This Saskatchewan teachers strike is about something no one wants to say openly.
Passing kids who should have failed, mainstreaming everyone, overcrowding and not enough ESL are all part of “classroom complexity.” But we’ve had ample warning this was going to happen, from a guy I’ve known for 30 years. He wrote a book about this in 2010.
Believe it or not, I used to write opinion columns for 28 years on everything under the sun before launching Pipeline Online. And this teachers strike in Saskatchewan got under my skin enough that I had to write about it.
I agree, there are many, many problems in schools – some of them you mentioned. Two others – 1. Teachers are expected to teach topics that are more social engineering and which they are ill prepared for and at the cost of other topics that they are only OK prepared for. 2. I suspect that the push for smaller classroom sizes has less to do with improving outcomes and more to do with using up surplus teachers.
The research on classroom size is iffy at best – most studies supporting smaller classrooms don’t account for a wide number of influences from the experience of teachers (new teachers probably shouldn’t be teaching classes with 30 plus students because they just don’t have the experience in classroom management); class makeup (from new immigrants, to poor performing students, those with disabilities, but then all kids these days are classed as having some disability); to family support. When school finances are limited, the cost-benefit test any educational policy must pass is not “Does this policy have any positive effect?” but rather “Is this policy the most productive use of these educational dollars?” And tax dollars are always limited – I suspect we could give school boards all of the tax dollars and we still wouldn’t see any significant gains in outcomes. Refocusing the curriculum is a must and teachers need to have expertise in their topics they are teaching. Math teachers need a couple of university level classes in math, NOT how to teach math. If you don’t have the foundations in a topic, no matter how many classes on have on how to teach something is not going to result in students understanding math.
At one time, teachers retired around 55 after teaching for 30 odd years. Does that still hold, particularly after the last couple of years where inflation has hit everyone? I suspect more older teachers are hanging on for another couple of years to earn extra dollars and pump up their pensions (and not just teachers all older workers are reconsidering retirement); and it doesn’t appear to me that Education faculties are pulling back on graduating new teachers. So we have older teachers not leaving and new teachers entering the system, at the same time that the number of school age students are not rising really much (some from immigration but the days of even 3 kid families are gone). I suspect the teacher’s unions are pushing mandated smaller class sizes to use up the surplus teachers (and also retain their revenue source from union dues). Yes, there might be some shortages in some subject matter and in some locations, but how widespread is that? The government’s approach of letting school boards decide how big or small a class size is more appropriate as it can be flexible – have a lot of new teachers, small class sizes can be implemented; lots of new immigrants, same thing. I would be in favour of the government providing more funds to school boards that are experiencing more immigrant children.
But then I’m always suspicious when activists and unions use the line ‘its for the children’ because, to me, that means it is NEVER the children but the adults. Yes, teachers would like small number of kids in their classes – all professionals would like fewer clients to deal with, but there is never the financial resources to do that without omitting something else. What would that something else be – health services, social services, maybe roads, etc. etc. etc.
My wife is an elementary school teacher. In Oakland, CA (uggggh). Now class … I have a question for you … Would you rather …
a) Teach a classroom of 32 students who are well-behaved and eager to learn
or
b) Teach a classroom of 24 students, 6 of whom have severe mental and emotional problems and are a constant disruption to the classroom. And toss in 3 ESL learners who have no idea what you’re talking about.
My sweet, outstanding-teacher wife, would take those 32 kids all day long. Why? Because she already teaches those 24 kids … and it makes her job a living hell. She’s NOT a child psychologist, and she doesn’t speak Mongolian (yes, she’s had MULTIPLE FOB Mongolian students). Sweet kids from Mongolia … but.
Sadly, a large number of her students are broken … real mental cases … who make the learning environment difficult if not dangerous for the other kids. And the Principal and school Administration will NOT deal with these kids. The days of sending problem children to the Principals office is long gone. Why? Because your Leftist politicians, and Leftist School Administrators believe “too many black children are referred for discipline”. Well … perhaps they should focus on the parents … and not warehouse these kids in my wife’s classroom? Yes, these kids are just warehoused until they drop out of high school and begin committing crime in Oakland. The pipeline isn’t difficult to understand.
