Today's Job Fair: What a Line-Up!

Arriving about 10 minutes before opening time didn't help much. While the chilly wind whipped about mercilessly, about ten of us participants from MicroSkills Language Program huddled and watched as the crowd steadily built up from our approximately two hundredth position to perhaps 500.

 Here we go! Can you spot Artur, Aleh, John, Zumurod, Irene, Ayesha, Vivian, Lily, and Lillian booking along? Who can blame them? It was ten after ten when, at long glorious last, the doors opened and we finally got moving. Where's George Sui?

O yes, we're in, but not so fast. First, the dignitaries have to give their speeches. The early-birds, of course, know how to sneak around back to pick up brochures and souvenirs while everyone else pays rapt attention to, um, whatever the speeches were all about.

But there's something for everybody. Watch as Lily and Vivian in the following video burrow their way to the front of the TTC line-up.



Please blog your field trip and tell us all about the study opportunities, job offers, investment invitations, interview/conversational experiences, autographs, and freebies you might have picked up!

Listening Excercise - Behavioural Interviews

Audio 4.4: Listen to a radio show guest talk about behavioural interviews. Answer the following questions.

1. How does a behavioural interview differ from a traditional interview?
2. What does an interviewee need to be able to do in a behavioural interview?
3. How can someone prepare for a behavioural interview?
4. What does SAR stand for?
5. Write an answer to the following behavioural interview question: “Describe a time you had a conflict with a co-worker and what you did to resolve the conflict.”

Now, watch five video lessons from youtube and blog your learnings.

Field Trip to a Job Fair on Thursday, April 29th

Kindly note the following information for our field trip this Thursday:

Meet at Don Mills Station at 9:15 a.m. and take the 9:22 TTC Bus Service 190, the Scarborough Centre Rocket, to Scarborough Town Centre. You may also catch TTC 190 along Sheppard at Victoria Park, Pharmacy, Warden, Birchmount, and Kennedy. The job fair runs from 10 a.m. through 4 p.m. (If you are late, you can meet us there, at Scarborough Civic Centre. Also, there's another job fair there on Friday the 30th.)

According to the job fair's website, some 45 employers will be there:

1.  Progress Career Planning Center
2.  The Mirror Newspaper
3.  Primerica Financial Service
4.  Toronto Fire Service
5.  TTC
6. Community Living Toronto
7. Global Educational Marketing Corporation
8. Centennial College
9. Investors Group
10. Toronto Institute of Pharmaceutical Technology
11. Yee Hong Centre for Geriatric Care
12. VHA Home HealthCare
13. Sun Life Financial
14. Ontario Provincial Police
15. Porter Airlines
16. Cosemetica Laboratories Inc
17.  International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) Local Union 353
18. Heritage Education Funds
19. J11 - IT Solutions
20. ACCES Employment
21. The Scarborough Hospital
22.  Ambulance Service EMS
23.  Licks Restaurant
24. Avon Canada
25. Toronto Zoo
26. Toronto East Service Canada
27.  City of Toronto, Parks, Forestry and Recreation
28. Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment LTD
29. Toronto Police Service
30. M & M Direct Marketing Inc
31. Carpenters Local 27 Training Centre
32. Magic White INC
33. Royal Bank
34. Hakim Optical
35. Toronto Animal Services
36. Hammer Heads - Central Ontario Building Trades
37. Thales Rail Signalling Solutions Inc.
38. Emkiro Health Services
39. Scotiabank
40. Canadian Forces
41. TorontoJobs.ca
42. Enterprise Toronto
43. The CableShoppe Inc
44. Debt Freedom Canada
45. Everest College

Do feel free to research the websites--especially the HR/recruitment/hiring pages--of these companies and bring your resumes with you.

Tuesday morning, April 27th: Environmental Workshop

On Tuesday morning, Ms Shintu Cherian Manathara, Coordinator, Multicultural Environmental Stewardship Program at Toronto and Region Conservation Authority, will be presenting to MicroSkills LINC 4 - 7 Classes the topic of the Great Lakes.

