JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

Support the teachers in their childish behavior?

I think it a bit shameful that the question can be asked.

All they were asked is to give a tiny slice back, and that after years of receiving inordinate new returns as measured by the general standards of our society today.

Instead of accepting their responsibility as very well-paid citizens of Ontario, they squabble like unthinking and privileged teenagers about rights being abused.

Many parents are afraid of not saying they support the teachers because they are concerned about the treatment of their children afterwards.

And that implicit intimidation is an important part of why strikes have absolutely no place in education.

Our teachers are subject to no scrutiny in their work, are not measured in any way by results or performance, receive quite extraordinary benefits, and are paid at what can only be called an extraordinary level considering their educations and expertise.

Most have only bachelor’s degrees, many just general (close to meaningless) general degrees, and many, many are expert in absolutely no subject.

On top of that they have a genuinely useless certificate from a teachers’ college, reflecting about 8 months spent in a completely non-academic environment, one where people like the disgraceful Director of TDSB earn “graduate degrees” with second-rate thought, much of it plagiarized, from “professors” who can’t tell the difference.

Take just those credentials and see what other work you can obtain today.

The effort will result in an honest “not much.”

People with such qualifications work, by the tens of thousands, as store clerks, restaurant staff, salespeople, and low to medium grade office clerks.

Overwhelmingly, they do not, nor will they ever, earn $80-90,000 with the most generous benefits on the planet short of senior government officials. All for a short work day and a very short work year.

Yet, we’ve heard over and over nonsense like, “Well, if you want university-educated teachers, you have to pay for them.”

We do pay for them, in many cases at nearly double the going rate for their levels of education.

What is so distressing about this matter is the genuinely childish and insanely melodramatic behavior displayed by a great many teachers and their leaders.

Show some civic-minded leadership, show some concern for kids, show some concern for the communities in which you live.

But, no, all we get is the equivalent of a pack of petty beasts fighting over a bone or two in an alley.

By the way, the Minister of Education, Laurel Broten, has done an outstanding job in difficult circumstances. Always calm, always in command of the facts, always available to CBC for interviews, and clearly sharply intelligent.

If we had more people of that quality in government, our society could only benefit.
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“I thought this government wanted to stop bullying. This latest tactic is bullying pure and simple!”

Bullying?

Yours is a complete misuse of language.

The government is the employer.

The teachers are the employees, extremely well paid ones.

The employer today has financial problems, and it has asked a very modest sacrifice of its employees.

Do they pitch in to help?

No, they whine about rights and other irrelevant nonsense at a time when many would just like decent job.

It is the teachers who are bullying, bullying the kids.

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“So many people who comment on these stories have no idea of how hard teachers work.”

Oh yes they do know how hard (some) teachers work.

In fact, teachers are the ones who seem oblivious about how hard others work.

Your comment is just the kind which irritates so many decent and thoughtful people.

It is special pleading, and it reflects genuine ignorance about the work of others.

 

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN BY LYSIANE GAGNON IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

“Our new culture of compulsive communication”

I like the expression even though it is highly inaccurate.

Tweeting is not our culture.

It represents the habit of a portion of our population, and I’m not sure that it qualifies even as a “culture” for them.

Likely they represent the same portion that has always had a compulsive problem with communication.

Young folks used to talk for hours on land-line phones, generally about nothing of any import.

The expression “verbal diarrhea” is quite old: I remember it in a university psychology course in the early 1960s.

Sadly, too many of our columnists and radio hosts suffer with a form of the same complaint: they write about trivia and passing fads and elevate them into the substance of “culture.”

Apart from Ms. Gagnon and, of course, Margaret Wente, much of our new Radio One CBC is of just this nature.
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“My younger colleagues used Wikipedia as a source for everything, were unwilling to spend time reading the texts or accessing the libraries, and I spent hours editing our written projects. The ability to write a concise, grammatically correct sentence (let alone a paragraph) seemed to be beyond the other contributors…”

I recognize the problem the writer describes, but it, in fact, has little or nothing to do with technology.

The truth is that technology is, in general, not yet in our schools, at least in any meaningful way.

We are badly behind by world standards.

It is simply amazing how many teachers do not know how to use a computer or know about good data sources on the Internet.

The problem you describe has several actual causes.

First, social promotion now sees people quickly rising to the levels of incompetence in schools.

High school grades have become a poor indicator of ability or performance.

Second, our colleges and universities are taking in students who simply should not even be in those institutions.

The institutions do this for purely monetary purposes, as when Ontario’s schools of education graduate 12,000 each year and only 7,000 get jobs (I even doubt that number).

Teachers at all levels are frequently lazy and indifferent. That’s the main explanation for “group work” despite all the blather about team work.

They only have to mark a third or quarter of the number of projects.

What you find often in assigned groups is one or two who work conscientiously and the others “ride their coat tails.”

So far as the ability to write, no demands are made by many teachers in Ontario.

The so-called literacy test is a pathetic little game, and the game allows teachers to avoid being tougher in classes about writing skills, as they once were.

Many teachers’ ability even to explain to students principles of research – such as confirming a source with another source – are often non-existent, as you see with Wikipedia (a good source but one that requires other source confirmation).

Many of our current teachers are themselves the products of this poor system, and they enter the system only to further degrade it.

It’s a sad situation, and we are wasting huge costs to no advance of education.

Your comment also confuses – as does the columnist’s piece – what really is technology.

Yes, Tweeting involves the use of a technology, but then so does answering the telephone or the doorbell.