I would say class size is absolutely an issue. Anything in excess of thirty is unmanageable, and especially when they’re all over the map. If there were 34 kids all actually at the same grade level, sure. But they’re not. Not at all. As for your earlier points, Zwaagstra has written extensively about most if not all of them over the years, including all the progressive bovine feces.
I am of the age where most of my classes in Grade 1 – 8 were at least 35 kids and probably more since the class pictures had always 3 or 4 who didn’t make it to picture day. And looking at those pictures, I can now spot the kids who probably had ADHD and other learning disabilities or kids that were getting the crap beaten out of them at home, In Grade 7, our class was assigned to a portable IN EDMONTON IN WINTER. Learning wearing mittens is fun. I didn’t really learn to read until about Grade 3 because our family moved back and forth between provinces and I got missed. The teacher recognized it and put me and 3 or 4 other kids in a separate group and started us back with the Grade 1 reader. I was supposed to tell my parents but I didn’t and my mum only found out when she met my friend from group mum in the grocery store and she asked how i was doing. After that my mum, with her Grade 12 education from a rural school in the 1930s, read with me EVERY NIGHT to improve my reading – it worked and I now have a graduate degree. The difference were teachers that knew their topic of instruction and parents were engaged. As well, I think all the boys in my classes ended up in the trades (which they did very, very well in as in very, very well) rather than the current expectation that all if not most will go to university. The current k-12 system is biased towards girls and towards going to university – for most teachers, they have no experience themselves or through family members in another other than teaching so the students simply cannot be engaged in learning if they don’t see themselves going to university.
As I mentioned the research on class size is very iffy and discounts too many other influences in order to get to the results that teachers and their unions want. Classroom size is the least important thing that teachers should be negotiating now and focus needs to be on actual results.
When I went to school 60 years ago my class size was always 36. There was streaming and the retard class had as low as a dozen. Apparently that is discriminatory. Nowadays throw in kids with profound handicaps that used to go to special schools but now are in regular schools because socialization is more important than education. When there are no expectations you get no meaningful results. Why don’t they just print “Participant” on high school diplomas?
But you know no one can actually say any of that, right? Which is why I wrote the column.
I can’t recall what the class sizes were when I went to school but I do remember everyone was streamed. The occupational students took 2 years in high school. The next level went for four years, then, presumably, a college. The ‘brightest’ went to grade 13, then, presumably, to university. Years later, with grade 13 and 2 university degrees, my income was less than all the kids who had trades. And one day, while inspecting TCPL gas pipelines, I was told about the million dollar a year welders. Only the occupational students took welding classes….
There’s a reason for that. Most welders don’t live very long. Take a look at the UA Local 179 memorial page, and start counting how many make it 80, 70, 60… some don’t even make it out of their 50s. https://ualocal179.ca/memorial-news
So they’re paid well, but their lives are short.
Oh, I hear what you are saying totally! I knew a guy in the early 80’s, very smart, but was a mechanical contractor and had his boiler papers (I don’t know if I have the terminology correct). Walter worked all the hours God gave him, and would buy new homes, develop the basements, build a garage and live in them for 3-5 years before selling and then doing the same thing over again. He was ALWAYS going to night school to get some extra certificates. He did lots of mechanical work on commercial buildings, so much so, that he purchased a roofing company which specialized in commercial/industrial building roofs. He is a multi-millionaire and is “still giving his all” everyday.
My dad was a welder. He lived to 91. But he had macular degeneration, probably caused by welding. He was legally blind for his last 15 years, with only peripheral vision in one eye.
When my kids were young, the move towards whole word reading was in full swing. You didn’t have to be a genius to figure out that it was going to fail most students. The experts had reversed cause and effect when they studied the brightest students and how they achieved reading success. So, before kindergarten, I taught all of the kids the tried and true methods of learning to read, I used a modified phonics system (phonics plus memorizing exceptions to the rules).
