part Eight.

               Part Eight


     Books can sometimes predict your future.
     In the early 1960's John Updike's book 'The Centaur' was published. It told a story about a high school teacher in a small town in Pennsylvania. The book took place in the late 1940's, and the male teacher with a young son to support and a wife and mother to feed, couldn't quit teaching though he hated the job.
     I first read Updike's book in early 1964 and didn't understand the story. It seemed too complex for me at the time. Plus the plot took part of its framework from Greek mythology. This made the book even harder for me to understand.  When I was asked by one of my classmates at McGill University whether I enjoyed the book, I said, "There's some good writing here about a basketball game."
     That was the only part of the book that I connected with.
     Yet about ten years later I came across the book again and enjoyed it immensely. "This is the story of many teachers," I told a friend of mine after I'd finished reading it. Of course, Powell River was wedged in between the sea and the mountains, while 'The Centaur' took place in eastern America's farm land. And it seemed that B.C. teachers in the early 1970's were paid a lot more than American teachers of 30 years before.  Still these differences aside, I  saw parallels between my ten months in Powell River and the teacher in 'The Centaur'.
      So ends my story about my attempt to be a full time teacher.

Friday 28 October 2016

Ten Months As A Teacher by Dave Jaffe. Part Seven.

           Ten Months as A Teacher:  Part Seven


     Although I'd left behind me the career of regular teacher in a regular school, I still had some contact with Powell River and did do some teaching long after I left this coastal town.
       I revisited Powell River twice after I left it in 1970. I visited it for a couple of days in 1972 and then again for a day in 1987. On the second time I found that the town had indeed changed for the better. Now there was a mall there. Also the town had a regular bus service as well as a community centre and a library. Still, as said before I found Powell River to be isolated and hard to reach except by plane.
      In the 1980's I started to teach ESL or English as A Second Language. I did this as a volunteer and never got paid for doing it. Still, there were rewards. In this volunteer job the students were mostly from east Asia and Eastern Europe. No Chinese Leanna Leakeys or Slavic Rick Malimas showed up to disrupt my classes. Nor was I teaching sometimes rowdy students crammed into classes with 30 desks or more.
      Instead I taught one student at a time and the students were grateful to see me and learn from me. I gave them lessons in speaking English in the students' living rooms and they said nice things to me. "You are one of the best teachers I've ever had," a thirtyish Chinese mother of a very young son said after I'd taught her for about three months. "I've learned so much from you."
       A blind Russian man welcomed me every time I came to teach him. "We are always glad you come, here," his wife told me. What a difference this was from the way some of the students in Powell River had talked to me. Of course not everything went smoothly. A young Vietnamese who'd been imprisoned by the communist government in Vietnam, pushed another young man off his apartment balcony breaking a few of the victim's bones. This young Vietnamese fled his apartment and came to me to ask for help. I referred him to a lawyer.
     Another one of my students frightened his wife, who confessed her problem to my supervisor. Yet despite these events I always felt gratitude from my students. As time went by I started to pick up skills and one of them was learning to write as a journalist. I also discovered the world of phonics. Now I realized that I could have used this knowledge of journalism and phonics to teach my English classes in Powell River. Yet it was too late. The opportunity to do this had long passed.
     So as I aged I was learning to regret what I had and hadn't done in the past. Yet as time went by, my ten months in Powell River shrank in significance. New events filled my life as time  and overshadowed my earlier life Still I call my time in this mill town ' a growth experience'. Or as young people say today about something positive, "It was all good."
 And so  despite my complaints, in the end I did learn many things from my ten months as a classroom teacher.
      
      

Thursday 27 October 2016

Ten Months As A Teacher by Dave Jaffe - Part Six

             Ten Months as A Teacher - Part Six by Dave Jaffe


    My teaching days in high schools were definitely over but what lay ahead for me? Here I was an ill at ease 28 year old who didn't belong as a teacher in a classroom or maybe anywhere else. What was I going to do for the rest of my life? Suddenly the answer popped up.
     In July or August 1970 I wrote a story on a cinema chain in Canada after a group of  yippies protested against the high prices of tickets that were charged for viewing the movie 'Woodstock'. I sent the story to 'The 'Georgia Straight'. The Straight printed the story. "You could be a writer," my dad told me. I was staying with my father as I searched for another job.
       About five years later that's what I was. I wrote for small papers criticizing powerful men and standing up for the underdog. I was now launched on a sometimes paid career. Goodbye teaching in classrooms. Hello left wing propagandist! So ended my very brief career as a classroom teacher.

