Conversation with an Ontario teacher

Anonymous, of course. I want them to keep their job.

Photo by Element5 Digital on Unsplash

Public schooling in Ontario has been changing in some quite unexpected ways. A fad or are these changes going to be baked in? I know I’m guilty of overusing the “As someone who’s first-hand familiar with authoritarianism, I’d say this looks a bit weird” construction, but I’ll have to employ it again. What I’ve been reading about the public (and private! they’re all hiring from the same pool of consultants, it seems) schools last few years has been… bit worrisome. I recently sat down with a teacher close to my age from one of the Ontario school boards who’s none too happy about where things are going and they let me pick their brain.

How long have you been teaching?

About fifteen years. I chose teaching for many reasons, partly because I felt I was good at it, I was a good story teller, but also because I felt compelled to help underprivileged kids get excited about history and literature and art. (I come from a working class background myself.) And I did some teaching of adults in college and loved it, so I thought, OK, let’s commit full time.

What was your teacher training like?

It’s changed quite a bit. I remember there were definitely dogmatic aspects to it and education was never really highly regarded as a grad school option, and my school was aware of that and we did do a certain amount of research, I got some good grounding in how to teach literacy for example and I had some really passionate teachers. I had a great teacher who studied history of education, another one who was passionate about Shakespeare. I remember we talked about how do we foster critical thinking. That was actually a topic for discussion.

But I have noticed a big change and I particularly see it with teachers who are Gen-Z – it’s very clear that young people in teacher training are getting indoctrinated to a certain way of thinking at places like OISE for example. They just keep using these well-worn phrases, for instance “recognizing black bodies”, “normalizing black people”, and their argument is that that they’re not normalized, that they’re dehumanized non-stop. They talk a lot about gender and how gender is a construct – and by the term gender they mean both sex and gender, they don’t make the distinction – and that it’s not real. I’ve heard this over and over, and tried having a conversation with some of them. So there are certain things I keep hearing that people of my generation would not believe and would not have been encouraged to keep saying.  

And I presume professional development was nothing like the professional development workshops we see today.

The professional development is I think just the extension of what you’re getting at OISE right now and the education schools across North America. A lot of race essentialism. Talking about identities – there’s a huge emphasis on how we need to be teaching identities, and have kids focus on their identities. I hear this a lot. And this notion that there are certain identities against whom there’s constant violence... in the teacher room or in these professional developments there’s very little willingness to question that. One-on-one people might, but not in a group. There’s an awful lot of received wisdom about this stuff. It’s just a different atmosphere; I remember us once being able to go back and forth and talk about what would be the best way to teach a material. It was often about the content; there was an understanding that content mattered more than its presumed politics – it was even considered wrong to direct people politically one way or the other. That’s not what a good education does. Now it is expressly political. At our union meetings we are told, teaching is a political act, and people are saying it so much now. This is the mainstream view in education right now.  

And the kids too have to take these, and this is what they look like to me, ideological improvement workshops.

There’s a lot of workshops. I remember one, I think it was called Get Real, which had a lot of sexualized language, a lot of talk about gender, about how “being a boy is not fixed”, that you may be neither a girl nor a boy… That was presented to elementary school students from grades 3 to 6.

Mandatory?

Well… yes I think it was by default, it was just understood that you would present and I know for a fact that teachers who weren’t sure about presenting were told that they should include this particular workshop. It was by default mandatory. There were also kids getting trained in Equity and in LGBTQ+ things. They were being trained to teach other kids. There would be workshops to teach kids and then there’s a lot of pressure to accept these kids into your classroom. Kids from equity clubs and LGBT alliance clubs. This is middle school age kids, who become very passionate defenders of what they’ve learned. They get that same stars-in-eyes look that some of their teachers have.

I’m a missionary now!

Yes and it gives them a tremendous amount of energy and a purpose. They’re also very evangelizing with staff… and I think a lot of teachers are afraid of these kids and of these teachers. Because they don’t want to have a discussion, they want to convince you.

And you look at what happened with Chanel Pfahl, who was reported by another teacher to the school board, which then went to the OTC, when she posted comments opposing CRT in a FB group. There have been other cases. She’s probably the only one who’s gone very public with this. She’s not teaching right now, and I don’t know if that’s by choice.