Then discovery math started and, as someone who likes math and science, I could see it was as awful as whole word reading. So, I taught addition and multiplication tables using fun educational multimedia and I continued tutoring them in math and science as they got older.
It seems like parents constantly have to work against the fads and flaws of public school education – bad learning techniques, disruptive students, bad teachers and bullying. It is frustrating, exhausting and time consuming for parents and students. Our solution was to send them to a private school as soon as possible. Best decision ever. Better teaching, better communication with teachers, better classmates and any bullying or serious class disruption is shut down quickly. Repeatedly problematic students are not allowed to continue.
This doesn’t solve the problems in public schools but, frankly, I don’t think public schools have any way of fixing what’s gone wrong.
You don’t have to dig too deep to realize that the new advances in teaching are usually based on nothing more than a PHD dissertation but with little practical approaches. So you get discovery math, whole language and hugh groups of kids never learn to read or do math at a level that is useful. My mother could add a whole page of numbers in her head and she was taught in the one room school house in southeastern SK.
There is an instragram reel from a guy talking about common core math in the US and his conclusion is that its purpose is to use as much paper as possible to get to the answer that with old math would have gotten 10 pages ago. His example is someone coming to your front door, but rather than you let them in, you have to sent them to the backdoor (not because the front door doesn’t work), but they also have to go past several houses to the back alley and climb over your fence to get to the back door.
” My mother could add a whole page of numbers in her head and she was taught in the one room school house in southeastern SK.”
One of my grandmothers was a teacher in one room schoolhouses in SW Saskatchewan. My small country school had 2 grades being taught per classroom by one teacher (except kindergarten) . You learned to concentrate on your own studies and tune out the other grade when they were being taught. My MIL was a teacher in the US and she gave us some workbooks she used as a primary schoo teacher. Very old school and dry but effective and to the point.
I agree that the education system makes learning needlessly complicated as in your front door/back door imagery. Using kids as guinea pigs for novel experimental learning ideas can sabatoge their formative years of learning…and you can’t get those years back.
Thanks for straying outside your usual ambit. I think experimenting with public education has been catastrophic, especially for boys. But meddlers gotta meddle. So many of my favourite writers failed or dropped out of school… Roy McGregor, Tobias Wolfe, Thomas King. And so many teachers are there because of the excellent pay, early retirement with an option to work as a supply teacher, and the insane amount of time off they get. I appreciate the solid grounding I received as a boomer going through school in the 60s and 70s. I think anything my son learned that helped him in life came from his father and me, and the team sports he played. School these days is socialization and the public system is overwhelmed by kids who have never been parented.
Teaching is a hard job – I don’t deny that, but so is every professional job. All professionals want to work with smaller groups of their clients, but if you choose to work in the public sector, public taxpayer dollars will always have to be balanced.
If you want smaller classes, become a tutor, or go work for Oxford Learning – but you actually have to produce results or parents will be really, really annoyed.
I agree with you on all counts.
I’ve been debating whether I should open up my writing again. Wrote that weekly column from 1992 onward. Started in Grade 11. Got five columnist of year awards before I switched to a paper that wasn’t part of the awards system. Who knows? See how this goes. Going well, so far.
Well someone has to stop accommodating kids that aren’t handicapped.
First take away their phones, give the kids the grade they earn, and expect something out of them for Pete’s sake. Quit artificially propping up girls , and little a bit of a fire under some male ass– wouldn’t hurt either
But it starts with the parents, quit coddling your kids, and driving decent teachers nuts.
A teacher had to phone my nephews wife and ask permission if she could challenge her son. Thankfully his mom has challenged the smart little bugger from birth.
Parents challenging their kids has given way to accommodating them, schools have followed, and now I see it happening in the workplace before they have even tried to earn their wage. I see younger experienced workers give up trying to teach some new hires much of anything. They have an attention span of an insect, are so used to having smoke blew up their a–, that they can’t comprehend having to earn the respect of their peers by actually paying attention and doing something.
