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...

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...

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...

Ben Levin at his plea hearing. Source: The National Post newspaper. This past week brought news of former Deputy Education Minister Ben Levin's guilty plea  in connection with a series of charges related to child pornography. The details of his case had not been known, apart from charges of making and distributing child pornography, as well as counselling an undercover officer online to perform sex acts on a child. The actual statement of facts heard in court on the day of the hearing is vile beyond description -- from the sharing of imagery depicting a child victim to the jaw-dropping revelation that Mr Levin told an undercover officer (posing as a mother seeking stories of sex with children) that he had used his own daughters for gratification with his wife's support. If there is any saving grace, police found no basis for this latter fiction; however, Levin's closest family are left to suffer in the knowledge that they were used as background characters in his play...

Source: Morocco World News Anyone who devotes time, as I do, to tracking the progress of equity, particularly as it pertains to gender and sexuality, in public education notices familiar patterns in the language of its detractors. Whether the discussion is about the Equity and Inclusive Education Strategy (2009) , The Accepting Schools Act of Ontario (2012) , or the 2015 updates to Ontario's  Health and Physical Education Curriculum (shelved since 2010), the peculiar phrase  normalizing homosexuality repeats itself. In my secular existence, it all seems very strange to me. Talk of normalizing homosexuality -- acknowledging sexual diversity, as I would have it -- sounds like normalizing gravity. Some examples below, emphasis mine: Charles McVety “This is part of a militant homosexual agenda to normalize homosexuality in everyone’s mind and thereby promote homosexuality,” he told the National Post last April. “If we teach our child...

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...