So, I don’t know, I’m not an expert but… why do kids have to know what a pansexual is?

They don’t. I would argue that also most school kids don’t need to know about the fawn gender, the faegender, these are the materials I’ve seen…

You are kidding.

I wish I were! They don’t need to know about that, nor the minutiae around sexual identity and trans identification… Personally, what I think is happening is all this is taking away the agency from the parents. Yes it’s understood as educators that if there’s a case of abuse, then we contact Children’s Aid. My concern is, so much is considered abuse right now. We’re more concerned about parental overreach than we are about the pedagogical or teacher overreach. So in some Ontario school boards, TDSB, Halton, Peel, and this is also found in the US and in Scotland, we are told if a child goes by a different name in school, that we have to check in with the kid before we use that other name with the parents. A kid may choose to have a secret gender and identity.

And no lower limit on age? They can be, like, 7?

Things are getting so permissive now that I suspect, though I’m not entirely sure, that you are right, that it’s even if it’s a child in kindergarten. They believe that a child can choose a gender identity. That is in our training.

And when did land acknowledgements become mandatory in all schools? Is it true, first of all, that they’re being read in every classroom in Ontario?

Yes. First class in the morning — though I wouldn’t be surprised if the people are bringing additional ones. I heard that in Ottawa they’re making the national anthem optional but this is never optional.

OK but why should the kids be listening to the national anthem? Just start the class without any pious rituals or pledges of allegiance.

I think that’s a valid question. I personally defend it because I think there’s something to a cohesive society. First of all, we are a nation state. And the anthem kind of emphasizes that we are a nation state. If a child didn’t want to stand for it, I would honour that.

And this is not unheard of in Canada, of course, what with Quebec separatists refusing various monarch-praising rituals at various points in history…

Right! And Quebec perhaps overemphasizes the need for a national identity. I think that’s a question worth pondering.

And the kids who don’t want to do it any of it should not be ostracized and the teachers who question it should not be fired.

I absolutely agree. And to me that’s ultimately what education is about. Willing to go to the weird, awkward, dangerous questions and grapple with them. And I think that way you gain the trust of the kids, because they’re like OK, this one is not just saying we have to do this this and that and ordering us about. And in that way if you do decide to take the more traditional position, you earned that position. But right now there’s just the right position and the wrong position in education.

To go back to the land acknowledgements, when did they become mandatory, any idea?

They started doing them I’m guessing 2015-16. And I’ve been in a room with teachers with one person saying I don’t like it.

How did others react?

I think most people didn’t know what to say. But she was a respected elder of the profession so they didn’t go against her. Around that time I started hearing the term “social justice”, and one colleague was particularly activist. My worry is, you don’t really have to know much to be a social justice activist, you just have to have the right positions. If you’re a teacher and you’re not in love with your subject matter, this is so easy. They’re constantly getting materials. I see people photocopying from one another… It’s much harder to know your subject matter to some extent; and you’re humbled by it too. Because it’s never ending. Or you can choose to say: this is the right way to approach this, we’re going to read stories by these people only – it’s all handed down to you, it takes little brain power.

Are these acknowledgments read by the teachers, how are they presented.

They are often presented by the kids. It’s very important to have “kids’ voices”. So they have a kid doing the land acknowledgments and they are listened to over the loud speaker each morning.

Omg…

It’s hugely important to have kids involved. In this new pedagogy it’s important to “centre” student voice because students have so much to bring. We have so much to learn from students, particularly those who are marginalized. We just need to listen to them.

And then they write the land acknowledgements for them.

They do. But what no one’s talking about is that you’ve already fed them all these ideas. This is so top down… and some kids would mock it. And they’re sick of it.

Is that right? There’s hope, then!

Some. Yes and no, because they’re afraid to push back in a meaningful way because they know they’ll get suspended in no time flat. Because in the disciplinary code, right now, that teachers and students are subjected to, the whole human rights and equity stuff, if anything’s perceived as hateful, you’re dealing with suspensions, you’re dealing with firings of teachers. This is explicitly stated to us in the past couple of years. And they haven’t really said what constitutes hate. So yes there’ll be some push back, but they’re very careful about it because they know they’ll have no stand.

