A Teacher Blogs

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 ...

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...

A particular Catholic blog that has caught my eye over the last couple of years is Everyday for Life Canada , written by veteran educator  Lou Iacobelli . There are two reasons I read it: Unlike many blogs in this arena, which simply link out other materials with a bit pithy commentary, Mr Iacobelli's entries are original essays. These range from personal reflections on faith to thoughtful explanations of the inner workings of the vast complex that is the Roman Catholic Church. The other reason I read it is that Mr Iacobelli was my eleventh-grade English teacher in 1976, just shy of forty years ago, at De La Salle College in Toronto. Mr Iacobelli was among a handful of teachers who provided me with an arena in which I could thrive. Having little interest in hockey or football in a school that excelled in both; being among the very few non-Catholics in the all-boys collegiate; and showing absolutely no talent for maths or sciences, to which the school's curricular scale...