My guess is that many of the good teachers bailed during Covid.
Maybe I’m wrong but I feel sorry for some kids I know going into teaching that grew up not being pampered, they’ll probably be spending more time keeping parents off their backs , then teaching kids much of anything other then how to be a proper vegetable (Post Modern Liberal).
I think the STF has lost it’s mind. I honestly believe it’s goal, by forceing the Gov’t to directly negotiate classroom conditions, is to eliminate School boards and any regional input into the Schools. The STF wants complete and total control over education, removing parents, and regional management of education.
And they want inflationary increases in wages each year + and additional 2% each year? Really? Greedy much?
I get it is a hard job, but they are actually try to cause inflation with their ask in this contract. And they want to take away parents input and regional input into the education system.
I think it’s so bad, even the good parents don’t want to admit how bad it is. Many dads do and a few moms I know. But I quit bringing it up knowing how hard it must be for them , other then telling them to keep the i pads and especially cell phones away from their kids as long as they can, and that their kids will be fine.
I’m so glad teachers weren’t our friends , we where taught to be individuals, our parents worked along with the teachers, we didn’t have cell phones, and real consequence wasn’t left out of the teaching by most adults in our lives. Covering my a– with my hand never killed me. I actually had the pleasure of saying thank you to my grade 3 teacher at least 30 years after the fact of having been put over her knee in front of the class along with two other boys that decided to go exploring at the end of the field day when we should have been getting on the bus . I couldn’t believe she was still alive, but I was sincerely thankful.
And looking around today so lucky, adults had realistic concrete expectations, and we caught on young because we didn’t have a choice.
What the teachers’ strike is really about is more money and power for the teachers’ union, and as a side effect more money for senior teachers. Period.
Spare me the class size debate. It’s irrelevant to educational outcomes and always has been. When teachers demand smaller class sizes what they mean is “the union told me to demand this because it will make my life easier, and I’m too myopic to realize the real goal is to increase the number of teachers and therefore the number of people paying union dues and voting the way the union wants”.
LC Bennett and MJM have indirectly indicated the one factor that actually matters in school success: parental investment. It’s virtually the only thing that matters. It’s such a huge factor that it wipes out socioeconomic status and even language proficiency. If the parents are invested and involved in their child’s academic success, then their child will succeed.
Teachers (and especially teachers’ unions) don’t like this because it highlights that teachers by and large are nowhere near as important as they like to think they are.
My father taught me a simple rule to apply to my life.
If the unions like something, you don’t.
If the unions don’t like something, you do.
It was the best lesson that I ever learned.
Yup. Tried and tested methods of instruction that withstood two millennia have been completely tossed in two generations and the results are here for all to see.
From Aristotle, to the Astronauts … to arseholes. In the blink of an eye.
I see you got my point on that.
Been pointing it out to family members who are teachers for years and years. 🙂
Matter of fact, here’s a comment I made on SDA a couple of years ago :
Jamie MacMaster
May 21, 2022 at 6:18 pm
Yup, brave new world. Processes that stood the test of time from Aristotle to astronauts have no place in a civilization where idiots vote to be ruled by arseholes.
Libertarians have always known how to fix the schools…and pretty much every other institution for that matter.
Vouchers Now!
90% of what goes on in government schools is the antithesis of education.
Fact:
U.S spends more on education than any other country (2014: $16,268 a year per student) There is no correlation between money spent and education outcomes.
BTW, my second grade class had 60 students.
From what I see on the internet Chicago spends $30,000 and New York City spends $40,000 per student. Alberta spends something like 13,000 Canadian yen or about $10,000 US. I don’t get it. I suspect Alberta does pretty well comparatively.
What if, as Ivan Illich, John Holt and John Taylor Gatto have been saying for decades, the schools can’t be fixed because they are WAD (Working As Designed)?
Yet most teachers lean way left and vote left. They, more than anyone else should be totally aware of what the problems are. Yes their union is lefty, but they don’t have to be.