So it’s enough for any one person to say This is hateful.

The right person.

Is there an official complaint process for verbal delikt? What happens?

It could depend. The first step is they call the kid in. If they’d used a certain word – the n-word, for example, no matter the context — I think you’re in huge trouble.

What if you’re rapping?

You’re still in big trouble. Unless you’re Black, in which case it’s fine. That has been expressly stated. That it’s their word, it’s the power of their experience. That’s the current moment in the school. The word “Eskimo” is also never to be used.

But a lot of books etc. have that word?

It doesn’t matter, because we’re also not supposed to use any materials before a certain time period. If you share a book that was either published at the wrong time or has an inopportune word, that could be a reason to call a meeting. And has been. So, primary source documents, that’s all gone now. You want to do Tin Tin in a French class? That’s going to be a problem.

Tin Tin is problematic?

Absolutely – the whole colonialism thing, as we’re very big on “decolonizing”. These people don’t know the history of colonialism, not even of the Americas. But we can’t discuss colonialism in any way because there’s nothing to discuss.

I want to make this point, there’s a big brain drain in teaching right now. And people who are about to retire are really glad to be retiring. If you’re a thinking person, why the hell would you enter teaching?

Or university! Or the CBC! It’s a growing list...Or the biggest companies in the world. I’m sure you’ve seen the bizarre Microsoft corporation videos where ethnic background, pronouns and land acknowledgments are stated by each of the presenters?

That in part I get; they have to think of the bottom line. But in education it’s not clear what the bottom line is. It seems like the bottom line is, these kids need to leave schooling with a certain set of beliefs. It’s not: how do we make them better readers, writers, better in mathematics? How do we make sure their scores are good on the provincial exams? It’s hardly ever discussed.

I know teachers are some of most normie people you can imagine but they are complaining that teaching has become boring to them, and all the supervisors care about is that we focus on identities, and on certain issues. They’re looking at your year-long lesson plans, their looking at your unit plans and they’re saying “you’re not centring certain voices enough”. And it’s having an impact.

We’re all doing a little bit of this to get the administration off our back.

Do you remember the book burning scandal at an Ontario school board from a few months ago? A whole bunch of people had read that proposal and said Sure, that’s fine, let’s burn those books in the spirit of reconciliation.

No, that has completely passed me by! But I am not shocked. There are so many embarrassing stories coming out of Canada.

I know the public librarians get very evangelical about their collections. I’ve been hearing about The Catcher in the Rye being unacceptable for 20 years now. That’s one thing. It’s another thing to say it should be moved from your collection. They seem to misunderstand their role as public servants. You don’t get to be the arbiter of what we read.

I wanted to ask you about school librarians, because city librarians have been steadfast in their support for free speech and inquiry, and reader choice, at least in Toronto and Halifax.

School librarians are different, my impression is that they’re constantly culling books for reasons of anticipated offense.

We see the other side of the issue in the US, where the opposite side of the political spectrum is at the forefront of this anti-library activism and is demanding the removal of books like I am Jazz, or the Anti-Racist Baby, or the many “I have seven genders” type books etc.

I think that’s a good point. I think both sides are fuelling this, and nobody is having a conversation. I think there’s a tremendous value of having for example a book about a gay kid – I don’t think it automatically makes you a groomer, just because you recommend the book. I also have some empathy for some of the parents who maybe come from more traditional backgrounds who are freaking out when they see some of this stuff that’s being advocated for. And all you get from the other side is You’re clearly just homophobic and transphobic. Maybe it’s more complex than that? But there’s no discussion between the warring parties and no one trusts the experts any more because it just seems they’re ideologically captured.

Do you talk amongst colleagues about these things? Or are you all atomized?

Atomized. That’s what we are.

And the union is probably the last place you can bring these topics up.

Isn’t it crazy? No, we generally don’t talk about it amongst ourselves. There are people who will admit it but say This is what you have to do. And other people who say I’m just glad I can retire. And again, you’re very afraid of the evangelizers on staff. Everyone’s afraid of them. The administration is afraid of them too--unless they’re one of the evangelizers and they’re running the show together.