Wednesday 26 October 2016

Ten Months As A Teacher - Part Five, by Dave Jaffe

        Ten Months As A Teacher by Dave Jaffe. Part Five


     The superintendant of the Powell River School system showed up in my classes in the spring of 1970. I'd thought when I first spoke to him in 1969 that he was a sympathetic person. He may have been but now he judged me as a teacher and his report on me was anything but positive.
     "This man is not a good teacher," the report said in effect. "This teacher is inefficient and doesn't know how to fulfill his duties." This is how I remember the report. Yet whatever it said precisely it was surely negative. The report didn't surprise me because I certainly didn't do things that other teachers had like get involved in after-school activities.
     The superintendent made his report in May I think. With less than two months left in the school year I just about signed off from teaching. I'd tried to teach my classes Shakespeare's 'MacBeth', William Golding's 'Lord of the Flies' Mark Twain's 'Huckleberry Finn' and some mainstream poetry. Obviuosly I'd failed at my task.
     After I'd read the report, I read a play with a Grade Ten class. The play was on the Grade 12 cirriculum but who cared? "It passes the time," I told a fellow teacher. "And the students seem to enjoy it." Sometimes with other classes I would tell the students about poverty in The Third World. Most students got bored and some of them even went to sleep as I droned on.
     When the school year ended I got a present from my home room Grade Ten class. I was surprised and even kissed the young lady who gave it to me. Yet before that happened and school closed up for the summer, I'd clashed with about four students in one of my Grade 11 classes. They threw eggs at my basement suite windows one night. So some students liked me. Others surely didn't.
     Then it was all over for me. So for the very last time in 1970 I hopped on a Greyhound bus one June day and made my way back to Vancouver. I felt relieved to leave Powell River. Yet I also felt defeated. After all, I had failed at my first big job of being a teacher.
    When the bus dropped me off on Denman Street in Vancouver's West End late in the day I shuffled back to my father's apartment . For the next two months I once again plugged back into the joys of living in a city. I watched one film after another, some of which I'd seen before. And how nice it was to sit in a restaurant or a library for hours on end and never worry about upcoming classes. I felt lucky beyond belief to live in a city with its nice gyms, shopping malls, swimming pools, well-stocked libraries, buses and trolleys, tidy beaches and lovely manicured parks.
    And there was another positive feature of living in Vancouver. "No one knows me here," I explained to a friend. "I want to live anonymously. I couldn't do that in Powell River." For a while I did feel happy.

    
    

Monday 24 October 2016

Ten Months As a Teacher - by Dave Jaffe: Part Four.

                  Ten Months as a Teacher.  Part Four by Dave Jaffe


     I faced classes and young faces that were sometimes friendly, sometimes hostile but usually indifferent. The fault might have been mine. "You were a lousy teacher," a partner of one of my students said. "My girlfriend said you were the worst teacher she ever had."
     Although this young man's comments angered me at the time he said them, he was probably right. I was a lousy teacher. I often didn't prepare for many of my five classes, three grade 11's and two grade 10's. I didn't read about the background of the novels, plays and poetry I taught. I often went into classes thinking, what am I going to teach right now? And I took no part in any of the extra cirricular activities that teachers usually headed up. I was supposed to help produce a play but I didn't even start the production. This was a major mistake on my part. For most teachers in the school coached sports teams, started new activities or did other things after school with the students. I did nothing.
      So while I struggled on with my teaching, life in Powell River outside of Max Cameron just went on. There was a whole social world out there that I never got in contact with. Young people paired off into couples and then often got engaged. Singing groups, choirs, churches, political gatherings, and soccer and hockey leagues kept on going. I knew nothing about any of this. Yet it was a whole side of life that I ignored.
    "You should come to school dances," one teacher told me. "If you show up at them, it can make your time in the classes easier." I didn't follow  this advice, yet I should have. Like the true recluse I was, I stayed away from crowds. Every time I could, I sneaked off to Vancouver. I usually arrived in the city at night time, and came back to Powell River on a Sunday. I loved these two to three day breaks and spent hours wandering in Stanley Park, going to movies, and browsing in book stores and the Vancouver Public Library. In the library I did look for things and projects I could do with my classes.
    These weekend jaunts kept me sane as my classes and teaching went downhill. I yearned to move back to Vancouver and soon I did.
      One man who helped shovel me out of teaching and back to Vancouver was the superintendent of the Powell River school system. I went to him in November of 1969 and told him of some of the problems I faced as a teacher. He listened to me with some sympathy. But going to him may have been a mistake as I found out later.
    

