NANCY REYNOLDS/Reflections
This is an open letter to columnists and small thinkers who enjoy depicting teachers as lounging around in deck chairs at the cottage while lesser mortals toil. They applaud legislation that will allow government to dictate the terms of a “collective agreement”when there is nothing either collective or agreement about it.
In the interest of full disclosure, I was elected to a school board twice and served six years as a trustee, and I have a school teacher in my family. I learned how hard school teachers work and how long their days can be.
To those who write columns – how long is your vacation? How long does it take you to grind out your prose and how many people do you answer to while you accomplish this? How often are you kicked, punched or bitten while you work? How much of your work do you do at home after hours and how much do you contribute financially to your workplace? How often are you exposed to illness by those around you? How many sick days do you receive?
Teachers contribute heavily to their own pensions, do you?
A reality is that many teachers agree totally to a two year wage freeze. It is the fringe benefit packages that are at issue – all negotiated in the past in the full gaze of the public.
It is important to have the facts right. For many, many years local teachers have NOT been able to amass sick days for a payout at retirement. This was negotiated OUT of the agreement years ago in this and several other jurisdictions. It may still apply to Toronto boards.
Teachers are constantly exposed to illness because parents do not keep sick kids at home and germs spread in the close quarters of the classroom. They need sufficient sick time to account for this. One minor surgery would wipe out the time offered by the government.
These days governments run schools and parents run schools and public opinion influences schools. Teachers are subjected to all of this.
Your children are in the care of teachers more waking hours than you as a parent. They are expected today to teach the curriculum and to impart life skills that used to be taught by parents. In some places their safety is a consideration as more and more violence invades schools.
Teachers hear a lot and see a lot and care a lot. They have been known to feed and clothe kids in need and they strive to find help for those who have trouble learning. This aid comes from educational assistants who work with kids facing their own challenges. These EAs will also have their meager salaries frozen.
Does this recent government initiative encourage anybody to join the profession? Are we taking any steps to reward initiative or are we enshrining mediocrity. What do we want from the educational system and how are we encouraging it?
As for influencing byelections – be careful Mr. McGuinty. You may think people care little for teachers and you will be applauded. You may be surprised to learn people care even less about you.
Teachers are not the enemy.
4 Comments on "Reflections: Try learning the facts, and you’ll see teachers are not the enemy"
While I have no argument that the majority of teachers work hard, it might be fitting to remind the columnist that the unions worked hard to put Mr. McGuinty into power, not once, not twice, but three times. In my opinion if you elected someone to office – in this case – many times, then you have no one to blame but yourselves.
If you think McGuinty has been honest with Ontarians (he’d never raise taxes… he’d never flip-flop on the collective bargaining process…) then you’ve been living in a fool’s paradise for far too long. He’s been dishonest with the public for coming up on a decade. Surely, anyone with an ounce of common sense after his first term would have realized you couldn’t trust the man.
Since the columnist is also intent on honing in on the hazards of the workplace – in this place, catching all and sundry from children whose parents are intent on sending them to school when ill, it’s only going to get worse with all-day kindergarten. In my opinion, all day daycare.
Having said that, the illness argument is ridiculous. You can acquire the same from just about any profession where there are large numbers of people in a confined space. Nurses, doctors, any health care worker, for that matter.
I’ve heard many teachers grumble that they have missed their own children’s activities, such as Christmas concerts, because they were attending their own students’ concerts at the school where they are employed. These teachers, however, have never had to work stat holidays… Christmas, Easter, New Year’s, Family Day, etc., as any shift worker has. Talk to a few shift workers and ask them how many events and holidays they’ve had to miss. Ever spent Christmas at your place of employment?
As for McGuinty turning off those considering the teaching profession, this is also far-fetched. Take a look at the numbers of university graduates scrambling to get into teachers’ college or finding a job as a teacher. There are far too many individuals for the numbers of open positions in this province.
As to warning McGuinty? Well, if you voted for this fool who has brought this province to its knees, then you can blame yourselves. (And the argument, “It’s all about the kids” just doesn’t fly anymore.) McGuinty has been inappropriately generous with unions, including the teachers’ union, until he realized after the Drummond Report that the province is ruined. Suddenly, he has to stop squandering tax payers’ monies, stop the unions’ demands and now the members are up in arms.
To argue that teachers work hard and are subjected to day to day ‘illnesses’ because of so many children being sent to school ill, is hardly a worthy argument in the larger scheme.
Some of us realized early on that McGuinty was, well, how can I put this delicately… Disingenuous? Deceitful? Duplicitous? A hypocrite?
You voted for him? That’s your tough luck, but sadly, the rest of us have had to live with his disastrous governing for far too long. Welcome to the club.
The columnist who wrote the above article is nothing short of being terribly naive.
Let’s look at some of the other “facts”. What other job gives you 11 weeks vacaton? I worked in business for many years and the maximum vacation after many years of loyal service was four weeks. What other job allows employees to retire early with a full pension? I know retired teachers who have retired early and after factoring clothes, transportation, etc. are making about the same in retirement as they did while working! What other industry increases salaries, not for doing an outstanding job, but for belonging to a union?
Nothing about the perks teachers get? Wow – what a balanced article.
Three Thoughts On This Subject:
1. When it comes to teachers, the 80/20 rule is absolutely true. Eighty percent of the work (volunteering, extracurricular activities) is done by twenty percent of any teaching staff. It was true at any school that I attended, the same teachers volunteered for everything all the time. It irks me to no end that the not-so-good teachers, the ones who do the bare minimum to get by, hide behind the ones that go above and beyond.
2. Teachers are paid well and have many perks. I am not saying they don’t deserve it, but, like the rest of Ontario, they need to do their part to curb spending. Quite frankly, their right to strike should be taken away, it should be deemed an essential service (our federal gov’t even ordered CP rail and Air Canada back to work for the harm it could do to the economy – do you honestly think it’s ever “right” for teachers to go on strike? What of the harm to our children teachers care so much about?).
3. There are a lot of young people waiting to get a teaching job in Ontario. Why do so many people want to be a teacher?? Perhaps it’s because they can reach top pay scale after 15 years at a salary in and around $90,000 and have all holidays and summers off?? Maybe it’s the comfortable pension? That’s all the evidence needed to show that teachers are well compensated, the fact that it is a very sought after profession.