With more schools incorporating iPads into their teaching methods, it makes sense that classrooms with special needs, even if those needs are simply requiring help motivating students to complete homework, should turn to the iPad as well. The iPad is perfect for those for whom a desk can only clumsily accommodate a wheelchair, and those who cannot hold a pencil. Tracing cursive letters with your finger, matching shapes, colouring, and using a (larger than usual) calculator is indeed easier and a great deal less frustrating in such cases.

But in my time installing iPad updates, or going through the app store with a patient at the clinic where I volunteer, I have found surprisingly few apps that are truly educational, and fewer still that are actually compatible with the accessibility features that Apple includes, such as voice over, which describes the screen audibly, or the zooming capabilities. No apps cater specifically to special needs of any kind. Quite honestly, even in clinical settings, the most sought-after and most frequently used apps are games. On the bright side, these games undeniably increase problem-solving and reflex abilities, and can be used as a reward system that motivates the children to do their actual homework, thereby facilitating the educational experience.

The iPad serves the important function of allowing kids who can’t necessarily take advantage of the well-equipped playroom, or who are unable to play conventional sports, or who spend a great deal of time on their own due to any number of reasons, to carry 36 gigabytes worth of games with them and still engage in tactile activities. Perhaps the most important aspect of this is that it succeeds in facilitating the task of a child development clinic, which is to foster the mind once the body has been taken care of down the hall in physiotherapy.

So is the iPad just a plaything? Sure it is. It isn’t the cure to all ills, and it’s a long shot to call it the best teaching tool out there. In fact, its capabilities are severely underexploited, regardless of the endless possibilities that a full colour, touchscreen tablet with hundreds of thousands of apps possesses.  What’s more, beyond issues of physical accessibility, is financial accessibility a realistic expectation? To what degree can parents be expected to buy an iPad for their children? While I have been asked by an extraordinary number of patients to download this app or that app that they have on their own iPads at home, and a few have even come bearing entirely digital homework assignments, not all families, especially families handling huge medical bills, can afford a $600 toy that can shatter quite spectacularly if dropped. In light of this, as well as the fact that the iPad is more than just an entertainment for some, perhaps more hospitals, clinics, and schools should make such toys and educational tools accessible.

However, merely increasing the number of iPads will not be enough. The iPad should become a more important part of education and care through its content. To allow this, greater emphasis should be placed on its potential to address the needs of the differently abled, and on developing apps that can truly allow the iPad to evolve from toy to tool.

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“I think the name [I chose] comes from wanting to find my own path, knowing I was a bit of an underdog, feeling [like]an outsider that was struggling to be heard in my creative collaborations.,” explained Caila Thompson-Hannat, the voice of the one-woman pop production.

“I had played in a lot of bands. I was constantly frustrated at hearing things in my head and not being able to manifest them through verbal communication with other band members,” she said, when asked about how she started this project. “So I bought a computer, something I had been somewhat opposed to at the time, and learned how to use it to craft songs.”

That investment certainly did not diminish the quality of Hello. “Don’t Leave It To Me” is vociferously melancholy. “Can’t we always be together?” is the album’s crooning plea. Every phrase hangs heavy, resonating with the strength of the tone behind it. The lack of fireworks, coupled with honest-to-goodness vocal ability, is what sets Mozart’s Sister apart. Sincerity and humility are recurring undercurrents. More than anything, they’re refreshing: “I moved to Montreal almost six years ago. I always wanted to live in Montreal. I remember visiting here when I was a teen and thinking it was the raddest place ever. I’m originally from the West Coast. Though I love Montreal, I am a proud West Coast Hippy Bitch.” Said Thompson-Hannat: “When I started Mozart’s Sister I wanted music people could dance to. So I hope people want to dance to it.”

“Contentedness” presents further verification of this songstress’ ability (not that the first two tracks leave you needing proof). While her voice is lovely to take in, it’s also significant and expressive. “I’ve been slowing down,” is the languid opener here, slowly sliding through in to “questions spinning on a spinning wheel.” Smooth lyricism and a voice that can handle it make for audible bliss. “Hey friend, hey there,” is spoken softly between two lines, interrupting quiet synths and drawing attention back to the strongest parts of Hello: voice and feeling.