Saturday 22 October 2016

Ten Months As A Teacher by Dave Jaffe

    Ten Months As A Teacher  - Part Three


          I soon realized that there were very few places to hang out at in Powell River once school was out. I was used to going to libraries, gyms and movie theatres in Vancouver. Yet in this town there were no shopping malls, no regular bus service and no inside swimming pools. As for a library, a woman opened a library for three hours once a week in a church basement. The high school I taught at, namely Max Cameron High School had a small library where I did find some books I liked. Yet compared to small cities that I'd gone to in the past, like Vernon in the Okanagan, Powell River struck me as a culturally deprived area.
      So where did people hang out? If they were adults they ended up at local hotels that had a liquor license. I wasn't a great drinker so once the school day ended I would walk down the hill to my basement suite I rented in a house. There I would put pop records on the record player I'd brought with me. Like many lonely people, music became my close companion.Still, very soon I started to feel bored and shut in, especially after the rains came.
     This town of about 10,000 had only one big main road that ran north for a few kilometres and ended at the fishing town of Lund. "There's not much to do around here," one of my students told me. He was right. I'm a city person who'd by now in 1969 had lived in three cities, namely London, England, Montreal and Vancouver. Powell River struck me as a barebones of town. Also the people there quickly saw me as a freaky character.
      "My grandmother thinks  you're really weird," my landlord's granddaughter said to me. "You don't have a car or even a television. She's never met anyone like you." The lady was right: I was a weirdo then and now. In the cities I'd lived in till now, I could hide my strangeness. Yet in Powell River I stuck out like a sore thumb.
    The pulp mill kept churning out its products day and night. This was the reason for the town's existence. After two months in this town, I felt I was living at the ends of the earth and was thinking of quitting my job and vanishing back to Vancouver. I didn't do this because of some of other teachers. Sue was a transplanted American who taught English just as I did to grade 10 and 11 students. Like me she faced some hostile students.Tony was a man from Britain who sometimes felt frustrated by the young people he met in his socials classes. I've already talked about Rodger in another part of my blog. We became friends and this short but very knowledgeable British-born teacher was invaluable in his advice and encouragement. Another teacher who helped me was Cliff, a somewhat older person than me, who gave me topics to discuss in my classes.
      Without these people around I wouldn't have finished my ten months of teaching, that's for sure.
    
   

Friday 21 October 2016

Ten Months As A Teacher by Dave Jaffe. Part Two

         Part Two of "Ten Months As A Teacher'


    "Powell River is 100 kilometres and five days from Vancouver," one student at Max Cameron High School where I was teaching in the fall of 1969 told me. He exaggerated a bit but certainly it took time to reach this mill town of about 10,000 people. The town was named after Israel Wood Powell, who in the early 20th century was the superintendent of Indian Affairs in B.C. In 1908 a pulp mill started up and people flocked to the area to work in the mill.
     To get to Powell River from Vancouver  in 1969 usually took time. If you drove to the mill town you drove up to Horseshoe Bay in West Vancouver. Then you got on a ferry that took you to Langdale. The rain usually pelted down as you drove off the ferry and headed north. As you drove or sat in a bus as I did, you could look to the left and gaze out at the waters of the Georgia Straight. Or you could look to the right where mountain and trees towered above you.
     This twisting, turning drive along what's called "The Sunshine Coast' took some time. One man who stayed at Gibson's a then small but now growing town on the coast, said way back in 1967, "I sure didn't see much sunshine when I stayed  for the winter in Gibson's." After at least a two hour drive you got on a small ferry at Earl's Cove .This ferry ride left you at Saltery Bay. Or have I named the ferry terminals the wrong way  around? I can't remember now.
     Once your second ferry ride ends you've arrived you're in the township of Powell River. Another short drive would take you near the mill and the town.
    The whole journey from Vancouver to Powell River usually took over five hours. Now of course you could have taken a plane ride from Vancouver Airport to Powell River and in 25 minutes you'd be in the town. But of course that trip cost a lot more money than taking the Greyhound bus as I usually did.
      Another entry point to the town  was from Vancouver Island. Here you could take the ferry that went from Comox to Powell River.  The ferry churned through  grey or blue waters to the town. I never came to Powell River from this direction so I can't report on this journey.   Still which ever way you came, delays or or obstacles to the ferries running, like storms or mechanical ferry failures could stretch out your travelling time even more. And when the winter fog settled on top of the town the plane rides in and out of the place were cancelled.
       So that was it. Truly Powell River was a long way from Vancouver or Victoria. On the map though it looked close by. Yet travelling time could stretch out to six hours or more. Year later when I re-visited Powell River I was asked what I thought of it now. "It's still pretty isolated," I replied. "That unfortunately hasn't changed."

