FINDINGS
Composition (Mother and Child), 2006. From Annie Pootoogook: Cutting Ice by Nancy Campbell. Published by Goose Lane in 2018. Annie Pootoogook was an Inuk artist known for her pen and coloured pencil drawings. She won the Sobey Art Award in 2006. Nancy Campbell is a curator of contemporary Inuit art. She has a doctorate from York University.
English for Foreigners NORMAN LEVINE
From I Don’t Want to Know Anyone Too Well. Published by Biblioasis in 2017. Norman Levine is the author of eight short story collections, two novels and a memoir. He was raised in Ottawa, served overseas in RCAF during World War II and attended McGill University. He died in 2005.
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he classrooms were above an optician, by a seedy restaurant, overlooking a large, bare cathedral. When I started, at the beginning of May, the season had not begun. I had eight pupils, the intermediates. If anyone could carry on a few sentences 22 Geist 108 Spring 2018
in broken English he left the beginners—which was crowded—and stayed in the intermediates until there was room for him in the senior class. Each class consisted of a small room with tables pushed together in the shape of a horseshoe. I sat behind a
desk, at the open end of the horseshoe, by a portable blackboard. The windows had to be closed because of the traffic noise. On a warm or a rainy day, the room was stifling. On the first day I wondered whether my Canadian accent would matter. “Ladies and gentlemen. I’m your new teacher. I’m a Canadian. And the kind of English I speak is not the kind that Englishmen speak. So if you have any trouble understanding what I say—” But I was interrupted by an Italian girl who beamed and said how clear my diction was. And they all said they understood me and complimented me on
