A Teacher Blogs

It was a soggy Sunday, June 28th, this past summer when I met the Premier of Ontario, Kathleen Wynne. We were at the annual Toronto Pflag Pride Brunch, which takes place the morning of the Toronto Pride Parade, capping the nine-day festival. I was actually very excited to meet Ms Wynne; although I have never voted Liberal federally or provincially and harbour reservations about the Liberal Government. As well, in the last three years, relations between the federations that represent public educators, like me, and the Province have been quite strained . I was happy to meet her nonetheless. Yours truly and Premier Wynne. June 28, 2015. Having introduced myself, I began: "Premier, I'm an elementary teacher, and I know we've had our differences, but that's for another time. I want to tell you now as a teacher, a parent, and a member of the LGBT community how proud and grateful I am that you have stood firm on launching the 2015 Health and Physical Education curric...

Twenty years ago, while attending a conference on equity for post-secondary educators, I happened to meet an Anishnaabe woman who had been a survivor of Canada's residential school system. Along with her siblings and friends, she had been taken from family and community and placed in a government funded school operated by the Catholic Church. (The United and Anglican Churches of Canada also operated such schools.) The purpose of the system was to Canadianize her -- to remove all vestiges of her aboriginal heritage. During our conversation, she described beatings, verbal abuse and sexual assault.  What stands out vividly in my recollection of our conversation was a rule of the school's dining hall requiring students to retrieve and eat any scraps deemed edible by the staff from a slop bucket they scraped their plates into.  We were eating dinner later when she teasingly admonished me to clean my plate. Then she had to push her own plate away. The memory of the slop bucket ...

The Toronto Star editorial of Friday, May 1st, 2015, Ontario must stay the course on sex education , marks the second time recently that a major media outlet has called out Charles McVety on his fear mongering over the 2015 Ontario Health & Physical Education curriculum. The first was when author and broadcaster Michael Coren made a hearty meal of the evangelist on CBC's Power and Politics .  Here's what The Star had to say: Meanwhile, anti-sex education monger Charles McVety, leader of the Institute of Canadian Values, is twisting the curriculum’s new focus on “consent” by saying that “teachers will be forced to teach little children how to give permission for that child to engage in sex.” The curriculum actually teaches kids how to say “no” and to understand the concept of consent before engaging in sex. McVety is no newcomer to the anti-sex ed camp. He so successfully whipped up opposition to the curriculum when it was first proposed in 2010 that Wynne’s ...

Some parents across Ontario will be keeping their children home from school Monday, May 4th thru Thursday, May 8th in protest of Ontario's Health and Physical Education curriculum, which is set to launch in September of 2015.  Parents & Students on strike: one week no school is meant to call attention to the number of parents who oppose the curriculum -- a portent of things to come. So, it's a boycott of something that hasn't happened yet. The campaign has spread beyond the GTA. Following, a report from CTV Windsor . Unlike the suggested letter to school from the ParentStrike.com website, the Windsor group is requesting assignments be sent home to facilitate home schooling. The Windsor board has officially it won't be sending work home. Nor should they; it's not the job of the taxpayer funded school to facilitate homeschooling. Teachers provide classroom education, not distance education. School boards commenting thus far have said...

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...

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...

Over the last few years, I've been tracking some of the commentary of Phil Lees , a retired educator, former leader of the moribund The Family Coalition Party of Ontario , and self-described parent rights activist. Mr Lees has spoken extensively about Bill 13 -- The Accepting Schools Act of Ontario (2012) , the 2010/2015 Ontario Ministry of Education Health and Physical Education Curriculum , and the impact of same-sex marriage in Canada, as he sees it. He is particularly fond of telling an anecdote about mock same-sex wedding ceremonies performed in grade three classrooms, and that will be the subject of this open letter to Mr Lees. April 5, 2015 Mr Phil Lees Director Public Education Advocates for Christian Equity 2621 Hwy 56 P.O. Box 306 Binbrook, ON L0R 1C0 Dear Mr Lees, I am writing to you to enquire about comments you've made several times regarding the conducting of mock same-sex wedding ceremonies in Ontario grade three classrooms. You've alluded to this in se...