Thursday 20 October 2016

Ten Months as a Teacher by Dave Jaffe - Part One

     Ten Months as a Teacher - Part One


     Leanna Leakey (which was not her real name) was a pain in my behind. A blonde attractive 15 year old, she was one of about 30 students in a Grade 10 English class I was teaching in the fall of 1969 in Powell River.
    Every time she came to class she caused me problems. She would talk loudly, gossip to her friends, ignore my asking to be silent and made fun of me.  "You are a strange weird sort of person," she wrote in effect about me in a story which I assigned her to do. I thought that if she wrote a story about why she didn't like my class, she would stop causing me troubles in my. Instead it just made things worse between us.
    At last I persuaded her to leave my class and go to the school library to read the books I assigned.
She agreed with this and so did another unhappy student in the same class. Rick Malima (again this wasn't his real name) was a big strapping hockey player who starred in one of the local hockey leagues. He was taking Grade 10 English for the second time.
     "It's just a waste of time for him," one teacher told me. "He doesn't want to be in an English class period. He's still angry that he failed English last year." At times I felt like Leanna, Rick and Ronald (which again wasn't his real name). Ronald was a big tough guy in another and smaller Grade 10 English class I was teaching. "I don't want to take this class," he told me in the first class I taught him. "I hate English. It's just junk."
     (Naturally I'm citing all these statements from memory. So the words hurled my way may have been a little different. Yet that's how I remember them). Now after a bare two weeks teaching English in the two story Max Cameron senior secondary school, I often felt frustrated. I had endless pieces of paper to fill out, attendance forms to get right and what it seemed was a whole lot of work to do.These never endings tasks I felt had nothing to do with teaching English to Grade 10 and 11 students.
     Anyway here I was, a 27 year old slacker who really didn't want to teach period. I wanted to stay in Vancouver, and lounge around in some old rickety rooming house. And there were plenty of such rooming houses  in Vancouver in 1969. In these relatively low rent places I could read progressive and/or new age books as well as novels from many countries.
     Yet I'd ended up teaching in Powell River because I needed money, and I became a teacher because I thought it would be an easy thing to do. But it wasn't easy and I quickly saw I didn't belong in a classroom and certainly not as a teacher. "I'm a learner, not a teacher," a middle aged teacher tells his son in John Updike's novel 'The Centaur'. That was me. Yet I ended up in the mill town of Powell River, a few hundred kilometres north of Vancouver. I was out of place here and out of sorts.
       (End of Part One).
    
     
    
   
    

Wednesday 12 October 2016

Death and How To Avoid It - Part Seven by Dave Jaffe

        Part Seven


    There are thousands of diets out there but if you're looking for one way to extend your life the best way is become a vegan. It does seem that vegetarians live longer than those who eat meat, chicken, eggs and butter. By doing this you'll not only help yourself, you'll also help the planet.
     About 20 per cent of global warming comes from raising cattle and other animals. In his book 'Diet For A New America'  one author praised the virtues of vegetarianism and points out  that switching to a plant diet is a very good thing. I am a vegan now and rarely eat any animal food. There are other diets that may lengthen your life but a vegan diet I conclude is one way to avoid an early death.
   This is the last part of my posting 'Death and How To Avoid It'.

