Volunteering at York

Volunteer

Have you ever volunteered? Would you like to work as a volunteer? If yes, you should come with me and join the Student Alumni Program-York is U which is the best organization in York University.

After I got the information from Don, I thought it was worth a try, so I sent an email to them to ask for details about this organization. After a short time, I got an email back. There was a general meeting on Oct.2nd. I went to this meeting, which was like a welcome party. First of all, we signed our application forms, and then we started our games. We were introduced to York is U, a Student Alumni Program which makes York a spirited, clean, safe and fun place for everyone. YorkisU members believe that York should be a source of pride and a place where students can return, year after year, even after they graduate. When we join this organization, we can gain valuable experience volunteering, make a lot of friends and learn the skills of leadership. There are many events in York University, such as York’s Birthday, the Stress Buster Carnival, Green Week, and Halloween. These cool events are all created by York is U. Thus, they provide a positive volunteer experience and leadership opportunities through participation. So, you should come and join us to be a volunteer, whether you have volunteered for anything before or not. At the orientation, we introduced ourselves and played games to remember each others' names. Food and drink were provided for the party. We could talk to the Director or Coordinator–Members one on one. At the meeting, they also gave out awards to people who had made a great contribution to this organization. A Member is any York student volunteer who has volunteered a minimum of 16 hours during a single York is U year and has attended a volunteer Orientation. So, you get your chance to be a volunteer first, then to be a member of York is U. As a member, you can have a lot of privileges. For example, you can attend an exclusive pinning ceremony where you receive your York is U membership pin, and personal congratulations from a top ranking University official. You can get exclusive invitations to York is U holiday and end-of-year parties. Members will receive an official recognition certificate at the end-of-year party to recognize them and thank them for their contributions. We had a lot fun in the general meeting. We also signed up for the coming events. Finally, we got a cool uniform at the end of the meeting.

Last week, I went to help them to prepare for Green Week. We painted banners and made Bristol boards. I have started my volunteer activity. How about you? Come and join me! There is a lot of fun to be had here. By the way, as I know, I’m the only person who is studying in YUELI who is a mamber here. That means that by joining this organization, you can learn English as well!!!

York is U - Student Alumni Program

York University326 Student Centre

4700 Keele StreetToronto, Ontario

M3J 1P3
Phone: 416.736.5492
Email: yorkisu@yorku.ca
Website: http://www.yorkisu.ca/

Chinese Student Association

After I finished the general meeting of York is U, I went around the student center and went to the fourth floor. I found another cool organization there, which is called the Chinese Student Association. The people in this club are very friendly. Frankie Chen, events director, told me that the Chinese Student Association is a club with 36 years of history at York University. They welcome everyone who is of Chinese descent to join this club. I signed the form and then I paid ten dollars for a membership card which is a Chinese Student Association at York University membership ID. It’s cool being a member of this club; you can get a lot of benefits. For example, you can get a discount on Canada's Wonderland tickets. There were four people playing mahjong at the front of the office. That was surprising. They told me that they are students in different classes at York University. They always get together and chat with each other. Frankie said, “This club can help Chinese students to enjoy university life. Also, students will feel they belong to Chinese culture.” At the end of our conversation, Frankie asked me if I was interested in being an executive because he had found out I had three years of experience as Chairman in my Student Union at home. I told him that I would try to apply it because I could improve my leadership skills. Finally, Frankie emphasized that although this club is the Chinese Student Association, they would use English in speaking and writing. Therefore, you should come and join me in this club because you can have a lot fun here. It is also a good place to learn English!!!


Club Office: Room 419, Student Centre
Website: http://www.yorku.ca/ycsa
YorkCSA forum: http://www.yorku.ca/ycsa/bbs
Facebook: YCSA [Chinese Students' Association at York]

Edison

animation and pop culture history: topics

Everybody knows something about cartoons and comics. They are for children, but they are also for adults, sometimes. They make simple pictures and caricatures, just for fun or for more serious purposes. Cartoons come in different forms and styles, and they are made for different audiences in different countries: Mickey Mouse and the Disney Corporation, the Fleischer Brothers, Bugs Bunny and Warner Brothers, Japanese Anime and Manga, Rocky and Bullwinkle and their Fractured Fairy Tales, Ralph Bakshi, Peter Max, Marvel Comics, Matt Groening, Stan Lee, Wallace and Gromit, Dr. Seuss, Maus, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns and The Dark Knight: from Georges Melies to Wall-e, they have been a part of popular culture for more than a century.

