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p weekender saturday september 20 1997 st saturday september 20 1997 vol 13 no 38 the tribune comment j- inions send your letters to the editor to the address below editorial education reforms should not be stalled the ongoing struggle between the provincial government and the teachers unions has a lot of people frustrated and confused both sides have dug in their heels and unloaded contradicting statistics at taxpayers expense which seemingly support their contentions in an effort to chisel away at this mountain of data we offer the fol lowing according to the ontario ministry of education in 1986 we spent s82 billion on education and our system was envied and copied all over the world today with budget of 132 billion for 22 million pupils including the separate boards and special needs students one would think our system should continue to have no equal not so say the latest results from the third international mathe matics and science study ontario students ranked dead last in cana da internationally we were an even bigger embarrassment falling below world averages one would have to agree that something has gone amiss little wonder that in october of last year 22 university professors dismayed by the abilities of many of our high school grads felt com pelled to issue a plea for education reform while demanding higher standards the implications of an education system with a poor global repu tation are ominous not only for childrens future but for our future as a society polls confirm that parents want changes granted there is great debate between teachers and the ministry as to what sort of education reforms are the right ones however we simply cant continue on as we are doing nothing while our present and future students suffer being fired made all the difference the trouble with unemployment is that the minute you wake up in the morning youre on the job slappy white ever been fired i dont mean downsized dehired streamlined or any of the other weasel euphemisms currently in vogue im talking about flatout in your face slam dunk canned where somebody with a bigger desk than yours looks you in the eye and tells you we dont want you to work here anymore i have no one could call it a pleas ant experience getting fired its hard on your wallet and on your self- esteem its been 25 years since my old boss in the globe and mail advertising department called me into his office and ominously closed the door behind me i remember now that everybody in the office was looking studiously down at their desk as i disappeared into the inner sanctum they already knew what i was about to learn a quarter of a century and i can still feel the humil iation no hard feelings mind you they were absolutely right to fire me as a newspaper advertising salesman i was basic black reader seeks prolific ostrich dear editor forget the chickens jset free the cattle i want one of those ostrich es each one lays about 3060 large creamcoloured eggs every second day between april and sep tember according to your corre spondent on the food drink page in the sept 16 edition id even be happy with the less prolific emu who lays a mere 20- 40 dark green eggs every third day between november and april if each ostrich egg is equivalent to 22 chicken eggs i figure with help from my calculator that the average weekly output of an ostrich is equal to that of almost three thousand chickens where can i get one and can we raise them here in our back yards yeah i know this is silly but hey i guess it proves that i read the whole paper matt douris stouffville jlietters editors note some confusion may have resulted in the interpre tation of the sept 16 article on ostriches in fact ostriches lay a total of between 3060 eggs over the entire season ranging from april to september the same holds true for the emu which lays a total of between 2040 eggs for the sea son ranging from november to april the ostrich lays approxi mately one egg every two days while the emu lays one egg approximately every three days we apologize for any misunder standing and hope local ostrich breeders have not been overrun by eager buyers yearning to eat eggs arthur black a total disaster each workday morning id exit the globe and mail office with my fellow salesmen like buttondown lemmings wed march out of the office briefcases at our side to make calls on prospective customers actually we usually slipped around the corner and into a greasy spoon where we sipped bad coffee and told worse jokes then about quarter to ten wed all straighten our ties check our shoeshines grab our briefcases and hit the pavement the other guys went off to make their calls just as good salesmen are supposed to i pretended to be doing the same thing but after a furtive glance or two i strolled a few blocks to a poolroom where i shot eight ball until the movie houses opened or i went to the ymca and ran laps on the indoor track or i checked my briefcase in a bus station locker and wandered around the museum any thing but sell advertising i hated sell ing it couldnt go on of course and it didnt after just a few weeks my dis mal performance came to the attention of my boss and the rest was history as was i and its taken 25 years for me to realize that getting fired was one of the best things that ever happened to me because imagine if id turned out to be a hotshot or even a mediocre salesman chances are i would have stayed in that line of work chances are id be selling ad space today and still hating every moment of it besides it turns out that getting fired can be a good sign a story this week in oh sweet irony the globe and mail notes that some of the great figures in history got the sack on their way up albert einstein was unceremoniously fired as a young man thomas edison was too henry ford got the hook even latenight yapper david letterman and diminutive sex guruess ruth westheimer each got pink slips before they got famous makes sense when you think about it you cant put a size ten foot in a size eight shoe people who are unhappy in their work are going to do a lousy job and bosses are always on the look out for people doing lousy jobs in the selling game lousy perfor mance shows up pretty quickly i also remember now how my colleagues the other salesmen lived in dread of the monthly roundup thats when the sales manager toted lip all the advertising space that had been sold and by whom and handed out congratulations to the hotshots and a private closeddoor one-on- one chat to the alsorans nobody wanted one of those chats i- still remember one morning in the coffee shop six or seven of us sitting around waiting to start the day of making calls the talk turned as it often did to what ill do when i win the lottery ronnie one of the quieter ones sur prised us all by saying the day after i win the lottery im coming down to the office and im gonna pee all over the sales managers desk everybody laughed everybody except danny not me said danny i plan to hire someone to do it for me stouffville tribune weekender patricia pappas publisher andrew mair editorinchief julie caspersen editor debra weller director of advertising mike rogerson retail advertising manager stacey allen classified manager barry goodyear director of distribution vivian oneil business manager pamela nichols operations manager about us fiiia y- jo210 clajj 905 402874 djsmqmilqn 4g2100 skllllill 6244 3v ufa letters policy the tribune welcomes your letters to the editor please keep letters to no more than 300 words note that letters may be edited for space libel spelling grammar while we endeavor to print as many letters as possible we regret that not all let ters may be printed i 3