Articles Tagged with “education”

Accepting arbitration now is not the way forward, not when OSSTF should be standing up with the labour movement across North America.

My school’s graduation ceremony was an opportunity for me to celebrate my students and also myself.

The system broke us, so let’s break it back.

Whether or not I personally choose to stay in adult education, we need to change the way we think about it.

Calls from both ends of the political spectrum for education to be neutral, apolitical, etc., are fundamentally flawed. Here’s why.

While we engage in hypotheticals of free speech and age-appropriateness, real-life trans kids need us. Let’s step up and stop allowing transphobes to derail the conversation.

Did you know that the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives publishes an education journal called Our Schools/Our Selves? Neither did I, until I saw a call for proposals for articles related to teaching during the pandemic. My proposal to write about adult and continuing education during the pandemic was approved. After a couple of months of drafting and editing, the final version has been published! You can download the PDF from this page—my…

Teachers in our society are subject to vocational awe, put on a pedestal and told we should be grateful for the role we play. But this exceptional reputation is really just a smokescreen for devaluing our labour and refusing to address the problems with our education system.

When we allow elected representatives to debate recognizing Pride Month and symbols, we send a message that 2SLGBTQ+ people’s rights are up for debate.

The government is keen to make the battle over education all about the money. But it isn't and has never been about that. This is about ideology, plain and simple.

Tomorrow my local district of OSSTF, the Ontario Secondary School Teacher’s Federation, is holding its strike vote. This vote determines whether we union members give our leadership a mandate to engage in job action, once we are in a legal position to do so, if they feel it is warranted. This could take many forms, from work-to-rule to rotating strikes to an all-out strike. It’s not something we do lightly. Although the Ford government is…

Last week The Globe and Mail ran an opinion piece calling for coding to become a mandatory subject in Canadian schools. I’m sympathetic to the idea, for I agree that computer literacy and an awareness of how the algorithms and programs that increasingly influence our lives is crucial to being an informed citizen. That being said, I disagree with almost all the points made in that article. More generally, as I continue to think…

I had an excellent class this morning.

Previously I blogged about how, in this combined ENG3C/NBE3C Grade 11 English course, we looked at various texts to help students article their identity. We’ve now moved on to looking at the history of Indigenous peoples in Canada. We have watched three documentaries (Trick or Treaty?, Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance, and We Were Children), and the students are working on research reports…

I have two book reviews I really should be writing instead, and some planning to finish, because I’m off tomorrow afternoon to Sudbury (of all places) for a two-day workshop. So of course I’m blogging instead!

In the previous session (March to April) at the adult education centre, I taught a Grade 11 workplace math course (MEL3E). I’ve taught this course several times now, and I didn’t bring much new to the table content wise…

Oh, look! It’s another article about discovery vs rote math! Here we go again….

I thought I had solved this back in 2011 (twice!), but apparently a couple of people in the world didn’t listen, so now here I am, back at it again. It seems like every five years when the latest round of test scores shows that the sky is falling we’ll be doomed to have the same arguments over and over…

Yesterday Martin Regg Cohn wrote in the Toronto Star about how the work-to-rule action by ETFO is harmful to students because of the inconvenience and delay it causes in notifying parents about those students’ final marks. He says:

Marks don’t matter. Achievement goes unnoted. Adversity remains unremarked.

Cute—far cuter than Cohn’s attempts to belittle the seriousness of the industrial action happening here later in the column with his own work-to-rule parody.

But this post, unlike …

Dear Mr. Lavallee,

You wrote a letter to the editor that appeared in The Chronicle Journal on Saturday, April 11: “Teachers have no right threatening education.”

Your letter communicates a great deal of frustration with teachers, arguing that we suffer from a sense of entitlement, that we strike because we aren’t satisfied with how easy we already have it. You ask us how we “dare” to “hold our kids’ education hostage.”

The truth is, the…

Ontario’s new health and physical education curriculum landed today. As with all curriculum documents, you can read it yourself. This marks the first revised curriculum since 1998/1999.

I remember in 2010 being disappointed when the McGuinty government backtracked hard on its revised curriculum. Both Premier Wynne and Minister of Education Liz Sandals seem pretty committed to keeping this one around, however, and that’s a very good thing. We need this, and the groups…

Eight days of school left, and then I get to return to Canada for a month! I had a nice dinner in Norwich on Friday with the math department. My train ride home should have been uneventful, but I stupidly forgot my suit carrier on the train from Norwich. So it’s somewhere in London Liverpool St Station, with any luck, and I get it back.

I didn’t have that many links to share, and I…

A few weeks ago I discussed gender stereotypes in ads with my Grade 8 class. I knew I would have no trouble finding examples to bring in to demonstrate what I meant. Indeed, I found this awesome website, the Gender Ads Project, with thousands of scanned magazine ads categorized by the stereotypes they portray. What I didn’t anticipate was how difficult it would be to find ads that both clearly demonstrate a stereotype and…