Winnipeg Free Press

Winnipeg Free Press (Newspaper) - January 2, 2021, Winnipeg, Manitoba WHEN it comes to exempting the National Hock- ey League from Manitoba’s COVID-19 pandemic restrictions, I feel conflict between my head and my heart. My head recognizes it seems unfair. Yet, my heart yells “Go Jets, go!” The province has granted lots of lockdown liberties to the NHLers, even though ordinary Manitobans are still expected to sacrifice many important activities, such as celebrating the holi- days with family and friends. Under threat of fines, Manitobans can’t wel- come visitors to their homes or gather outdoors in groups more than five, but dozens of hockey play- ers and staff will mingle freely at the Winnipeg Jets training camp that begins Sunday. Yes, Sunday. Manitoba churches can’t hold Sunday services, but the Jets can group together. No official has yet explained why the government feels hockey is essential but church services are not. Under the NHL season that begins Jan. 14, hockey teams and their large entourages from throughout the country will come and go from Winnipeg with a thumbs-up from the Manitoba government. This is the same government that repeatedly pleaded with Manitobans to avoid trav- elling to keep the virus from spreading. Some teams will come from provinces that have the new, more contagious variant of CO- VID-19, but the NHLers coming from those hot spots, which include Ontario and British Co- lumbia, won’t have to isolate in the same way as ordinary Manitobans. Players and team staff will apparently be tested for COVID-19 every day. This type of daily test- ing has long been sought by many Manitobans who work on the front lines of potential COVID-19 contact, including care-home workers. Many still can’t get daily tests despite the danger of their jobs. It would be awkward to explain to health workers why their safety is considered less im- portant than that of young men whose skills are skating and shooting a vulcanized rubber disc. Many Manitobans will argue pandering to the NHLers should earn the government a major penalty for misconduct. I get that, but I also must confess (and here is where my heart trumps my head) — I’m eager for the puck to drop. Unlike this newspaper’s top-notch hockey writers, I don’t cover the team journalistically and feel no obligation to be objective. I pay for my seat. I am an unabashed fan who typically ends games with a throat hoarse from offering suggestions to on-ice officials and Jets coach Paul Maurice. The fan fun usually includes sitting shoulder-to- shoulder in a rowdy rink of like-minded zealots, but not this season. The Jets will play to an empty arena. Also, under code red restrictions, fans are not allowed to watch the televised games in sports bars or at the homes of buddies. Some U.S. teams will allow a restricted number of fans to attend games but, given Manitoba’s dan- gerously high rate of transmission, it’s sensible the Bell MTS Place doors will stay closed to ev- eryone except the teams and officials. In fact, the decision to restrict fans is an encouraging sign the NHL’s plan to play is commendably cautious. The league has also taken other safety precau- tions to minimize the risk of spreading the virus to the public as the teams traverse the country. Players will fly on private charters, and will largely be restricted to their hotel and the rink when they play in Winnipeg. The NHL’s pandemic accountability was ex- tremely successful during last season’s Stanley Cup playoffs, held over 65 days with all teams bubbled in Edmonton and Toronto. The players and staff were tested for COVID-19 a total of 33,394 times. There were no positive results. This display of coronavirus savvy earned the league credibility that it can organize a safe season and bring world-class entertainment to Winnipeg at a time when we need diversion more than ever. Without a doubt, it will be different from past seasons. The Jets will play only Canadian teams, which usually delivers a higher level of rivalry. Some hockey buffs have long called for a perma- nent all-Canadian NHL division and this season’s experiment will be intriguing. During a winter when there is little else to look forward to, we can await the moment Blake Wheeler snares the puck on the right wing and threads a pass either to Mark Scheifele, who is battling in front of the net, or to Patrik Laine, who is preparing his cannon-like slapshot in the high slot. Fans will hold their breath until — wait for it, wait for it — they score! That euphoric moment, when the goal light flashes red, will help the new year shine a bit brighter. Carl DeGurse is a member of the Free Press editorial board. carl.degurse@freepress.mb.ca C M Y K PAGE A9 THINK TANK PERSPECTIVES EDITOR: BRAD OSWALD 204-697-7269 ● BRAD.OSWALD@FREEPRESS.MB.CA ● WINNIPEGFREEPRESS.COM A9 SATURDAY JANUARY 2, 2021 Ideas, Issues, Insights THE ASSOCIATED PRESS FILES Game-show host Alex Trebek, who died on Nov. 8, promoted the importance of wide background knowledge and memory work. Trebek championed broad-based learning C ANADIANS were saddened to learn that longtime Jeopardy! host Alex Trebek passed away recently from pancreatic cancer. For more than 35 years, Trebek was a familiar face in our homes. There was no better way of testing your general knowledge than seeing how many Jeopardy! questions you could correctly answer. The outpouring of emotion over Trebek’s death has been huge. There’s no question that hosting Jeopardy! was his primary claim to fame. But why did so many people have such a strong emo- tional attachment to a game-show host? Given the way in which some people, particu- larly progressive educators, dismiss the value of rote memorization of facts, it seems surprising that Trebek would become such a popular icon. However, Jeopardy! isn’t just a show where contestants show off that they remember a bunch of random facts. Rather, it’s an opportunity for contestants and viewers alike to test the extent of their general knowledge. That’s because Jeopardy! questions deal with many topics. Contestants could be asked about anything from William Shakespeare’s plays to the solar system to the civil-rights movement. Being able to answer most of the questions correctly in Jeopardy! can be taken as a pretty good sign that you’re well-read. The top performers on Jeopardy! don’t win by cramming a bunch of random facts into their brains. Rather, contestants are far more likely to do well if they have a broad knowledge base about many topics. For example, someone who is familiar with Shakespeare’s life story knows the broad narra- tive of his key plays, and understands the histori- cal context in which he wrote his plays, is far more likely to sweep the