What are the kinds of things that make for fun facts about schools around the world?
The highest elevation, the oldest, largest, the smallest, school on a boat, getting to school on a zip-line, Summer vacations at Christmas, longest school day with the shortest year - these are all at school advisory. All curious and interesting.
One school in the Philippines is made of recycled pop bottles. It is given the distinctive name of Bottle School. It took about 9,000 bottles and dozens of volunteers to build the structure. Each bottle was filled with sand, water and straw to keep them sturdy. Then, a cement-like substance was used to hold the bottles in place as they were stacked on top of each other to create walls. Looking at the picture I would guess this is a school bus garage rather than a school.
Another school in India has 56,000 students on a daily basis. But I think this is a matter of definition as it has 18 campuses. So it sounds like a city that has trouble naming each school building as an entity. Just looking at organization functioning and structure I can't imagine there is one principal for 56,000 students.
Then we come down to 'earth' from these novelties. In our area, there is a grand new 'super school' in progress of being built. It is just east of us at the border of Grimsby and Beamsville. These are mega schools serving a broad geographic area.
The new super school has a big billboard out in front of the construction site with howling/roaring blue wolves. It says Home of the Wolfpack - it is an aggressive and violent image of 3 snarling wolves. If mascots are intended to portray and represent behaviours and traits, this school is going to need a lot of help managing violent student behaviour. Or maybe the mascots will be alienating and they will have to spend a lot of time getting students back into class.
Mascots are a hot topic in the US - there are colleges that have live mascots. These bring the schools a lot of bad press about cruelty to animals. There's a story of one live mascot trying to kill another one. And then there are the articles pointing out that most mascots are male - even on products like cereal. Female and gender neutral mascots are few.
Isn't that one of our social quandaries now? When we identify something that is explicitly discriminatory or not in line with our social values, there's much work to clearly define the issue and then to unravel it. Think of Ryerson University and the X Campaign.
How many Xs would there be everywhere if we applied the same approach? For me, it would start with a big X on the three snarling wolves out front of the West Niagara Super school.
This is an image of the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles - the Frank Gehry designed building.