Hard to argue with success so I did a shallow dive on what makes Finland so successful.
Some things I like…some I don’t. I like that teachers are highly revered not unlike doctors and must possess a Masters degree and only the very best are recruited. Chuckleheads only looking for a paycheque at the expense of the student need not apply.
Finnish teachers like Canada and the U.S. are unionized but that’s where the similarity ends. They’re partners…not adversaries. Someone get the smelling salts for Randi Weingarten.
You’d have to be living under a rock not to realize North American schools are simply Communist hothouses.
Anyways.
https://www.edunation.co/blog/finnish-education-system-the-best-in-the-world/
“Growth mindset isn’t the only fad in our schools. Learner-centred pedagogy, often called student-centred instruction, is also hugely popular. In essence, learner-centred pedagogy requires that students should, to the greatest degree possible, direct their own learning. It’s often summarized by the popular slogan that a teacher should be a guide on the side rather than a sage on the stage.”
_______________________________________
You need not look any further than this philosophy to discover why there are discipline issues. School is a collaborative effort. The students are there to learn. The teachers are there to teach. But, that’s where the collaboration ends. Obviously, the lesson plans should be tailored to the capabilities of the class (which is a solid argument for compartmentalizing students based on performance). Such “segregation” is a necessity to assure that the lower performing students grasp the basics, and the higher performing students are encouraged to achieve new heights. Intermingling these groups lowers the potential of both groups which is the calling card of the equity proponents.
Additionally, teachers are a vehicle of example. They should exemplify what is trying to be achieved. It makes me cringe when I see teachers using improper grammar and slang in their necessity to advertise themselves on social media. I see the bright blue hair, and the multitude of piercings/ tattoos and I know were I a student again, I wouldn’t be able to take them seriously or trust their judgement in how it pertains to my education. The only example they would instill would be what I don’t want to be.
In short, I’m pretty sure I would spend a significant amount of time in detention for pointing out truths and failings. I come from a family filled with educators in the public school system. Parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents and even a great-grandparent who founded his own school and built the damn thing with his own money. I recently posed a question to my 87 year old aunt. “What do you think of today’s public school system?” Her response: “I’d probably be unemployed or in jail by now. My students were there to learn from me. And, if someone violated that process, they would be sitting in the principal’s office explaining why they can’t behave.”
The biggest problem is too many malcontents just have to leave their mark. They’re not happy with keeping things running smoothly, they have to literally urinate on everything.
According to the STF, the ratio of students to classroom teachers has increased from 18.6 to 20.4 – begging the question of why they are complaining about classroom sizes of 30? is it a misapplication of resources, or something else?
Second, “curriculum consultants” do not improve teaching, but pays some teachers extra to implement the latest fads in education, thus justifying the jobs of both the consultant and the people developing these experimental techniques.
A few years before the end of what was a 23 year Army career, a Major at the ripe old age of 45, I was contemplating what to do with myself post-military. One thing I enjoyed most in my career was being a Course Officer. Though section commanders did the bulk of instruction at section level, there were some cases where I took the opportunity to teach classes to whole platoons. The only training I had to teach was a 5 day ‘methods-of-instruction’ course. I enjoyed the classroom experience enough that I decided becoming a teacher would be a good 2nd career.
So, about 3 years before leaving the military, I started taking classes at the University of Saskatchewan in the College of Education, as a part-time mature student. I eventually graduated in 2004. (Most of what I had to take was useless for teaching skills – I learned more on that 5 day military course – but that’s another story).
Right about the time I was graduating, both Saskatoon school boards were complaining about the lack of male teachers, somebody from the Public School Board was even on TV and radio, talking about the need for male role models for the male students. So, perfect situation, right? Middle aged new male teacher, retired senior Army Officer, with a lifetime of real-world experience…good candidate for male role model? Wrong! From my graduating class, the Public school board hired at least 4 early 20’s women, and I believe none of my male classmates. As best I could tell, they were hired because…their mom’s and/or dads were teachers. I did get on with a Regina school board for a year, only as a substitute. But there was no hope for full-time for at least another year. I moved back to Saskatoon, and eventually worked for the Provincial Government, unrelated to teaching, until I retired last year.
