Today in my primary music classes we talked about music as a force for peace. In broad, simplified strokes we talked about The Singing Revolution in Estonia and the Prayer of the Mothers associated with the Women Wage Peace movement in the Middle East. We talked about how war is sometimes a function of greed, where one country wants what another country has. And I saw before me a sea of confused and inquisitive faces, posing the most innocent, most poignant questions:
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There is something fragile about the first days of school. There are butterflies everywhere. Butterflies in backpacks, butterflies in lunch boxes, butterflies in the feet of displaced newcomers, butterflies in the eyes of those scanning the schoolyard for familiar faces on that very first fresh morning in the uncharted terrain of new teachers, new classrooms, and new aspirations.
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Here’s a little gem from the archives: 2010 to be exact, when I was supply teaching in Peterborough and getting to know my neighbours on Charlotte Street. Happy Hallowe’en!
Today I scored huge points with my skinhead neighbour’s children.
Every year at the end of October I start to think about how I’m going to evade Hallowe’en. I hate the skeletons, gravestones, witches and, yes, even the spiders. I don’t get why the entire continent gets such a charge out of thinking about icky, dark, evil things for a month every fall. Fall is icky enough without the ghosts and the orange and black. Why make it colder, scarier, crueller?
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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