Tuesday 11 October 2016

Death and How To Avoid It - Part Six by Dave Jaffe

    Part Six


          In part five of this story I told of how I met a rich man who boasted that he got to his present affluent state all on his own. Like many successful people he refused to acknowledge how lucky he'd been.  Suppose now that this man had been born into a First Nation family. Once again he wouldn't be living as long as many Caucasian Canadians do.
    Half of all First Nations children are poor. And many of them as they grow up die long before they turn sixty years old. Attawapiskat is yet another impoverished First Nations reserve in Canada. Its chief once went on a hunger strike to protest the terrible conditions that many of the reserve's 2,000 people were living in.
     In April 2016, 11 people in Attawapiskat tried to kill themselves. First Nations people, not just women but men too often live in the most deplorable conditions. They huddle together in very crowded houses. Many of them drop out of school before they graduate. Some sniff glue, shoot up heroin, drink themselves to death, and often die violent deaths. Not all First Nations people are poor or violent. Many aboriginal Canadians work hard and do get an education.Yet far too many die at an early age, especially if they're living in isolated communities in Canada's north.
     The cause of their despair is the Caucasian men who flooded into Canada from the 17th century on. They pushed a side the First Nations onto ever shrinking reserves and later herded young natives into terrible residential schools. "When the white man came to Africa," the U.S. writer James Baldwin wrote, "the white man had the Bible and the black man had the land. Soon the white man had the land and the black man had the Bible."
    The same thing happened in Canada to aboriginal groups. One day these people who were the first inhabitants of this country will be full citizens of Canada. Yet that days hasn't so far arrived. Right now a First Nations person is far more likely to die at an earlier age than most other Canadians.
    All the world's people live in a hierarchy. How long you live depends upon where you're lodged in the hierarchy. Many of the 7 billion people who live in this world live on the lower rungs of the ladder. They were just born in the wrong time in the wrong place. So death hovers over them much more closely than those born in a different time and a richer place.
     

Saturday 8 October 2016

Death and How To Avoid It - Part Five by Dave Jaffe

               Part Five


     Eduardo dos Santos is getting on in years. He's head of Angola, a sizeable African country whose western border hugs a large part of the south west coast of Africa. Angola is yet another African country whose history is full of conflict. Dos Santos's party the MPLA or in English the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola has been in power for many years. It took power in 1975 when the MPLA finally threw out the Portuguese colonizers.
     To get in power in Angola,the MPLA had to fight a vicious war against the Portuguese rulers.Then it had to fight off two other mostly black groups. Last it ended up fending off a U.S. backed army that ravaged Angola for at least ten years.  Final death count from all of this conflict? About two million people.
     "Anatomy is destiny," the famed psychiatrist Sigmund Freud once said. Freud's brand of therapy once was called 'The talking therapy and' is no longer so popular. In any case Freud was wrong about anatomy. Anatomy isn't destiny: Geography is.
.
    If you're born in Angola you're not going to live a long time. You're probably going to die at about the age of 51. The average Angolan in short has a life span of less than two thirds of the average Canadian. Angola's not alone here. Alongside Angola there are 12 other African countries whose citizens don't live much past 50 years either.
      Now Angola shouldn't be poor and if it wasn't,  its citizens would live a lot longer. It's a country chockful of oil, diamonds and other valuable minerals. Its government alas is one of he most corrupt governments on earth. And its rulers who were once gun toting Marxists, are very rich and now support free enterprise to the hilt.
In Luanda, Angola's capital city, millions of people just struggle to survive. Meanwhile Angola's small ruling clique are very rich multi-millionaires. The 21 million people of Angola teach us a valuable lesson: Luck often determines whether we live a long life or don't.
      "I go to where I'm at,  all by myself." one rich man told me at a political meeting. "I worked hard to make my money and no government has the right to take it away from me." Like many other rich and not so rich Canadians, this man ignores how lucky he's been. If he'd have been born a black Angolan, he'd either have been dead by nowor would be eking out a bare existence in some impoverished village or just surviving in an urban slum. Instead he's driving around Vancouver in an expensive Audi. Luck doesn't figure in his calculations. Yet it should.
    