She has thoughtfully suggested that we learn the following vocabulary words ahead of time:

1. Bioaccumulation: the term used to describe how an animal stores harmful substances or chemicals (such as pesticides) in the body.
2. Consumer: Organism that eats other organisms for food
3. Decomposer: An organism that obtains energy from decaying organic material.
4. Drainage Basin: It is an extent of land where water from rain or snow melt drains downhill into a body of water, such as a river, lake, dam, estuary, wetland, sea or ocean.A drainage basin acts like a funnel collecting all the water within the area covered by the basin and channeling it into a waterway.
5. Ecosystem: A group/community of organisms interacting with their environment.
6. Endangered Species: Animals or Plants facing possible extinction in the wild (the danger of no longer existing in the wild)
7. Food chain: The feeding relationships of species that transfer energy through the organisms in a community.
8. Food web: The complex interconnection of food chains in an ecosystem.
9. Habitat: The local environment in which a specified organism, population, or species lives, characterized by physical and chemical features, and the presence of certain other species.
10. Lake: Body of water larger and deeper than a pond
11. Non native species: Plants and animals that are not native to an environment, introduced intentionally or accidentally. When these plants or animals out compete and crowd out native species for space, light, and nutrients, they are considered to be invasive.
12. Ocean: The large body of salt water surrounding the great continents or land masses, and divided by the land masses into several distinct portions, each of which is called an ocean. The Atlantic, Pacific, Indian and Arctic Oceans
13. Plankton: Microscopic plants and animals floating in the sea or fresh water, including larvae of larger creatures. They are at the bottom of the food chain, being eaten by filter feeders and larger larvae.
14. Pesticides: Chemicals used to prevent insects and other crops from destroying crops.
15. Pollution: Human and natural contamination of the environment by chemicals or heat energy to the extent that existing habitats are threatened or populations of organisms are endangered.
16. Population: A group of organisms of the same species that live in the same area at the same time
17. Predator: An organism that kills and consumes another organism (prey); includes animals eating other animals, and animals eating plants.
18. Prey: An organism that is killed and eaten by another organism.
19. Producer: An organism that makes its own food
20. River: A natural stream of water with a large volume
21. Sea: A large body of water but smaller than on ocean
22. Solar energy: Energy from the Sun in the form of light and heat energy.
23. Threatened Species: are animals or plants that are likely to be endangered if factors threatening it are not reversed or removed.
24. Water cycle: The process, involving evaporation and condensation, by which the Earth's water circulates through the environment.

Let's see if we can learn the above terms to get the most out of the presentation!

McGuinty "Rethinks" Sexualizing Your Kids ... for now

Sex will not be written onto your children's minds this September, promised Ontario's Premier Dalton McGuinty today. Many of you were alarmed in class when we read that on Tuesday, he had announced that your kids would learn various sexual orientations, diseases, techniques, and positions in various grades. Other parents, including lifelong Canadians and newcomer immigrants, were also offended by the province's plan.

Backing off from his original plan, Mr. McGuinty has promised to be more "thoughtful, responsible" the next time his government comes up with such a proposal. They will still give your kids sex education, but using the older, 12-year-old curriculum, for now.

No one expects the sex-ed proposers to go away quietly. According to the Star, "Transportation Minister Kathleen Wynne, who was education minister until January and oversaw the new curriculum development," was "visibly angry" at McGuinty's rethink. “You’re aligning yourselves with homophobes.” But it's not only the former education minister who has been pushing this proposal. For a year, it had been discussed among "public and Catholic school boards, university faculties of education, and health and parent groups. ... After an initial draft, it was then was sent back for public feedback and the education ministry received 3,000 responses before it was fact-checked and finalized in late 2009." If the reports are true, it appears that the whole Ontario education system or its leaders have a very different idea about what to teach your children about sex than many of the schoolchildren's parents. And those educators will be back, for sure.


What do you think of the Ontario Government's public emphasis on sex and sexual display? What do you think of your school board's open celebration of different sexual orientations? Do you know a search on "lesbian" turns up 130 results on the TDSB website while "gay" turns up 218 times (compared to 91 times for "obey")? What do you think they should teach your children?

Feel free to speak your mind in your own blogs!

Or, directly send Mr. McGuinty a message through his website!

Missing Books

Hello Everyone,

If anyone has seen my library copies of Molinsky's Communicator I, please return them to me or at least kindly return them to Toronto Public Library (any branch!).

Thanks so much!

Practise, Practise, Practise!

Great job, guys. Here are the pictures from our first mock job fair for 2010!

Looking good, guys! Yay, keep it up!