So after being a sub, what did you think of the thrust of the column? On the mark or bovine feces?
Yeah, my minimal amount of training as a CIC officer was almost all about instructional technique. That would have been 2002-04 I took that training. But it was helpful. I was TRG O for six of seven years at 43 RCACS The Battlefords.
I’m old enough to remember when there was a ‘push’ for including mentally or emotionally challenged in the classrooms, because it was thought the socialization would be good for them – less stigmatizing for them than being segregated or excluded. I’m not sure if it is effective for an individual, but from my experience interning and subbing, they can be a disruptive influence on the entire rest of the class. I had one student during my internship, in a class of 32, who caused more issues on his own than the entire rest of the class, even though he had his own TA. On the rare days he wasn’t there the large class would move smoothly, and the kids (grade 11). were eager. But on the days he was there, you could see the frustration in the other students. So, I think we need to go back to the old days of segregating the disruptive students, for the benefit of those who want to learn. The alternative is dragging all the students down to the lowest common denominator.
Mugs posted this earlier today on the “Survey says” thread. It explains the deplorable state of affairs in our schools.
“And as long as little Jane and John are smiling and patted on the head.
Many mom’s and dad’s are happy and don’t question much.”
Having had the joy of watching from the sidelines for nearly two decades…my wife is an educator’s assistant in an Ontario K-8 school…I can confidently state the public school system is nothing more than a steaming pile of refuse ablaze in a dumpster. It wasn’t always that bad, since up to a several years ago uncontrollable little sods with shitty parent(s) were quickly and easily ejected from the classroom whenever the kid had a meltdown and would be sent home to play XBox so my wife could work with another student who’s truly in need and whose parents actually give a flying you-know-what about their kid’s education. Not any more. Now the kids truly in need often take a back seat and never get help since, it seems, the primary purpose of today’s EA is to keep the classroom mayhem…namely that screaming, biting, hitting, pencil stabbing, chair throwing brat in sore need of a swift backhand…down to a manageable level. Manageable level usually entails getting the kid in the throes of a meltdown out of the classroom and into an empty room made expressly for the purpose of (trashing) blowing off steam and then get him/her/it back into the classroom until it melts down again. And that’s just the primary and intermediate kids…many of these useless sods eventually move on to bigger and better things once they hit high school, like self-identifying as animals or requiring daily visits by the local constabulary.
Many of the kids deemed by the board to require an EA – mostly due to developmental delay often caused by parent lifestyle and/or shitty parenting – arguably have no place in a classroom with their so-called peers and often times not at all in the same school. Then there’s the severely developmentally delayed kids, many of whom who’ll never even graduate to wiping their own arse…not joking here, that have their own classroom complete with tens of thousands of dollars worth of specialized equipment along with a certified teacher and a couple of EAs…and usually most of them don’t want the assignment.
It’s all a horrible waste of money…at least three quarters of a million a year just in my wife’s school alone once the supply staff (if the school can actually get supply EAs…since most of the supply staff know which schools to avoid) costs for at least 1/4 of the EA staff who are maxing out their leave and sick time because they’re pretty much sick of this shit are factored.
In case it’s not at all clear to you by now…home school.
So,the system is working as planned then.
“Public Education” just like “Free Public Healthcare” and “Good Government”..
A lie and a corruption.
50 years ago it was just putting in time,serving a sentence for a crime I never committed..
12 years of terminal boredom..
I survived ,just..And eventually found a trade that interested me…
But then I could read and write and use arithmetic, when I made my escape.
Looking at todays texts,the kids are doomed.
Forward,to our glorious future.
Funny how a Democracy depends on having well educated citizens,capable of understanding their own self interests..
Indoctrinated morons…those are extremely dangerous.