“I picked the name Hello because I like how many ways you can say it,” she says, sincere as ever. “Everyone says it […] and it can mean many different things. I wrote these songs a while ago. They sound different to me now, just as the way you say hello to a friend sounds differently than if you say it to a lover, or to an ex-lover. Since these songs were written, I’ve had four different apartments, three boyfriends, and made a group of friends I think I would like to die beside. Much has changed, but the songs are the same. It’s seeing the same things through the infinite lens of a changing life. Hello said many different ways. Forever.”

Synth pop sparkle and a catchy, “I got news for ya baby,” gets a twist in “Single Status.” Quiet and low-key, the anthem of careless acceptance and nonchalance is accompanied by cheeky whistling and spoken with finality; “hello/I can’t come to the phone right now/I’m busy.”

“I’d call this record a digital lo-fi record. I like that things sound ‘digital.’ I think it’s cool. I made everything using ‘lite’ plugins, and guitars and keyboards plugged straight into the computer. It’s an extremely expressive EP; it runs the gamut emotionally. Whenever I try to make an even-keel record, I feel like I’m cheating, so often I go high and low. Mozart’s Sister is your friend, she understands you. Buy her record and then we can all hang out, ya know?”

The only complaint: while four is a respectable number of tracks for an EP, for a first record by such an intriguing, capable artist, four might not be enough to get to know her as much as we would have liked.

“P.S.,” she adds. “Everyone is adventurous when it comes to music, it is connective tissue between interior and exterior experiences.”

Check out Motzart’s sister on Bandcamp here.

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Oles Chepesiuk

Quebec, and especially Montreal, like the rest of Canada, likes to consider itself an accepting and open society, both on multicultural and secular grounds. Of course, this means that when issues pertaining to race and acceptance do arise, they’re usually treated very seriously: as reported by the National Post and the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, the Service de police de la Ville de Montréal (SPVM) vowed in 2012 to end racial profiling by their officers and launched an investigation into including the topic as a module in CEGEP police technology curricula.

However, the 2006 case of a Quebec middle school student, who was later identified as being of African origin, being handcuffed and escorted out of school in front of his teachers and peers for no apparent reason, twice in one week, seemed to catch less attention than may be expected. This was odd, especially considering that it was the first investigation into racial profiling that the Quebec Human Rights Commission ever conducted in relation to a school. Last November, the Montreal Gazette covered the out-of-court settlement between the student’s family – represented by the Quebec Human Rights Commission – and Montreal’s largest school board, the Commission Scolaire de Montréal. Surprisingly low levels of outrage and counter-action were reached in the province and among school officials.

Why, then, was the eighth-grader in question arrested, handcuffed, and driven off in a police car, in front of his peers and teachers? Simply because he was in the same hallway as two police officers who were in the area in regards to an unrelated incident. Nevertheless, when the principal saw them, she insisted, strongly enough to sway the initially uncooperative police officers, that the young man be arrested. Later that week, disregarding the previous incident, the student went to the principal to complain that he had been attacked by grade 11 students; however, when one of the alleged aggressors, who was Caucasian, told the principal that the eighth-grader was in fact the source of the trouble, she opted once again to call the police and have him arrested and escorted off the premises in handcuffs, leading him to spend a night in a centre for juvenile offenders. Eventually, the young man was forced to change schools.
Even after Commision des droits de la personne et de la jeunesse published an extensive report in 2011 on the state of racial profiling in Quebec and in Quebec educational centers, school boards were not interested in the matter and “felt there were no problems.” This came after various instances of profiling within the school system were exposed, and no changes were made. Simultaneously, the Rights Commission is struggling under the sheer volume of the influx of complaints related to racial profiling in the school sector in Quebec, which more than doubled in the past five years, with 1,047 complaints filed in 2011 alone.

If one good thing came out of this deplorable incident is that the attention of Montreal school administrations has been captured, though not nearly enough. According to Gétan Cousineau, the president of the Commision des droits de la personne et de la jeunesse, this investigation has put necessary pressure on the school board to recognize that there is indeed a problem where the school boards have previously claimed there was none to be found. The Commission Scolaire de Montréal is under scrutiny by the Rights Commission to make necessary changes in its treatment of students who are visible minorities, and is now serving as an example to other school boards that the Rights Commission has the ability and jurisdiction to investigate.