   

Friday 7 October 2016

Death and How To Avoid It - Part Four by Dave Jaffe

              Part Four


           Smoking tobacco and drinking alcohol will lop years off your life. And so does  using certain types of illegal drugs. Marjorie, which is not her real name, was the mother of a heroin addict. "My son caused me many problems," Marjorie told me one day. "He used to steal doctors' prescription pads, hang out with thieves, and was often getting stopped by the police."
     Marjorie lived into her nineties. Her son's still alive too, but he's taking methadone these days and not injecting heroin. Mark, which isn't his real name wasn't as lucky as Marjorie's son. He started injecting heroin in his late teens. He overdosed in his late 20's and  died. Another man told me that he became a killer because of heroin. "I needed money for my drug habit," he told me. "I killed a man to get the money."
    Illegal drugs are very expensive because they're illegal. Once someone gets addicted to heroin or cocaine, they have to find some big money to feed their habit. Many addicted women become street prostitutes which is a very dangerous profession. Serial killer Robert Pickton boasted of killing 60 women. I'd bet that many of these women were cocaine or heroin addicts and sold their bodies on the street.
    Men addicted to heroin or cocaine usually turn to crime too. They steal from stores, try to hold up banks, deal illegal drugs or turn to fraud. All these activities can shorten your life.
     Of course, not all people who try heroin or cocaine get addicted to them. These people may shoot up heroin or snort cocaine once in a while. Yet even here casual use of these drugs can shorten your life. In the first nine months of 2016, close to 450 people died in British Columbia after injecting heroin. Both cocaine and heroin are often laced with fentanyl that can kill a drug user right away.
     One man told me, "Heroin addicts are human beings too. They should not be demonized."  This is true. Still, if you want to keep alive and healthy, it's a good idea to stay away from hard illegal drugs. They're nothing but trouble.
     
    
    

Thursday 6 October 2016

Death and How To Avoid It - Part Three by Dave Jaffe

     Part Three



     He was one of Canada's most famous novelists. And he disliked the man who became one of Quebec's most famous premiers.
     The novelist was Mordecai Richler, a Montrealer born and bred. The man whose policies Richler really disliked was the very short Rene Levesque who was born in Quebec's Gaspe area. A famous journalist, Levesque devoted most of his political career to setting up an independent Quebec. Richler never learned to speak French, disliked Levesque's politics and distrusted his nationalism.
    "From the beginning," Richler wrote, "French Canadian nationalism has been badly tainted by racism."
A secular Jew, Richler pointed out in his book 'O Canada, O Quebec', that many French Canadians loathed Jews in the past and that some French Canadians still do now. Richler saw a direct link between the  anti-Semitic nationalism preached by the early 20th century writer Abbe Lionel Groulx and the sovereigntist nationalism embraced by the Parti Quebecois that Rene Levesque headed up for many years.
     Nor did Richler like Levesque personally. "My enduring feeling about Rene Levesque," Richler wrote, "is that if he had chosen to hang me, even as he tightened the rope around my neck, he would have complained how humiliating it was for him to spring the trap door."So Richler didn't like Levesque for pushing Quebec to separate from Canada and Levesque probably didn't like Richler. Yet these two opponents did have two fatal habits in common. They both smoked tobacco and drank alcohol. And because they did this, they both died long before they should have.
    Levesque was born in 1922 and died in 1987. He was only 65 when he passed away and was rarely seen in public without a cigarette in his mouth.  Richler who was born in 1931 died in 2001. He too smoked continously and drank alcohol nearly every day at one of his favourite watering holes in Montreal. Even after he had been operated on for cancer, Richler kept on smoking and inhaling deadly cigarillos. He never stopped drinking alcohol either.
     Both men's lives point out what is now obvious: If you want to live a long life don't smoke or drink. They're both poisonous. Smoking cigarettes lops at least nine years off your life. Every year 19,000 Canadians die from lung cancer and most of these people got this deadly form of cancer from smoking. Also if you smoke cigarettes you're far more likely to get a stroke or be crumpled up by a heart attack.
     Drinking alcohol also cuts years off your life. Every year more than 4,000 Canadians die from alcohol abuse. These alcoholics die in car crashes or in drunken brawls. They're also far more likely to be men than women. Or they pass away from cirrhosis of the liver or other illnesses caused by alcohol. Over 3 million Canadians are risking death by drinking. And close to four and one half million expose themselves to risk when they down  alcohol . Drinking can shorten anyone's life. It's deadly. Then there's other dangerous drugs out there that I'll talk about next time.
     
