A Teacher Blogs

A group of activists opposed to the 2015 Ontario Health and Physical Education Curriculum met with Premier Kathleen Wynne on April 29th demanding a withdrawal of the document.  They walked away empty-handed. Left to right: Gwen Landolt, Jotvinder Sodhi, Lorraine La Vigne and Maggie Amin look on. Photo: Lianne Laurence / LifeSiteNews LifeSiteNews had this to say: Speaking at an informal press conference outside Queen’s Park, the six vowed Ontario parents will keep fighting an odious curriculum they say will incalculably harm their children by exposing them to explicit sexual information far too early. As well as (Gwen) Landolt, national vice-president of REAL Women of Canada, the group included Jotvinder Sodhi of the Mississauga-based HOWA Voice of Parents , Feras Marish, representing the Muslim community, Christina Lui of the Chinese-Canadian Parents Alliance of Ontario , Maggie Amin, and Lorraine La Vigne. TheRebel.Media was there too. From Emily Pratt's ...

It was inevitable.  Following the airing of the Bruce Jenner interview on ABC News , the atmosphere was ripe a backlash of ugly, reactive commentary. And I suspected it would be used to buttress the non-fact-based campaign against  Ontario Health and Physical Education curriculum . What I had not expected was the ammunition would be would be the horrendous tragedy of David Reimer . Gender Identity and John Money  tells the story of David Reimer , born 1965, whose penis was irrevocably damaged in a botched circumcision, setting the stage for a life of torment and indignity, culminating with his suicide. The author of the blog post is Lou Iacobelli, a devout Catholic, parents rights advocate, and a retired teacher. In fact I took eleventh grade English with him nearly forty years ago. On the essential facts of the case, I don't dispute what Mr Iacobelli posted: Psychologist and sexologist John Money told young David's parents that he could give their chi...

Peel District School Board Chair  Janet McDougald just became one of my heroes. For being forthright about the efforts of a handful of hardline religionists to hijack the discussion of Ontario Health & Physical Education Curriculum . Speaking to the Toronto Star's Louise Brown , she says: “A small fraction are intentionally misleading people (about the curriculum),” she said, “but the vast majority are confused and upset about what they’re reading and we need the (education) minister to work more aggressively at providing parents the answers they need to feel comfortable about it going forward.” Right on both counts. The "small fraction" consists of representatives of a number of organizations: The Institute for Canadian Values , Campaign Life Coalition , The Parental Rights in Education Defense Fund (PRIEDF) , and Public Education Advocates for Christian Equity (PEACE) . There's a couple of new kids on the block: Parents Alliance of Ontario ; HOWA CRP , le...

The incendiary rhetoric around the 2015 Ontario Health and Physical Education curriculum is not without purpose. It's meant to scare people -- to vote Conservative (preferably hardline religionist); to bring new converts to the Pro Life movement, which is also anti-queer; and to put that upstart lesbian Premier in her place. One of the outcomes I was expecting was a push for homeschooling, as an expression of religious belief and parental rights.  And then I found this. The event is hosted by All Saints of North America Orthodox Church in Hamilton, Ontario. The church's website lists Rev. Geoffrey Korz as the "Priest-in-Charge." Father Geoffrey's email is on the flier. The Orthodox Priest is also listed as the  Orthodox Christian Chaplain at McMaster University . The outspoken Father Geoffrey offered his two-cents-worth in  September of 2012, when Dr Steve Tourloukis  announced he was suing the Hamilton-Wentworth District School B...

Saw this today. More than 100 000 parents from across Ontario have signed petitions opposing @Kathleen_Wynne 's sex-ed agenda. Parents will be heard. #PCPO — Monte McNaughton (@MonteMcNaughton) April 21, 2015 and this. I'll be presenting the first of thousands of petitions at Queen's Park from Ontario parents opposing @Kathleen_Wynne 's sex-ed agenda. #PCPO — Monte McNaughton (@MonteMcNaughton) April 21, 2015 And then I looked at this press conference from January 27th, 2013, the day after Premier Wynne won the Liberal leadership convention. Just before the fourteen-minute mark, the Premier said that the Health and Physical Education curriculum was coming back. Then she got elected to a majority and brought the curriculum back. Then I looked at some of the petitions. There's a few of them out there. I found four of note: Stop Ontario's graphic new sex-ed program from LifeSiteNews: 69,139 Parents As First Educators : 56384 Protect Our Kids fr...

I stumbled across a piece from Mclean's magazine, Here’s the craziest fact about Ontario’s sex-ed curriculum . I'll save time. As of February 2015, when the updated curriculum was revealed, the 1998 version in the oldest in the country .  The 1998 curriculum actually didn't roll out until 1999.  But here's why this article is really interesting -- to me, anyway: Here’s a short list of things we didn’t have in 1999: We didn’t have YouTube , or even the first iPod , much less Facebook and Twitter and other future boxes like that... You couldn’t tap credit cards to make payments; heck, you couldn’t tap anything on your cellphone, other than tapping out a text message—and, if you were lucky, you had the predictive functions of T9 texting , so that you didn’t have to just press the 5 button three times just to type the letter L. USB flash drives didn’t exist... Never mind the fact that Snapchat and other social media wasn’t around, as Sandals noted—computers as we...

1950s Sex Education LP Recording I was reading up on some of the groups that participated in the April 14th My Child My Choice protest against the Ontario's 2015 Health and Physical Education Curriculum. A group calling themselves The Well Informed Parent caught my eye. From their website:  "We are parents representing parents. We have drawn on the considerable skill sets of many parents - such as educators, lawyers, concerned parents and medical professionals. That way we can be well equipped to make informed decisions in regards to our children's education and well-being." To this end, The Well Informed Parent has come up with alternatives to contested components of Human Development and Sexual Health   and other sections of the curriculum at various grades. To summarize, here are the most hotly contest contested components, as reported back in 2010 by Kathryn Blaze Carlson for the National Post : Grade 1: Identify body parts, including genitalia (pe...