Middle and high school students are often pegged as being inherently intolerant due to their age group, while the same behaviour does not translate to the higher education environment. However, it is not at all the case that incidents such as that outlined above are rare in higher education, despite lack of media coverage, or statistics available from academic sources. According to the aforementioned 2011 report of the consultation on racial profiling and its consequences, black students from a Montreal CEGEP reported that they were targeted for unjustified indentification checks at a school dance, and that the security personnel exclusively checked the indentifications of young black students on the grounds that they suspected there might be a drug dealer in the school.

In another case, in Ville Saint Laurent, a borough of Montreal, a 16-year-old black youth left school to wait for the bus. A fight broke out near him, and the police car passing by immediately handcuffed the student and took him to the school principal. Days later, the student jaywalked near his school, and was ticketed by the same police officer.

There have also been cases of “welcoming classes,” classes put in place for new students from outside of Canada for the express, and well-intentioned purpose of helping to ease their transition and improve their French. These often make teens sit through children’s shows, an experience that can be both infantilizing and humiliating. The same report published by the Commission states that many students from these classes have complained that their teachers have been unwilling to invest efforts in their education since there is “no point,” and that they were considered unlikely to succeed in life.
The report states the obvious: students who are profiled often drop out of school, either because they feel ostracized or discouraged, or because of the self-fulfilling nature of prejudice and labelling; time spent in centres for young offenders, or on the fringes of social inclusion, lead to exposure to crime. What’s more, those who drop out, upon reaching adulthood, whatever their origin, are at a greater risk of poverty and socio-economic exclusion.
The people who were interviewed for the report were between the ages of 16 to 25, meaning that the students were close to completing high school, or in higher education institutions like CEGEPs and universities.

At McGill, a school where many faculty members themselves come from outside of Canada – something that the study recommended all schools attempt to implement (hiring professors of different ethnic backgrounds) in order to curb the racial profiling of students – cases of racial profiling seem to be nonexistent. Yet, in a province in which approximately 9 per cent of the population are immigrants, and in which 64 per cent of immigrants are of a visible minority, in a province where over a thousand racial profiling complaints are filed in just one year, we can safely say that this phenomenon of racism manifested through racial profiling, might not always be visible, and so it is up to us to stay vigilant.
There are processes, like equity complaints that people can excercise in relation to these types of incidents. Students who feel singled-out should not be afraid to come forward and excercise their rights as contributing members of our community.

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It’s then that they darken their eyes and smear their lips with their mother’s rouge: much too deep – obscene, provocative, unintentional. Brief moments of separation, but then they catch each other’s eyes and they’re together again: in car doors and in puddles and broken glass; all the way down to the tunnels and the trains. They sit side by side in a single seat by a window and they ride the line from one end to the other and back again until they feel whole once more.

Tonight, a man, stumbling and slurring grabs fistfuls of their hair and calls them a word they don’t understand and she’s scared for a moment, until a boy, not much older than her, steers him away and asks her name. At a loss, they remember what the man had called her. The boy laughs and says that’s what he had thought, that her lipstick and kohl-smudged eyes gave her away, and as the train slows, he stands and motions for her to follow. They hesitate a moment too long, so her blouse catches between the sliding doors and she feels a tug, but then she’s free and rushing after him.

Soon there’s deafening music, the smell of sweat and her father’s aftershave. It’s too hot, too crowded and she can’t move, can’t see and her chest and lungs and heart and insides clench. There are hands, on her hips, insistent, demanding; her breathing quickens, and she pulls away, free – but he’s there, leaning against a wall, hand extended in a mockery of welcome and he grabs her forearm and exclaims that he’s been looking all over for you, darling.

She shakes her head and twists away. She doesn’t know what this is, hasn’t seen it in movies, or read about it in magazines, or heard it sung in songs. And then she’s in the restroom, door locked behind her, and, oh, God. But there is no one, not even God, who she’s been told is merciful but she’s never believed that and perhaps she should have, but no.

She’s alone, was alone even while out there pressed between hundreds, she realizes. She curls her fingers around the white porcelain sink and pulls herself close to the mirror. Her other half, her reflection, stares back at her. Relief, and she smiles, and it smiles back. Hello, she whispers; hello, it mouths. Could you help me? she asks, for she has never asked anything of it, but all it offers is mimicry, and the boy, his voice muffled, utters empty promises through the door. And please, she cries, please save me, but her shadow, her only friend for so long just stares and pities, and does nothing, for they are no longer they, but her and it and she knows not who she is or who it is, and then, there are not just two of them, not just two halves, but a thousand splendid pieces shattering.

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