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Thunder Bay school uses Tragically Hip lyrics to teach Canadian history

“Late breaking story on the CBC, a nation whispered ’We always knew that he’d go free.’” -- Gord Downie, in Wheat Kings, from the 1992 album Fully Completely. A Superior Collegiate teacher is using the songs of the Tragically Hip to teach her students about Canadian history.
Superior Students
Students at Superior Collegiate Vocational Institute are using the words of the Tragrically Hip to learn about Canadian history, a pilot program with Teach Ontario and TVO (Leith Dunick, tbnewswatch.com).

THUNDER BAY -- Cameron Padovesy has known about the Tragically Hip all of his life.

But the 15-year-old really didn’t pay attention to the Kingston, Ont. band. It was music his father loved, that was played on classic rock radio stations in Thunder Bay, but it really didn’t have an impact on him personally.

It wasn’t until his 10th-grade teacher Vicky Walker told her Superior Collegiate and Vocational Institute class they’d be learning about Canadian history through the lyrics of the Tragically Hip and its front-man Gord Downie that he started to pay attention to the songs he’d heard, but never really listened to, since infancy.

He was immediately intrigued.

“You’ve got tons of songs and you listen to the lyrics and all the history is in there,” on Monday said Padovesy, adding it's the lines in Fifty-Mission Cap that stuck most with him.

“You listen to it and the lyrics are about wanting to have a cap that looks like you’ve flown 50 missions, but not wanting to do the work. Then it goes into depth about hockey and about the Maple Leafs, our unofficial Ontario team.”

The Tragically Hip became famous for their Canadian-fuelled tales, enlightening the nation about the plight of David Milgaard, who was locked up for a sexual assault he didn’t commit, in Wheat Kings, Nazi-fueled riots in Bobycaygeon or coming of age and trading hockey for girls in Fireworks.

Artist Tom Thompson, hockey hero Bill Barilko and explorer Jacques Cartier are also given the Downie treatment.

Students in Walker’s class quickly found they could identify with the lyrics, said 15-year-old Lauren Stark.  

“I learned that we have a lot of racism issues, mainly for First Nations and the stuff we’ve done to them in the past,” she said. “Gord Downie, especially with his movement, has helped me realize that.”

The terminally ill Downie this week is set to release his latest – and possibly final – project, Secret Path, the story of Charlie (Chanie) Wenjack, a 12-year-old Aboriginal boy who ran away from a residential school in the late 1960s and died as he tried to walk back to his home community several hundred kilometres away.

Derek Longbridge said Downie’s words are eye-opening.

“I never really thought too deeply about the lyrics. But then we started to analyze them in class and really focused on the meaning and how they show we really need to recognize some of the bad and horrible truths of our past,” the 15-year-old said.

Walker, a self-professed Hip fan whose mother died of the same type of brain cancer Downie has been diagnosed with,said she was approached last month by Teach Ontario and TVO to take part in a pilot project that would see students study the lyrics in history class and create an online blog filled with essays, video pieces and other artistic endeavours related to the subject at hand.

It’s a different way to engage students instead of reading to them out of a text book. It made them more eager to learn, she added. And it taught them about their country too.

“As we listened to the Hip, as we analyzed the lyrics, you see the intricacies of the references. And it’s those subtle references throughout Downie’s (30) years of work and the Hip’s (30) years of work that create a uniquely Canadian identity,” Walker said. “And it’s from sea to sea, from one side of the country to another.”

The next phase of the project, to be held in November, will focus on Secret Path.


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Leith Dunick

About the Author: Leith Dunick

A proud Nova Scotian who has called Thunder Bay home since 2002, Leith is Dougall Media's director of news, but still likes to tell your stories too. Wants his Expos back and to see Neil Young at least one more time. Twitter: @LeithDunick
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