Shakespeare category than someone who, without prior knowledge of the playwright, tries to memorize many random facts about him. A broad and deep knowledge base is essential in Jeopardy! — and in life. This is why it’s important for schools to have a knowledge-rich curriculum that sequentially builds on knowledge year by year. Commonly referred to as a core knowledge approach, the emphasis is on ensuring that students acquire substantial background knowledge in all subject areas. For example, instead of simply encouraging students to learn about themselves and their neighbourhoods, they benefit far more from a curriculum that exposes them to people and places they probably wouldn’t learn about on their own initiative. A good curriculum should help students broad- en their understanding by looking outward rather than inward. This is particularly important for students who come from disadvantaged homes, since their parents can’t afford private tutoring and probably aren’t taking them on educational trips around the world. Background knowledge is also key to improv- ing students’ reading comprehension. The more students know about the topic of a book or article, the more likely they will be able to read and un- derstand it. Background knowledge about a topic is a better predictor of reading comprehension than the complexity of the words or sentences within an article or book. All Canadians should be grateful to Alex Trebek. He reminded us that there’s great value in knowing a lot of facts by memory. For students, memory work is important work. Michael Zwaagstra is a public high school teacher, a senior fellow with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy, and author of A Sage on the Stage: Common Sense Reflections on Teaching and Learning. — Troy Media Explore Mars without leaving home A DOZEN or so years is not much time to solve a long list of currently insuperable scientifi c and technological problems. Which is bad news for NASA’s wildly ambitious time- table to begin human spacefl ight to Mars by the mid-2030s. Time fl ies when you’re stuck in low-Earth orbit, as humanity has been for nearly 50 years. The International Space Sta- tion is approximately 386 kilometres away. The daunting obstacles between us and Mars begin with the simple problem of weight. A flimsy lunar lander won’t get the job done on Mars. Although it is the most livable non-Earth planet within our grasp, Mars is brutally hostile to life: it is as cold as Antarctica, has less oxygen than Mount Ever- est, is prone to hurricanes of toxic dust and suffers constant bombardment from lethal ra- diation. Infrastructure for even the grimmest human existence must be ferried from Earth. Before humans could build housing from Mars bricks or plant crops in Martian soil, they would need brick-making machines and greenhouses. A Mars mission demands vastly more material than humans have ever boosted into space, weight that presents engineering challenges on both ends of the journey. We need larger rockets to escape Earth, heat shields to enter the Martian atmosphere and some sort of braking system to land safely. We have none of these ready yet. To write that paragraph, I had to gloss over a raft of more complicated challenges. In the absence of sufficient oxygen, astronauts on Mars would probably rely on solar panels to generate electricity for splitting water into hy- drogen and oxygen. So add solar panels to the freight manifest. Also ice-mining equipment to recover frozen water from underground. And a high-tech home gym to fight the wast- ing effects on human muscle and bone mass of long stays in low gravity. Mars colonists will also need currently non- existent lightweight materials to shield them from radiation far more deadly than any that can penetrate Earth’s protective atmosphere and magnetic field. As for farming: another unsolved challenge. Topsoil sampled by Mars rovers reveals that a toxic chemical called calcium perchlorate is nearly ubiquitous; this must be neutralized somehow even before the thin, cold dust can be fortified and coaxed into germinating seeds. Far easier to farm Death Valley. Because of the great distance involved — Mars at its nearest is about 150 times farther away than the moon — a mission to the red planet has no room for error. NASA can’t just send more supplies on the next rocket, as is possible at the nearby space station. Thus, it’s not enough to find theoretical solutions to the problems of human life on Mars. It’s not enough even to find good solutions to these challenges. Perfect solutions are necessary — even if the mission is a one-way trip. To send humans and bring them back to Earth is a far more complex proposition. But technological trends point to a more plausible Martian future. All of the most difficult challenges around travel to Mars stem from a single fact: the human body can’t survive there. The problems of freight and infrastructure; of food, water and oxygen; of deadly radiation — all of it vanishes once you remove the meat from the equation. The related fields of robotics and haptics are moving rapidly in the direction of hybrid astronauts — machines that can take the human consciousness in real time to another planet. While humans have been stuck in low orbit for half a century, robots have been working miracles in space. NASA probes have been ex- ploring Mars for decades; the latest mission, launched this year, is designed to scoop soil samples into sealed containers for future col- lection and return to Earth. In recent years, robots have landed on a comet, sampled an asteroid, visited Jupiter and flown beyond the solar system. Haptics is the field of computer science that develops data into human sensation — the feeling of touching something a robot touches, of seeing through a robot’s eyes, of hearing what a robot hears. It’s inevitable that the convergence of robots and haptics will produce in the not-too-distant future inter- planetary probes that allow humans to visit other worlds, to “touch” and “see” them, via hardware on the surface and software in the ether. “Future exploration of planets will most probably involve robots that are controlled by humans orbiting the planet above,” a blog of the European Space Agency predicts. Though complex, travelling into orbit around Mars would be far simpler than a landing. Engi- neers can also work on ways to speed data from robots on Mars to humans on Earth. Exploration is human nature — but so is the use of tools. Let’s be smart and build tools to take us to Mars without the likelihood of dying there. — The Washington Post MICHAEL ZWAAGSTRA CARL DEGURSE DAVID VON DREHLE Jets skate around Manitoba’s pandemic lockdown A_09_Jan-02-21_FP_01.indd A9 1/1/21 4:27 PM ;