A Teacher Blogs

" Ontario Parents Alert! Check your Imams and Leaders ," warns Jawed Anwar  on his Seerah School website. The link leads to an article entitled "How the Accepting (Biased) School Act Will Affect You and Your Children." The tone is alarmist and conspiratorial -- like much of Mr Anwar's prose on the site.  BILL  13  is an act (law) now; Accepting School Act. It is a biased act promoting homosexuality and seven-gender sex in public funded school. It is not an anti-bullying act as told by some politicians. It is promoting gender fluidity by denying the gender of birth. It is a culture-shift mandate to embrace the homosexual agenda. It is an act to corrupt the minds and souls of young children. The " Bill 13 " he refers to is Ontario's Accepting Schools Act, 2012 . The Act, as I blogged before , updates the The Education Act of Ontario, expanding the definition of bullying; enabling administrators to issue greater consequences to students who bully...

One Friday evening in late October, I found a scan of a flier on a friend's Facebook wall. The flier, I later learned, had been handed out to residents of the Thorncliffe Park neigbourhood in Toronto's east end. Its purpose: To caution parents about implementation of Ontario's " Accepting School's Act ," also known as Bill 13 , which passed its final reading on June 15th, 2012 and is scheduled to be fully implemented by February 2013. But your kids will now be forced to learn the 'Same sex life of style' without informing their parents. This new educational policy [sic] completely against our social, moral and religious faith. Throughout the Curriculum," you will notice shocking changes which will change not only the behaviour of our kids but also the behaviour of  our whole society. In other words, according to the authors of the flier: The great queering of Ontario's school children has begun. Let me backtrack: T...

The story of Hamilton, Ontario dentist Dr Steve Tourloukis' quest to be informed in advance of "lessons taught in school which promote views contrary to our faith" has made the rounds of news services and the blogosphere . Dr Tourloukis, who is Greek Orthodox, is quoted in a  Toronto Star newspaper article published on September 11, 2012: “I’m not an extremist, but I must ensure that my children abstain from certain activities that may include lessons which promote views contrary to our faith,” said Tourloukis, who is supported by a group called the Parental Rights in Education Defense Fund. “We know other denominations like Jehovah’s Witnesses and Muslims are excused for certain activities. Does our being Christian disqualify us from equitable treatment?” Dr Tourloukis is suing the Hamilton-Wentworth District School Board over its refusal to grant him advance notice of instruction on topics he has submitted to his children's school for his approval. According to ...

November 16, 2011 I was clearing out old computer files, as well as the cobwebs in my brain, when I stumbled across this article I published twenty years ago next month. It was a Q&A with US author, activist, and educator Jonathan Kozol. It resonates with me today because of the changes that have taken place in my own life over the past two decades. By this time, I had worked for several years as an adult educator -- most recently at Frontier College, a national literacy agency and Canada's oldest adult learning institution. I had just left Frontier to accept a post in the English department at George Brown College in Toronto. Ten years later, following a lay-off, I would find myself newly-graduated from teachers' college and working for the Toronto District School Board. And today, having spent much of my second teaching career in the inner-city, Kozol's words hold a new meaning for me. Interview with author Jonathan Kozol by Gordon W.E. Nore The Progressive magazine M...