A Teacher Blogs

The big talk today is the  Sex Ed protest at Queen's Park , organized by  Campaign Life Coalition , but I wanted to take a look back at last Saturday's protest at Valley Park MS,  organized by Thorncliffe Parents Association, which had already staged a protest in  Thorncliffe Park on March 14th . Reports  LifeSiteNews , "the Premier managed to slip away through a fire emergency exit rather than face her constituents." Valley Park Protest -- LifeSiteNews To be fair, the Premier tried talking to protestors days before. It looked like this. From the  Toronto Star : "...Wynne said she believed the  Mississauga event  was organized behind the scenes by federal Tory activists trying to use sex education as a wedge issue to fan parental fears. And she is braced for more of the same in the months leading up to a federal election this fall." Mississauga Protest -- Toronto Star It's not a stretch to make that conclusion, with several f...

Elvira Kurt's widely circulated Facebook rant about Jian Ghomeshi's early attempts to spin allegations of assault into rough-and-kinky-but-consensual-sex is perhaps best-framed in the following quotation from her post:  …submitting a sex tape as proof of consent… that’s some next level delusion right there. She was alluding to a meeting that took place at CBC headquarters in which Ghomeshi showed his bosses video on his smart phone in an attempt to prove that nothing was amiss in popular broadcaster's bedroom. That was last November, and horrified CBC execs severed their relationship with now-former host of CBC radio's Q program. Several women and one man have come forward with allegations against Ghomeshi. A number of them have made complaints to police. And the one-time front-man of Moxie Fruvous is now on bail pending trial. Fast-foward to January of 2015, when the battle over Ontario's sex education curriculum begins anew. In the midst of what would see...

Back in April 2010, most Ontarians probably didn't know the name Benjamin Levin, who had been the Provincial Deputy Minister of Education during the development of the 2010 Health curriculum. Before that, Dr Levin served as Deputy Minister of Advanced Education and also of Education, Training and Youth from 1999 through 2002 in Manitoba. The OISE -- University of Toronto professor would go on to work on Kathleen Wynne's transition team when she became Premier. That changed in July of 2013, when Levin was arrested by Toronto Police Services, following investigations in London, Ontario and New Zealand. All tolled, Mr Levin was finally charged with seven counts of child exploitation, including charges of possessing and accessing child pornography. Before I proceed, let's be clear. There is indeed a place for moral outrage in this story, and that has to do with Ben Levin's conduct. The charges against Mr Levin are serious and disturbing to anyone with a grain of dece...

When Kathleen Wynne was first sworn in as Premier of Ontario on January 23, 2013, she had already indicated plans to re-introduce the 2010 Health Curriculum, which her predecessor, former Premier Dalton McGuinty, had withdrawn . Following her party's return to majority status in June of 2014, the only question was when. That answer in the late fall of 2014, with Premier Wynne and Education Minister Liz Sandals promising to have the updated sexual health components online for September 2015. How did the original curriculum get killed, and how did it take five years to make a return? Here's the backstory. As I previously blogged here , in April 2010, the Ontario government -- led by then-Premier Dalton McGuinty -- launched an ill-fated revision to the 1998 Health and Physical Education document. I say, "ill-fated," because the Premier would withdraw the curriculum within two days, later replacing it with an interim document -- minus content deemed too controversi...