Derek from Canada

Today was my second day of classes, so far they have gone very well, but it is mostly just introductory stuff. I have done a lot of thinking about place over the last few years and it continues here now that I have become Derek from Canada (teachers are called by first names here). In the only class I have seen more than once we were talking about Canadian identity and stereotypes and how our purported lack of identity has possibly led to a reinforcing/embracing of stereotypes in order for us to have some kind of identity. In class we watched beer commercials and my favourite Tim Horton’s commercial (double-double). Students knew about Tim’s, and hockey, and ‘eh’, and one student told me about a character on a TV show who is Canadian and how she thought that the way the character spoke was a stereotype but that I talked like that. I repeatedly pronounced ‘about’ followed by ‘a-boot’ to demonstrate that the two sounded different but to no avail, they were still laughing. Maybe it’s like the town name I told the bus ticket lady about, I repeated it twice, she asked me to write it down, and then I swear she repeated back to me what I had already said twice.

Another aspect of place that I have been thinking a lot about is history. A trip to Copenhagen (or any town really) has you looking at buildings 100’s of years old, history is right in front of your nose and you can’t miss it. In Canada the history is there but there isn’t always the same kind of physical evidence, the land has been tread upon lightly in comparison (tar sands? tread lightly?), no kings built excessive buildings using public coffers at the expense of the general populace. Yes we have government buildings and fancy hotels but in much of the country buildings are modest and many of the greatest buildings/structures erected in Canada’s past were designed to return to the earth they came from. History in Canada, the land of great nature as my students see it, is sometimes only found if you can set your frequency to the right tone to receive it. Know that people have been in this forest, on this water, on this beach, for thousand of years before you and that too is history.