More Than I Can Bear

At the height of the plush backpack craze in the late 1990s, I was teaching at a public elementary school in Ottawa.

- Alana Forrester

Two students in my Grade 5 class were obsessed with their Winnie the Pooh bags and never let them out of their sight. One day I teased the girls about their packs, shaped like one of the whiniest heroes in children’s literature. “He’s always complaining and is unwilling to put in the effort to change his situation,” I said to them of the character who famously uttered, “For I am a bear of ver