In September, the subject of teachers is probably the most timely of all subjects. Even if you don’t have a school-age child at home, just getting to work on the first day of school must’ve been a challenge — have you seen the streets?! Where did all those cars come from?
As a mom of a junior-kindergarten boy, I can tell you that getting to work is not that much of a stress compared to how freaked out I am about my kid’s new life chapter — even thinking of making lunches makes my head spin — and my most pressing question is: what is his teacher (Miss Lisa) going to be like?
I hope she is the kindest, sweetest person in the world and I hope she’s all better now, after the sort of year teachers have had here in Ontario. It’s been a really tough year because of their conflict with the Liberal government over the proposed Bill 115 (which came into effect Dec. 31 but was later replaced), which imposed labour contracts on public school teachers — for example, by limiting their ability to strike — and remove their right for collective barganing.
The proposal was a blow, probably most evident in their reaction: Besides withholding supervision of extracurricular activities as a way to protest the controversial bill, the teachers conducted one-day strikes in December and it wasn’t till June that a new tentative contract deal had been reached.
Even now, the teachers are still smarting from that time although many are also cautiously optimistic, says one Toronto Star article. “‘It’s a fresh year, it’s a fresh start,’” according to Dianne Sedore-McCoy, a Grade 8 teacher quoted in the story. “’However, I think we’re a little apprehensive about how things are going to go, based on the difficult year that we had.’”
The Bill 115 fiasco isn’t the only hurdle in the world of teachers. In the near future, there will be half the spaces in teachers’ colleges that there once was but it’ll take double the time to get a degree — this has been proposed by the government in order to deal with the oversupply of teachers. The new changes will be introduced in September 2015. But perhaps this isn’t a hurdle but rather a necessary restriction as there really might be too many teachers out there. According to the Ministry of Education there are about 9,000 new graduates in Ontario each year, but only about 6,000 spots available.
Personally, I know three people who have graduated from teachers’ college and are having a very hard time finding a job. One of them said that he would have thought twice before applying to teachers’ college, had the new changes been in place. He thinks now it was very optimistic of him to count on getting a job but he also blames the education system for making him think it would’ve been possible. I hope that by the time he gets to teach he won’t lose all of his original optimism — after all, no one wants a bitter, disillusioned teacher and — it would be a disaster to all those young minds to be taught by Grump McGrumpy. So this September, I wish all the teachers even more optimism and even more hope and, above all, I wish them continuous employment.
First published at http://poss.ca/en/possscript