Like movies, animated films and novels can be analyzed academically, and this can be a common, fun way for university students to practice their critical reading and thinking skills – not too seriously (but maybe yes, seriously,)without having to read a lot. How many movies have you seen, and how many cartoon movies? Do you know things about their history? How are cartoons movies different from live-action movies? What do all of those Disney movies (Pocohontas, Mulan, etc) have in common? What are cartoons really saying? Do they have secret meanings? Can they criticize society more than other movies and escape punishment? How do they tell their stories? Do the different styles of different times and places tell us something about history and cultures?

We investigated some cartoons from different times and places, just to see what we could figure out by ourselves. Here is what we decided.

For example, there is the 1966 Japanese anime TV series Speed Racer and the 2008 Wachowsky Brothers movie version, Speed Racer. Alex and Feng showed us clips from both. The original Japanese show was made from a comic book. The animation style was quite simple compared to the style of a company like, for example, Disney. In a way, it was "underground" comics for the U.S. audience. Maybe that is why the Wachowskys, who made The Matrix, wanted to make their new one: they like things that are underground or subversive -- and they like comic books. Also, it is true that in Speed Racer there is a lot of technology, and technology is a good thing in that show. For characters like Mickey Mouse, however, technology is usually something they have problems with. That could be why Speed Racer was a hit with kids, in the 1960s, compared to Mickey Mouse.

Even if the animation was simple, Alex points out that it can be stylish because it comes from comic books. There is a newer series from the U.S. called Samurai Jack that imitates that Japanese style, but is very artistic, too.

Brian, Carol, and Edison showed us different cartoon versions of the story of "The Tortoise and the Hare" (that is, The Rabbit and the Turtle), to explain the differences between Disney's "classic" way and Warner Brothers' versions that make fun of Disney's way. Disney's 1934 The Tortoise and the Hare is a correct version of the classic story, where the tortoise wins the race, in the end, because he never stops and never gives up. The lesson is to be honest and never quit. In this version, the hare spends too much time trying to impress the girls and forgets the race until it is too late. In the first Warner brothers version, however, Tortoise Beats Hare (1941), Bugs Bunny is the rabbit, and the story is different. In this version, the turtle wins because he cheats! (So this is not a great version for teaching children the moral lesson of "be honest, work hard, and never quit.") In another Warner version, Rabbit Transit (1947), the turtle sort of cheats again. This time he has a rocket-powered shell. Warner and Bugs want to make fun of the official version of things.

In fact, that style has become really normal for cartoons since. The Simpsons do that, just like Warner Brothers and Bugs Bunny did, and more recent movies like Shrek do it, too. Brian, Edison, and Carol showed us that there is even a 2008 movie version of this story, Tortoise vs. Hare that makes the same kind of jokes with the story.

Fatmah and Mor added some more clips comparing the Disney style with the Warner Brothers style. They showed is the classic 1933 Disney version of The Three Little Pigs, which won an Oscar for best animated short that year. This cartoon is so classic that it is easy to understand, even though it is so old. The characters speak in rhyme, and they sing their song, "Who's Afraid of the Big, Bad Wolf?" which is a song almost everyone has heard somewhere, even though most of us have never actually seen this cartoon. Then they showed us a Warner Brothers cartoon from 1944 called Bugs Bunny and the Three Bears. This cartoon shows very clearly how Warner Brothers makes fun of the classic elements of these kinds of stories, as Bugs, playing the role of Goldilocks, makes fun of the bears, while the bears are trying to remember the story accurately so that they can get something (that is, rabbit) to eat.

Melaine and Shelly showed us clips from Disney's The Lion King (1994) and the Japanese anime TV series Kimba the White Lion (1966). There is a controversy about Disney's movie, that Disney may have stolen the idea from the earlier TV show. This link to the Wikipedia article about Kimba explains the controversy. It even shows that an early version of Disney's lion cub was white, just like Kimba. (It also tells about an episode of The Simpsons that mentions the controversy). But Melaine and Shelly explained the plot of Kimba, which is different from The Lion King. In Kimba, humans are destroying nature with evil technology, and killing and capturing endangered species. Kimba's misson is to try to make peace between animals and humans. Disney's movie doesn't have humans in it at all -- but then, Disney probably wouldn't make a movie that says people are evil . . . .

