Cosmic Prose

Natasha Regehr

Category: Teaching (page 1 of 2)

Go Gently

January 18, 2022 / / 4 Comments

Work.  All my life, I have allowed it to define me.

As a student (even as a very young student), my work was to try to be the smartest kid in class.  Let’s face it.  I was a clumsy, homely child with thick glasses and a lazy eye.  But school, I could do.  And I did it well.  It became my “thing” —  so much so, that I decided never to leave. 

And so now, decades later, I get in my car every morning and drive 45 minutes to another school, where I pour all my energy into the young lives and minds before me.  I just want them to learn, so badly.  To light up with new words, new ideas, new ways of thinking. 

But today, I went too far.  Snow had been falling all night.  It was due to continue for hours.  School buses were cancelled.  Other teachers headed onto the streets and turned back because of the weather.  And I kept going.

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You asked…

May 28, 2021 / / 2 Comments

14 months since our first school closure in March 2020, my government has finally asked for my opinion about the matter. Here it is.

Dear Mr. Ford,

Thank-you for your recent letter inviting responses to your questions regarding school re-opening in Ontario.  

I am an elementary educator and have seen firsthand the effects of crowded classrooms, inadequate facilities, understaffed buildings and under-funded programs.  Many of these issues predate COVID-19, and their effects have only multiplied under the additional stresses of pandemic conditions.  As teachers we have tried our best under difficult circumstances to provide a safe and healthy learning environment for our students — and we have tried in vain.

I teach in a portable with 28 students.  The desks are so close together that I have to walk sideways to pass between them.  In what other situation would such an environment be considered safe for anyone? I teach in a school of 400 with only two small washrooms.  Most of the classrooms don’t have sinks, and those we do have are unusable because of mould issues.  In what other situation would such facilities be considered hygienic?  We have footsteps painted on our floors and walkways indicating a distance of two metres — and four children lined up in between each one, because a line-up of properly-distanced children would send us around the block.  The masks, the children’s sole remaining layer of protection, come off twice a day while students sit side by side eating their lunches.  How many restaurants are allowed to function right now under similar circumstances?

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A Holiday Sing-Along

April 5, 2021 / / 0 Comments

Twice this year, classes in my school have had to quarantine for the holidays due to positive COVID test results in the building. I wrote this little ditty over the Christmas break, and added a special Easter update today. Feel free to sing along.

 I wore my goggles and my mask: 
   Somebody sneezed on me!
 I sanitized my withered hands: 
   Somebody sneezed on me!
 I don't have plexiglass
 In my cramped, crowded class:
 I stepped sideways, but alas!
   Somebody sneezed on me. 

     Now we're getting COVID for Christmas,
      Students and teachers are mad.
     We're getting COVID for Christmas,
      'Cause Dougie's been nothing but bad.
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Out of the Closet: School Violence Revealed

March 8, 2020 / / 90 Comments

Not long ago I spent my lunch hour sobbing in a closet at school.

I can’t get into the specifics of my morning, but I can give you a composite view. 

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Love in the Form of Snowsuits

December 27, 2019 / / 2 Comments

Substitute teaching in a variety of locations has a way of opening one’s eyes to realities we may overlook when we spend much of our professional life in the same building. Sometimes a trip across town is a greater leap than a voyage abroad. This reflection takes a hard look at issues of equality in Canadian schools.

I recently walked into a Grade 3 French immersion classroom in a rural community.  The students greeted me with rosy cheeks and cheery smiles as they walked in the doors and peeled off their abundant snowsuits.  They immediately went about the serious business of being obedient schoolchildren.  They hung on my every word (partly because I spent a good part of the morning impersonating Red Riding Hood in French, and partly because it was their natural habit of mind). 

The most challenging students in the room were two boys who were obsessed with measuring things and doing puzzles.  I had to confiscate their tape measure at one point because they were estimating and checking when they were supposed to be writing stories.  I commented that one of the mathematicians may want to consider being an engineer one day (at this point he was using the springing function of the tape measure to carefully propel objects across his desk).  “No,” he said.  “I want to be a farmer.  My dad wants to take over my grandpa’s farm, and then I’m going to be a farmer, too.  I really want to be a farmer.”

The picture of wholesomeness.

The next day I walked into a Grade 3 classroom in an English school in an urban neighbourhood on the literal “wrong side of the tracks.”  A little girl in a pink coat was curled up in fetal position on the carpet, and remained there, unmoving, until I left.  “Give me back my g**d**m slime!” exclaimed another girl, flopped on a bean bag, grinning feverishly.  Little boys ran around in their stocking feet, sugaring themselves with Christmas treats at 9am. 

