Teachers in Ontario

 

This is a difficult issue for me to write about; I consider myself a liberal, through and through.  I respect the hell out of Premier McGuinty and many, if not all, of his colleagues.  McGuinty's wife is a teacher; he hears about the slings and arrows of education every day, no doubt, so is not looking down on the problems within our education system from the 20,000 foot level.

 

On the other hand, I am married to a teacher; many of those in both of our families and many friends are equally teachers.  I also get to hear first-hand every day the realities of being a teacher.  My wife is one of the good ones; she looks at her students as extended family and invests herself in them to the nth degree.  If she comes home ebullient, I know that they had a good day; if she comes home on the verge of tears, I know that something has happened with one or more of "her kids."

 

Let's take a step back and ask ourselves a basic question - what is it we think we are paying teachers to do?  Drum information into our children's heads so that they can pass tests, with those tests enabling them to get access to other tests which will eventually get them jobs?  What does a teacher's job description look like - research, prepare and administer lessons, write and mark tests, communicate performance to parents and transfer knowledge to youth?  What about the other duties as necessary part?

 

Teachers, really, are all-encompassing mini-CEOs of classrooms; they're responsible for long-term strategy, mid-term planning, HR management, logistics, resource management, etc.  Except the teams they're trying to elicit performance out of aren't trained, hired staff; they're kids.  Teachers are on-the-job trainers as well.  They also have to stop fights, make sure their students have warm clothes for the winter and have sense enough to wear them outside and deal with all kinds of personal issues ranging from kids who pee their pants at school to kids who come to class with welts on their arms that they don't want to talk about.

 

Perhaps a better analogy - teachers are a bit like police officers.  It's nice to tell police that their job is to drive around town and enforce the law, but the reality they face is far more complex.  Police officers, in practice, end up being councillors, translators, therapists, diagnosticians, arbitrators and shoulders to lean on.  If there are ever challenges out there that nobody else wants to face, those challenges land in the laps of police officers.

 

The same holds true for teachers.  If kids are having emotional challenges with either friends or family, teachers don't get to say "look, kid, leave your personal baggage at home" - they have to work with that child to address the issue or build the internal resiliency necessary to empower that child to focus.  They also have to find ways to work with parents of various ethno-cultural and religious backgrounds that might not agree with the material a teacher is mandated to teach or approve of their approaches.  In some cases, teachers even have to work against cultural gender-biases in both parents and students. 

 

Teacher's don't have the luxury of firing kids who don't perform or behave in inappropriate ways or respect the teacher/student hierarchy; pressure is on them to keep kids in the system and deliver those test scores.  As such, teachers become anthropologists, psychologists, diagnosticians and tacticians, trying to decide which kids need to go to Team for special needs assessments, what strategies to use to get their stakeholders or teams to support the end-goal (education), etc.

 

Can you imagine any other workplace where the middle-manager was responsible for saying "employee X, based on an impartial assessment of your behaviour, I think you have a learning disability.  Let's arrange for you to see our in-house specialist team so that I can better modify my expectations and management style to suit your needs."  This happens in our classrooms all the time, and as specialized assistance by audiologists, etc. for special-needs students are being cut back, the expectation is that teachers will assume those roles as well, effectively becoming all things to all people.

 

As teachers scale back from extra-curricular activities, lots of parents are getting upset.  It's not fair, they say, that they now have to leave their jobs, perhaps losing chances at overtime, to go pick up their kids.  Perhaps they even have to start paying for private after-school programs to keep the kids busy until they get off work.  But - teachers don't get overtime for after-school activities, do they?  That's just one of those things we expect them to do because, well, they're teachers.  Really - ask yourself if that kind of expectation was put on you, how would you feel? 