Joy and Wenting showed us examples of cartoons from Tom and Jerry and Itchy and Scratchy (the characters from The Simpsons). The stories of these two groups of characters are basically the same: there is a cat and a mouse, but the mouse is smarter than the cat. Tom and Jerry are really very old: according to Joy and Wenting they started in 1940. But Itchy and Scratchy are meant to be a parody of the older cartoon. The main differences between the two are that in Tom and Jerry the cat is grey and the mouse is brown, while in Itchy and Scratchy the cat is black and the mouse is blue. So, in the new version, the animals look less realistic, but as we all know, in the new version the violence is a lot more realistic. When we look at the older cartoons, though, we can see that Tom and Jerry are really very violent themselves. Joy and Wenting showed us a cartoon of theirs called Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Mouse.

After Joy and Wenting told us about these cartoons, they also told us about Happy Tree Friends, which is even newer and, therefore, even more violent!

Ellie, Tony, and Q-La showed us clips from the Beatles's 1968 animated movie Yellow Submarine. This was called "the first psychedelic movie," but you have to be old enough to remember the 1960s to know what psychedelic means. The style of animation in the movie is very strange, and not like anything you might see today, really. It is very different from the usual Hollywood style, and it is not intended to be realistic at all. As Ellie said, it is called "surreal" animation. The plot of the movie is about bringing peace to Pepperland, and driving away the evil "Blue Meanies." In fact, it's message of peace was considered, at the time, to be very political: the movie implicitly opposed the U.S. in the war in Vietnam.

Soju

Soju is a Korean drink. It was traditionally made from rice, but more recently it has been made in other ways. It has about 20% alcohol, which makes it stronger than wine (which is usually about 10-12%), but not as strong as whiskey (which is usually about 40%). It is not very expensive, so it tends to be a favorite drink for students. You drink it cold, not warm like the Japanese rice wine, sake (soju is usually stronger, anyway). Ho Jeong says that now younger people – well, her friends at least – will keep it in the freezer. You might pay 90 cents or 1 dollar for a bottle (300 + ml) in Korea, $3 a bottle in a restaurant; here in Canada, you can pay $9 a bottle in a store, and $15 bottle in a restaurant. In addition, since there are just 7 shots in a bottle, you usually have to buy two bottles . . .

The most important thing to know about soju is the etiquette. You have to learn the rules from your father or grandfather. First, you should never pour your own drink! People say that, when someone pours their own drink, it is very unlucky to be sitting in front of them. Next, when you drink it, if you are facing someone older than you, you must turn to the side and hide the drink with your hand. It is disrespectful to drink while you are facing someone older directly. Third, you should always use two hands when you pour a drink for an older person. And you should always pour it for the older person!

Recent social changes in Korea have meant that more women are drinking soju now. They have to, because drinking soju according to the rules of etiquette is an important part of business communication in Korea, and now women are in business more often. It is possible now to buy weaker soju because of this.

Parents sometimes teach their children how to drink soju when they are in middle school. This may sound surprising, but it makes sense if you understand that one of the rules of soju etiquette is that, if an older person offers you a drink, you may not refuse. As you may imagine, this rule can make things interesting in high school.

In general, age is important in Korean society. It can be a delicate social situation when an employee is older than his boss, since the boss is supposed to be treated as an elder. Daniel says that a good guy boss will not insist on being treated as an elder outside of the office. There is a movie in the Nexus, Paul Weitz’z 2004 In Good Company, which might be interesting to watch because it is about this issue (but in America).

A poktanju is a drink that is made by dropping a shot of soju into a pint of beer. This is the same as the drink that we call a depth charge (which is a kind of boilermaker) here, but we use whiskey instead of soju. But Daniel says that soju is less expensive.

So, when students drink soju, or other things, they have drinking games, of course. In China, they will count off numbers in their group, and each time the number reaches 7, or 14, or 17, or 21 – that is, any number with 7 in it or a number that is a multiple of 7, you have to stand up or clap, and if you forget, you have to drink, or they can ask you to do things, or you have to tell the truth about something. In Korea, they do the same with the numbers 3, 6, 9, etc., and when you get to 33, you have to clap twice. Don remembered a drinking game from his time in university called “Zoom Schwartz Profigliano,” which is a little strange and not so easy to play.

by Koo Bong Hwoi

School in China

In China, the schools are very centralized. You can see a complex of buildings, all in one place, with primary and secondary schools, and even university, at the same location. The classes may have about 60 students each. The students wear uniforms – but as we all know, there are lots of different ways to wear a school uniform!

