A Teacher Blogs

A year after appearing to pledge support for revised sexual health components of Ontario's Health and Physical Education curriculum, Progressive Conservative Party Leader Patrick Brown seems to have changed his mind. Mr Brown, who represents Simcoe North, recently distributed a letter promising to withdraw the curriculum if the Tories win a majority in a projected 2018 Provincial election. The release of the letter, which coincides with a byelection in Scarborough-Rouge River has been seen as a move to bolster the chances of Raymond Cho, the Tory candidate for the riding. Meanwhile, activists opposed to the curriculum had been hoping to make this a wedge issue in the election. Mr Brown's apparent change of heart is not really a surprise, but that's going to take some explaining. We begin with Mr Brown, speaking to Toronto Life magazine in an article published July 29, 2015. When asked about his views on children learning about gender identity, given that he had voted ag...

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 ...

I know.  This was Rob Ford's last interview before going in for major surgery.  And I'm a terrible person for posting this.  Councillor Ford sat down for "an exclusive one-on-one" interview with TheRebel's Ezra Levant on May 7th. At the eight-minute mark , Ez asks Ford his thoughts on the 2015 Ontario Health and Physical Education Curriculum . What could go wrong? WARNING: Coarse language. Ezra Levant: I'm surprised at the story of the sex ed curriculum. I read in the paper the other day that 35,000 kids stayed home in some parents-students strike in the sex ed curriculum Kathleen Wynne is putting in. Rob Ford: It makes me sick to my stomach. It makes me absolutely sick. I have two kids -- one in grade two; one in grade four. My one in grade two and my other one in grade four should not be talking about what anal sex is or what a blowjob is. This is what they're teaching these kids. That makes me sick. I told my kids, "If they star...

My old neighbourhood growing up, Thorncliffe Park, in the former East York, has become ground-zero in the controversy over Ontario's 2015 Health and Physical Education curriculum. The first day of a one-week strike saw 90% of some 1300 children in North America's largest K-5 school absent at the behest of their parents. Instead of being in the school, many were out front holding signs decrying "irresponsible" sex education and chanting "We Say No!" -- all of this in an effort to preserve their childhood innocence. Some children then accompanied the adults to Premier Kathleen Wynne's constituency office a few kilometres away for more of the same; while others were paraded in front of Queen's Park. But it is the behaviour of the adults I would like to discuss today. We'll start with the organizer of the Thorncliffe Park spectacle Khalid Mahmood, head of the Thorncliffe Parents' Association . Mr Mahmood is a past chair of the school council...

It was September 11, 2012, when most Ontarians first heard about Dr Steve Tourloukis and the Family Religious Values Letters . The Hamilton dentist was quoted in a Toronto Star newspaper article published that day: “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?” More specifically, Dr Tourloukis submitted a list of topics he deemed contrary to his faith, with the expectation that the school would provide him with advance notice of instruction in these topics, as well as an opportunity to view teaching materials.Based upon this, he would make the determination as to whether he would keep his children ho...

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 ...

Saw this today. More than 100 000 parents from across Ontario have signed petitions opposing @Kathleen_Wynne 's sex-ed agenda. Parents will be heard. #PCPO — Monte McNaughton (@MonteMcNaughton) April 21, 2015 and this. I'll be presenting the first of thousands of petitions at Queen's Park from Ontario parents opposing @Kathleen_Wynne 's sex-ed agenda. #PCPO — Monte McNaughton (@MonteMcNaughton) April 21, 2015 And then I looked at this press conference from January 27th, 2013, the day after Premier Wynne won the Liberal leadership convention. Just before the fourteen-minute mark, the Premier said that the Health and Physical Education curriculum was coming back. Then she got elected to a majority and brought the curriculum back. Then I looked at some of the petitions. There's a few of them out there. I found four of note: Stop Ontario's graphic new sex-ed program from LifeSiteNews: 69,139 Parents As First Educators : 56384 Protect Our Kids fr...

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...