Job Fair's Next Week! Got Your Resume Ready?

Next Thursday, April 29, 2010, we'll be going for our first job fair of the year at Scarborough Civic Centre. So this week, we'll be focusing on interviews and resumes. If you've never done an interview or a resume in English, now's your chance!

First, the resume. How do you create one? Where do you put your qualifications, experience, skills, contact information, etc.? Is it helpful to include your photo, personal hobbies, family information, and references? What kind of sentence structures do you use? Do you write, "I designed this, programmed that, managed the other ..."? How many pages should I write?

Fortunately, there are samples and templates that we can use. Monday afternoon, our assignment is to create a professional resume (if possible; otherwise, a generic one will do) using Microsoft's job-specific resume templates. Be sure you watch this and two other youtube videos before typing out a resume:



Next:

1. Create a resume for yourself,
2. proofread and edit it,
3. print out one copy for your classmates to help proofread and edit, and 
4. email a copy to yourself for your records.
5. Then check the resume again and make any necessary corrections.
6. Upload the resume to your blog, Monster Board, and Workopolis.
7. You may print one copy of the corrected resume.

All the best on your job search!

Vowel Contraption Simply Unspeakable

Have you ever been confused with the IPA Vowel Chart showing the positions of the tongue that make different vowel sounds? Some vowels may be front and open, like /ae/, and some vowels may be back and close, like /u/. The kind of vowel you make depends on how your tongue is positioned or moved in the mouth. (If you can't see the chart below, click here.)

Front	Near- front	Central	Near- back	Back
Close	i · y ɨ · ʉ ɯ · u ɪ · ʏ ʊ e · ø ɘ · ɵ ɤ · o ə ɛ · œ ɜ · ɞ ʌ · ɔ æ ɐ a · ɶ ɑ · ɒ
Near-close
Close-mid
Mid
Open-mid
Near-open
Open

Sometimes, a Sammy Diagram, a line drawing of a human head, is used instead:

Tongue positions of cardinal front vowels with highest point indicated. The position of the highest point is used to determine vowel height and backness

 However, we can now see in a video exactly how the tongue's position and movements affect the quality of vowel being said:

If you can't see the video above, you may try it from home or some other location.

Three's Company on a Joyride and at a Concert

Our entire delegation descended en masse on Sheppard Yonge Subway Station on time and headed straight for HarbourFront Centre. ... (Fill in the rest in your blog, writing according to the sentence numbers indicated below.)

1. Our entire delegation descended en masse on Sheppard Yonge Subway Station on time and headed straight for HarbourFront Centre. ... __________________________________________

2. The streetcar took us all the way to Spadina Station and back. If we ___________________ instead of taking that long ride, we __________________________________________

3. __________________________________________. This must be where children love to play on weekends. If you _____________________ on a Saturday or Sunday, you ______________________. If my neighbour's kids ______________________, they ____________________. You can't stop them.

4. __________________________________________

5. __________________________________________

6. We made it just in time to Roy Thomson Hall. It started to drizzle just moments before we got there. If we ____________, we __________________________________________

7. __________________________________________

8. __________________________________________





9. __________________________________________





10. __________________________________________





11. After the final song, Hymn to Freedom, we took a subway train from St. Andrew TTC Station and headed for home. If we _______________________ opportunity, we ______________________

Field Trip on April 7--HarbourFront and Roy Thomson Hall Concert

 

It starts with our theme on the Environment, carries on through iconic Downtown Toronto, and ends up with Music at a free noontime concert at the Roy Thomson Hall!

Next Wednesday, we'll again be leaving the Sheppard Yonge Southbound Platform at 9:30 a.m. for Union Station, connecting onward via streetcar to HarbourFront Centre. Then begins our walking tour of the waters of Lake Ontario, an important part of our environment. This should provide a useful backdrop for our special workshop on the last week of April, on the environment.

Our tour will then take us directly north, nicely mapped out for us on the online Ride the City Toronto Map. Among the places we could see on the way are CN Tower, Rogers Centre, and Metro Toronto Convention Centre. Should the weather prove inclement, we'll visit the PATH Underground City instead.

At noon, the Viva! Youth Singers will be performing the last of Roy Thomson Hall's Free Noon Hour Choir & Organ Concerts for the season. What an opportunity to enjoy some of what Toronto and Canada have to offer!