Students stay in the same classroom, with the same group of fellow students, through the whole school year in high school. They have classes that take about 45 minutes and 8 or 9 classes per day. School starts at 7:00 a.m., and can go until 5:00 p.m. Teachers can add classes to the end of the day, especially for exam preparation, so that you may be in school until 7:00 p.m. The teachers can even add classes on Sundays.

You can choose your program – well, with some other considerations. Your test scores make a difference to which program you will be able to get into; also, teachers can pick students whom they like for their classes. There are science programs and humanities programs. Most students choose the science programs because they think the subjects will be more practical – and also because in the humanities programs require a lot of memorization, and they don’t want to have to do that. Carol’s high school had 23 classes, with 21 of them science program classes, and 2 of them humanities program classes.

The classes are all ranked for the next year by the big examinations at the end of each year. They don’t call the class numbers “levels,” and the classes will use the same textbooks in the same year, most of the time, but some classes will move faster through the books and cover more material. So, classes are in competition with each other. This means that the students in the same class will probably help each other a lot when they have to take exams – although there are sometimes super-smart kids who don’t become very social with the rest of their classmates, and don’t help much.

School is very different in China from the way it is here in Canada. Here you can find some very elite, difficult, and very expensive private schools, like Upper Canada College (for boys), the Bishop Strachan School (for girls), and St. Andrew's College School (for boys). Most of the English-speaking Prime Ministers of Canada went to U.C.C. If you want to see a movie about this kind of school, look at Peter Weir’s 1989 Dead Poets Society, which stars Robin Williams. (It’s in the Nexus on VHS). Here is the last scene of the movie (don’t watch if you don’t want to know the end!)

by Zhao Xun

Introduction to Psychology

We visited a lecture of the course called Introduction to Psychology on Tuesday, July 22. The topic of the lectures was Types of Psychotherapy. The professor is Tifrah Warner, and she is from Israel.

When she started her lecture, she asked a student to choose a proverb from a small book that she gave to the student. The proverb was this one: “It is not necessary to blow out the other person’s lantern to let yours shine.” (Swahili, East Africa) We thought she did this partly to make people relax, but also to get them ready to think. Professor Warner seemed quite relaxed and friendly, and also concerned about her students. She spoke to them in a very kind way but also seriously about their ideas.

For the first few minutes of the lecture, students came in the lecture hall and put essays on the table in the front of the hall while she was talking. They had to walk right behind her to do that. She didn’t get angry at that; in fact, one student came in, dropped off an essay, and left, and she laughed about it. We wondered if professors should tolerate this kind of disrespect. In some other countries, many of them don't. A lot of students were eating and drinking in the lecture, also. There was a lot of typing noise from students taking notes on their laptops (or looking at facebook). One student was reading a graphic novel. For some students, it looked as if they were at a movie theatre, or watching TV.

Even though we studied the chapter of the textbook assigned for the lecture in our class before going, Professor Warner didn’t talk a lot about what was in the book. Daniel says that in Korea, for some subjects, like psychology and business, the professor will use lecture time to talk about examples in detail, and not go over the textbook material very much. However, in hard science or engineering courses, professors may stay closer to the textbook.

In Korea, students also hear rumors that if you fail a course, you will get a refund – but that is not true.

In China, Shang says, some professors will teach from the textbook, and some won’t, depending on the professor. In addition, some professors will focus on the textbook before the exam (to help students prepare for specific questions), but others won’t even do that.

In Saudi Arabia, Ahmed says, sometimes professors will say to students that they should read the textbook on their own, and the professors will want to lecture on other things. However, three or four weeks later they will find that the students have not done any of the reading, and they will be forced to lecture on the textbook – and therefore to force the students to study it.

In the Saudi system, professors have a lot of freedom to decide what to teach, and even when to teach. They can go to a class at the first meeting and say, “I am not available at this time,” and reschedule the whole class, so that they only have to be on campus a couple of days a week. This can be a big problem for students’ schedules.

Instead of lecturing on the textbook chapter directly, Professor Warner made her lecture and discussion focus on one interesting issue in the chapter: when should psychotherapists prescribe drugs and when shouldn’t they prescribe drugs? Most of the students in the lecture seemed to be against the idea of using drugs too quickly in psychotherapy, but when the professor gave them a list of kinds of cases, most said they would prescribe drugs more quickly than her. She described the way many doctors think: “the medical model.” First, doctors think of psychological illness as being like physical illness. Therefore, they assume there must be a physical cause for a psychological illness. Therefore, this cause should be chemical, and should be fixable by drugs. But she said that just because there are chemical changes in the brain doesn’t mean you need drugs. You can change someone’s brain chemistry by giving them a hug. And she described the work of Milton H. Erickson, a therapist who she admires a lot, to show that you don’t need drugs as often as most people today think.