    

Wednesday 5 October 2016

Death and How To Avoid It - Part Two by Dave Jaffe

               Part Two


    Why do women usually outlive men? I can't say for sure. But biology tells us that the female of any species outlives the male.
     In the world of us humans, women in the western world do take better care of themselves than men. They exercise more as any visit to a local aerobics class shows. These classes are jam packed with women. Yet fewer men show up to jump, sweat and strain. Women also watch their weight more than men.
    That doesn't mean that all women are hauling anorectic looking bodies around. Women pile up the kilograms as they age just like men. Yet overall women do try to control their weight more than men do. "My wife's keeping me well fed," a chunky 40's something male told me as he slapped his big stomach. Yet this man's wife was quite thin. She was following a far healthier path than her spouse. For keeping thin does extend your life.
     Women also lead less reckless lives than men. They don't endanger themselves as many men do. "Women don't climb Mount Everest," a male mountain climber told me way back in the 1970's.
 This isn't true to-day. The second wave of feminism came along in the late 1960's and allowed women to do many things like mountain climbing that only men used to do.
      Still even to-day women take less risks than men.A drunken car driver is far more likely to be a man, and usually a young man than a woman. And therefore that male is far more likely to die. Every year more than 2,000 Canadians die in car crashes and here far more men than women end up dead, especially if alcohol's involved.
     Women are also far more likely to end up as criminals especially if the crime is violent. Over 600 Canadians are killed every year by someone else. And the person who's stabbing, shooting or strangling someone else to death is eight times more likely to be a man than a woman."If only women committed crime," one female prison guard told me, "we could close nine out of ten prisons."
      Men far more often than women rob banks, fight in streets or playgrounds, become illegal drug addicts, steal from stores and commit fraud. Surprisingly men are also more likely to become prostitutes than women. Crime by the way is a young man's game and a very dangerous one too. If you want to die young, become a criminal.
      Another plus for women is that when illness strikes them, they're much more likely to go to a doctor than men."I'm not going to run off to see a doctor every time I get a little pain,"my father used to say. He tried to stay away from medical offices. Yet woman aren't like this. They go doctors when they're in pain or feel their body temperatures rise. So here's another reason why women outlive us males.
   Then there's the choices that men and women make as they go through life. We'll look at this in the next part/.

Tuesday 4 October 2016

Death and How To Avoid It - by Dave Jaffe -Part One

    Part One


       Canadians don't like to discuss death even though about 250,000 Canadians die every year.
     People laugh when I tell them what I sometimes do. I go into cinema complexes and restaurants. ""Hi my name's Dave," I tell the cashier or food server. "I'm an old man. Do you have any discounts for seniors.?"
      Yet sometimes I foretell my future. "Hi," I say again to someone I just met. "My name's Dave. I'm an old man. I'll be dead in less than ten years and maybe long before that." I don't get many laughs if any from people who hear this.
     Death is after all a serious business. You pass away, you vanish and you become extinct when you die. 50 million people die worldwide every year. Some people want to die. Every year close to 4,000 Canadians kill themselves and some of them are quite young. Yet that number is less than 2 per cent who die annually. Most of us want to stay alive.
     People jog or do other forms of exercise every day to stay alive or live longer. Of course few people roll out of bed every day to exercise and tell themselves, "I'm going to do my daily exercise
to live longer." Yet that in part is what exercise is all about. And if you exercise regularly chances are you will live longer than someone who doesn't.
     Of course there's other ways to live a long life.
     First off, be born a woman and not a man. Women everywhere in the western world live longer than men. In Canada in the year 2000 men had a life expectancy of 77 years. Yet women's life expectancy stood at 82 years or five years longer than a man's. Some women now live into their early 90's. Most men are not so lucky.
     A friend of mine was walking in a park in Victoria in the early 1970's. The second wave of feminism was just getting underway at this time. My friend met a young woman on his stroll through the park. This woman was a strong feminist. "Women are second class citizens in this world," the woman said in effect after she'd started to chat with my friend. "We are paid less than men, face more discrimination, and are treated more violently than men."
     "All these things are wrong," my friend replied. "They should be changed. But I'll tell you one thing: You woman will bury all us men." My friend's reply was spot on. Go to a long term place anywhere in Canada. These places for the aged are chock full of old women. And usually there's no more than half a dozen aging men around. The male husbands of most of these woman died off long ago.
    In the next part of this story we'll look at some of the reasons why women outlive men.