 

Also consider how many teachers are parents themselves.  A large number of the parents whose kids are in the same daycare as my son's are parents; like everyone else, they have to pay for someone else to watch their kids while they go off to work.  Would it make sense to you to pay someone else to watch your kids while you were at work while having to watch someone else's kids in your free time because that's just the way society looks at things?  Teachers also face the constant battle of seeing their prep-time (time used for preparing lessons plans, writing and marking tests, etc) taken away from them for feel-good administration meetings or rah-rah assemblies.  Fighting against the elimination of prep-time is a key activity teachers' unions undertake, but it isn't one that gets a lot of attention.  Perhaps it should.

 

Sick days.  Warren Kinsella is right; nobody should be banking sick days - they should be there for use only when one is sick.  Of course, the teachers' bank isn't just about sick days; it's their bereavement leave, days to take care of sick relatives or visit prenatal doctors or deal with the contractor whose fixing broken infrastructure in their house days, too.  Perhaps those days should be broken down into categories so it's more clear to everyone what individual leaves are for.  Also, keep in mind that schools are breeding grounds for germs.  Kids get sick regularly given their exposure to others, developing immune systems, etc.  Sick students leads to sick teachers; do we want to have a system in place where a legitimately sick teacher runs out of days and has to come in and teach while at the same time fighting a flu?  Maybe we do; maybe we don't care if teaching while sick impairs their performance.

 

This brings us to workplace safety.  We all demand safe working environments - it's a human right, or something.  It's hard to get a job done when your health and safety are at risk.  Unless, of course, you're an afore-mentioned police officer or in far too many cases, a teacher.  I was in my wife's school yesterday - it was stifling hot, and this at a time when the weather is starting to cool down.  I couldn't imagine functioning at peak capacity - not producing, certainly not learning - when my brain is cooking.  That's the least of complaints for that particular school, though, which also faces a cockroach infestation.  It's all well and good to say don't bring your work home, but what if you have, in addition to homework, the daily need to make sure all your personal goods are hermetically sealed to keep from bringing cockroach eggs home?  Are we to assume that cockroaches are just a workplace hazard for both teachers and students?

 

What about this one - how easy is it to focus on studies when you have semi-regular lock-downs?  Again, back to my wife's school - there have been several murders in the area over the past few years.  One, from what's been released, was committed right on school property, after school hours.  Yup - that police line to the right is on the school property.  The murder was right there, where kids spend their recesses.  One was at a birthday party for students who go to the school - are those kids supposed to be leaving the horrors of their personal experience behind when they go to work?

 

Hopefully, by this point, you'll see that there are clearly different rules and conditions that apply to education than to other work environments.  Yet, it's our teachers we depend upon the most - we download education, personality management, moral and critical skills development and to a large degree, parenting to them.  There are more lucrative careers one can pursue if all you're really interested in is high wages or cushy benefits, and certainly jobs that come with less bang-head-on-wall frustrations.  In this respect, teachers are more like politicians - the best ones, the ones we want to encourage, do what they do because they believe they can make a difference.

 

So, yes, I think it is unfair and unwise to use the players within the education system as political pawns - but that includes students and teachers, and to unions and politicians equally.  To a much larger degree, however, it reflects on all of us.  As costs for everything are going up yet wages are lagging behind and as demand for productivity (and hours worked or lost to commuting time) skyrockets, we simply do not have the time to be all things - good employees, good parents, friends and parnters.  Equally, as the inefficiencies of our siloed system start to break our economic back - leading to less funds for things like social programs (like those that help kids overcome the challenges of poverty or the shock of witnessing murders) or infrastructure management (getting rid of those cockroaches), zeroing in on teachers as a stumbling block to societal success is facetious.

 

There are bigger, structural issues about how our systems are designed and how we prioritize our own time that needs to be revisited.  In this, perhaps teachers set an example for us to follow - we need to ask ourselves what really matters to us and start putting that first, perhaps demanding that our institutions start doing the same.  Maybe we all need to collectively take a look at the social contract we've signed on to - that's teachers, unions, government, civil soviety at large.  Perhaps we would all benefit from some time spent back in the classroom.