But when students asked, she had to say that her view is not the majority opinion in psychology today. Today, drugs are being used more and more anyway.

If you want to visit this course, you can find the syllabus online through the York University website, and you can get the textbook at the Reserve Desk in Scott Library. “On reserve” means you can only borrow it for two hours, and you can’t take it out of the library. That means you basically photocopy what you need. The textbook is Psychology: Themes and Variations by Wayne Weiten. The call number is BF 121 W38 2007.

Dim Sum

Dim Sum is a way to have breakfast in China. You can go to the restaurant and order a lot of little dishes to have with tea. In some places you can just point at what you want, when they bring it by on a cart. Then the waiter gives it to you and marks down what you got on a sheet of paper that you have. The dishes are different kinds of food, kinds of dumplings, rolls, seafood, buns, etc. Some of them are sweet, and some are not. This has been a custom in China for a few hundred years, so it is old, but not one of the oldest parts of Chinese culture. The custom is a bigger thing in the south; in the north, it is more like just a dessert.

In the past, people believed that drinking tea and eating at the same time was bad for you; however, people later found out that tea is actually good for your digestion, so dim sum was enabled to be popular. Yoyo says that it was a tea house owner who popularized the idea that tea is good with food, which isn’t a big surprise.

Before 7:00 in the morning, the tea is free, so the older people go at 6:00 a.m. They gather and spend hours there with newspapers and conversation with everyone who comes in. Then they go to tai chi at 9:00. The younger people usually don’t come until about 10 a.m., so they have to pay for tea.

We’re not sure what Canadian food is, really. Don says that if you want to look for an American breakfast or brunch, you might try any of these places:

Flo's Diner

Fran's

Grapefruit Moon

Sunset Grill

Over Easy

The Rosedale Diner

Or if you’re looking for other kinds of food, you might try one of these places:

Grazie (Italian)
Milagro (Mexican)
Edo (Japanese)
Mezes (Greek)
The Rebel House (English)
Allen’s (Irish)

Does anybody have any other suggestions? Where is a good place to go in Toronto for Dim Sum?

by Yang Ying

guo xiao jiao

One thing that comes from Chinese culture is guo xiao jiao, or the old practice of foot-binding for women. This may be unique to China. In the old days, they started to bind a girl’s feet when she was four years old, and they started in the fall and winter so her feet would not feel it so much because of the cold. This practice, of course, broke the bones in the girl’s feet, since they were trying to make her feet stay very small – maybe four inches long. Foot-binding was banned officially after the 1911 revolution of Sun Zhongshan (his name is usually written Sun Yat-sen by the English), but it had to be banned again after the 1949 revolution of Mao Zedong as well. Today there might still be a few very old women who are living who had it when they were younger. Eason’s great-grandmother had it; he saw it when he was very young.

If you look at Beijing Opera, you can see the characters called Dan. These are the girl roles. At York University, a performer named William Lau knows how to play those roles. His group, which is called the Little Pear Garden Collective, gives performances and demonstration of Beijing Opera on the York campus and in lots of other places. In his demonstrations, he shows the audience the special shoes a dan performer wears to make the girl’s feet appear to be very small. They make the performer walk with very small steps.

Foot-binding may seem quite strange to people from other countries, but it is not true that this is the only beauty practice in the world that is not good for the women’s health. In the west, in the past, women often wore corsets that were very tight. A corset is a garment that makes a woman’s waist smaller. Sometimes women were supposed to have very small waists – maybe 48-50 centimetres (or 18-19 inches). These corsets could rearrange their internal organs in bad ways. Here is a link to a fashion magazine’s advice column from 1903 about how to get a girl to start wearing corsets.

After we heard about foot-binding, we talked some more about definitions of beauty. Why did people in China think that very, very small feet were beautiful? What is beautiful in any culture? Some scientists say that beauty is usually about looking young. Maybe that explains foot-binding a little. There is a science writer in English named Steven Jay Gould. He wrote an essay called “A Biological Homage to Mickey Mouse,” in a 1980 book called The Panda’s Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History. Here is the York library call number for this book: QH 366.2 G666 1982. This essay explains the concept of “neoteny,” which says partly that people find youth attractive.


by Zhang Weifeng