“Is there anything I should know?” I asked the teacher. 

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Dear Mr. Ford

June 2, 2019 / / 0 Comments

The Honourable Doug Ford
Premier of the Province of Ontario
Legislative Building 
Queen’s Park 
Toronto ON M7A 1A1

May 31, 2019

Dear Mr. Ford,

I am writing in response to your request for feedback regarding your proposed changes to class sizes, as detailed in your “Class Size Consultation Guide” (March, 2019).

To begin, I thank you for providing the information in this guide and for inviting feedback from those you refer to alternately as “stakeholders” and “partners.”  I wonder, however, exactly how you define these terms, and what they say about your priorities in this process.  Who are your “stakeholders”? Who stands to benefit from the decisions outlined in this document? Whose opinions hold the most weight? Similarly, who are your “partners”? With whom are you demonstrating a cooperative stance in this discussion? We will return to these questions throughout my response to the Consultation Guide, as they are crucial to identifying the intentions underlying this policy.

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DELF Unpacked: Don’t Ever Lose Faith

September 2, 2018 / / 5 Comments

Natasha here, reporting in on the aftermath of the infamous DELF B2.

I was worried.  Let’s find some better descriptors, now that I’m functioning in my mother tongue.  Words like chagrined, nausea-ridden, paralyzed.  I dreaded that exam.  My entire body was stiff with tension for eight solid weeks, from the moment I walked into my first class to the day after the inquisition.  My long-awaited summer in France turned out to be, in many ways, a summer of travail and trepidation.

And then, just like that, I passed.  Not just by the skin of my teeth.  Not just with a satisfactory margin of breathing room. Not quite with the flying colours I secretly dreamed of.  But almost.  Almost.

At one point, I re-coined the DELF acronym (“Diplome d’Etudes en Langue Française”) as “Dumb, Enigmatic Lists of Faults.”  I still kind of think that.  The test-makers are simply méchants, in my well-studied opinion.  They rub their hands in delight as they formulate one trick question after another, in a sinister attempt to separate the dumb from the dumber.  I know.  I met one of them.  And she was mean.

But do you know what it was that bumped my score down two points from the 80% I’d hoped for?  Continue reading

Leap!

May 6, 2018 / / 10 Comments

Have you ever received a message like this?

It’s a little surreal. It feels quite final. I’ve made the leap.

I’ve made leaps before. Big leaps. Resigning, house-selling, relocating leaps. Blind leaps, for the most part. Great, optimistic, terrifying leaps into a new unknown. Leaps I’ve later questioned. And here I go again.

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Bake a Cake

March 25, 2017 / / 0 Comments

The most delightful thing just happened.

I was late for lunch, because it’s the week before concert week, and I’ve been making up the classes that I missed last week when I was sick.  Like, really sick.  Vomiting sick.  The only kind of sick that would keep a music teacher from her students two weeks before the first big concert of the year.  So I forfeited the dearest part of my day (lunch, of course) to rehearse with the students who missed their classes while I was busy vomiting.  

Therefore, when I finally had a few minutes to breathe, the cafeteria was closed.  I was devastated.  Yes, I had vaguely suspected such an atrocity might occur, but it was a chance I had been willing to take.  I knew I had to risk missing those tantalizing beef kabobs for the sake of the concert cause.  And the children, of course.  The children.

So there I was at the cafeteria counter, gushing with gratitude when the kitchen staff agreed to prepare a plate for me (bless them bless them bless them), and I saw a whole pile of kids sitting around the picnic tables outside, with nary a teacher in sight.

“This is perfect!” I thought.  “I have someone to sit with while I eat my lunch!”  And so I did.

I sat down, right in the middle of all the little ducklings.  They were stunned, but pleased.  I heard some of the children calling out each other’s names in a rhythmic sort of way, and I mused out loud, “Hmm! Sounds like someone wants to bake a cake!” And I started to sing.

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Rendez-vous: The Day I Met my Prince

October 27, 2016 / / 1 Comment

A year and a half ago, with my sights set on Morocco, I trotted to the Peterborough Public Library and went berserk. First, I gave away about fifteen boxes of books, and then, I set about replacing them.

I signed out an armload of language and travel resources, fiction, and DVDs about North Africa, and devoured them all, in between spastic packing fits. But my most precious acquisition was a tiny, one-dollar purchase from the library basement: a slim, winsome copy of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince – en français, of course, because I fancied the idea of becoming fluent in French during my two years abroad.

img_9764Ha! Well, I exported myself from one continent to the other, and soon discovered that “learning French” is a bigger endeavour than I had expected – and that Le Petit Prince is not so little after all. Continue reading

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