Time to get LOUD

February 5, 2018

June 7, 2018 is the date for Ontario’s provincial election.

It is time for front line education workers to be heard. We have a lot to contribute to the conversation and we should be recognized for our contributions to the education of the most vulnerable individuals in the education system:

  • Students with mental health issues/concerns/diagnosis
  • First time students (kindergarten, new to the Boards)
  • Students with physical/cognitive disabilities, identified and non-identified
  • Students whose life circumstances place them in a precarious status for learning
  • Students who lash out and harm/injure/permanently disable their educators

That last point is critical – violence in schools has been bubbling to the top of media feeds since last fall. There’s been a lot of finger pointing – bad parenting, bad children, bad educational assistants/teachers, bad programs (specifically integrated classrooms).

I disagree with those in the media and public playing the blame game.

Parents, especially those of children with individualized learning or life skill needs, are by and large doing the best they can.

Students who act out in a violent manner are frequently doing so in response to being in an environment that does not meet their needs.

EAs and teachers are swamped with requirements of the curriculum and the immediacy of the needs of their students. They work incredibly hard within a system that is not conducive to special education success.

Integrated classrooms are in the sights of people looking to deflect blame but the undercurrent is that the educators and special needs students within the programs are the real cause.

The deflection of focus onto these various actors in the education sector takes away from an important issue for this election – inadequate funding for programs and supports that are supposed to meet the education and social development needs of students with individualized learning requirements.

The Ontario government has imposed negotiating frameworks which have made the public believe educators only care about their salaries.

Money is how society values people. So, yes, educators want to be adequately compensated for their work. We will never stop fighting for that.

This election though is not a negotiation. The focus will be about speaking up for students and their learning conditions – which happen to be educators’ working conditions.

Students deserve the supports they need to be successful meeting their unique goals:

  • enough front line staff to support their learning
  • staff with enough time to observe each student with individual needs in a variety of environments
  • physical resources and staff with enough time to take those observations forward to create programs that work for each student and each environment they move through in the day.

Right now, educators are spread so thin – educational assistants with 3, 4, or 5 students who are in multiple classes – meaning they cannot consistently provide the breadth and depth of support students need.

There are many teachers with multiple special education students without any other resource people within their classroom to support and enrich the environment.

Schools have limited access to social workers, speech and language or other specialists.

It is time to get LOUD, to demand that any politician looking to be elected talk to people on the front lines. It is time to demand that those politicians take up the cause of students who are paying too steep a price for insufficient resources in education.

It is time to get LOUD about the consequences for educators – the violence and the injuries – which are a symptom of the current model for special education systems and the lack of adequate funding.

My vote will only be given to someone who takes the time to learn about the realities of life in special education from the people doing the work every day.

Be heard.

The river flowed both ways

January 8, 2018

A while back, I used daily prompts to keep me writing. This is one of my favourite outcomes from that experiment.

Take the first sentence from your favorite book and make it the first sentence of your post.

The river flowed both ways. And each decision has at least “two ways”. For too long, I didn’t really know that “in my bones” and often looked to others to decide my fate. That made it seem to me, at least, that the river only flowed one way – their way – and each decision had only one side – theirs.

I’m over that now. I watch the way the river flows, that way and this way. And then I wade in. And walk the way I want.

The first line is from the finest book I ever read – The Diviners by Margaret Laurence. 

The real bottom line – students

January 5, 2018

I recently re-tweeted a news article about how the Premier of our province, Kathleen Wynne, criticized Tim Horton’s franchisees for taking away benefits from employees as a cost cutting measure to meet the new minimum wage requirements; she called the owners ‘bullies’. I pointed out that Kathleen Wynne’s government has systematically cut benefits from education and other workers in the province over the last several years. My question was: who is the bully in that situation?

As could be expected, I received a couple of comments telling me that as a public servant, I was overpaid, didn’t know what life is like in the “real world” and had been coddled. I responded with examples of how I didn’t feel I was coddled (being injured, etc.) – and then I stopped.

First of all, getting into a war of words on Twitter is as useful as a bathing suit in a snowstorm, and secondly, I feel the discussions about education funding always devolves into the blame game: education workers, teachers and others are accused of being greedy.

Here’s the only thing that should matter to everyone when it comes to education (and my personal bottom line): the best interests of students.

When you take money out of the system, students are negatively impacted.

Governments and uninformed people in the public continually circle the issues around education funding back to it being about salaries and benefits. Yes, those are important. Society bases people’s value on income; people need decent wages to live and to contribute to the economy; and, people deserve to be compensated fairly for their contributions.

Good educators are ones who see the importance of a balanced set of priorities. Educators have taken pay cuts in one form or another – usually small or no increases in salaries along with benefit cuts.

And still, the students suffer. The governments are saving money on salaries, as they said they needed to. And yet, the cuts continue.

Fewer supports, high student to teacher and educational assistant ratios, closing schools and/or classrooms (meaning fewer places for students with specialized needs to receive appropriate care), less professional development opportunities, fewer mental and physical health care specialists – all of these directly impact students.

Yes; I got ticked that the Premier took away my benefits.

But, let’s be clear: my biggest priorities, and that of all good educators, are our students and their learning conditions. The fact that those are also our working conditions should not make the picture muddy.

The difficulties educators and students are facing ARE the real world and constitute the real learning enviroment for thousands of students everyday.

The trouble with trouble

January 3, 2018

On New Year’s Eve, during a quiet dinner with friends, the topic of workplace injuries came up. One of our guests asked if I’d ever been hurt at work. As I listed the injuries and their causes, the guest was shocked.

“Kids did that to you?”

“No,” I answered. “The system did that to me and to them.”

That’s the trouble with trouble – the wrong people often get blamed.

In April, 2015, I wrote a post about the realities of working in special education. The post was in response to the Ontario provincial government’s tactics of vilifying education workers by implying we were only after money. Given that there was not – and still is not – enough money in the system to properly support education workers hurt while doing their jobs, I was angry at being portrayed as ‘only in it for the money’. Literally thousands of people connected and could relate to the content of the post. And yet, here we are in 2018, and nothing good has changed for education workers. In fact, things are worse and less safe than ever.

The special education system in Ontario, and across the country, is in trouble. In the fall, there was a large number of stories coming out about teachers and educational assistants being injured. These stories prompted the CBC’s Cross Country Checkup to dedicate a show to hearing stories from across the country of educators facing violence on the job. Although the show asked the question “Are teachers facing too much violence in schools?”, there was an outpouring of responses from educational assistants.

Stories about violence in the classroom have been featured for the last several years across the country:

  • an Ottawa teacher attacked by a student;
  • educational assistants in Nova Scotia supporting teachers demands for better work conditions to reduce injuries;
  • New Brunswick reports about the violence facing educational assistants in that province;
  • a teacher shortage in BC – brought on by years of labour disputes largely centred on funding – has created a crisis for special education students receiving support; and the list goes on.

Funding in all sectors of education across all provinces is lacking foresight; the educational system is being run on a business model that does not account for the workers or the clients (the students).

Someone recently asked me, what is the solution?

I don’t know enough about education systems or political systems or funding models to say.

I do know this: you cannot fix the system unless you talk to the people who are working in it and find out what they know and experience. The benefits of doing that are two fold: those workers who are front line and spend their days with the most vulnerable students in the system will be listened to, some of them for the first time in their careers; and, secondly, the people responsible for making changes will be working with actual data and information rather than what they THINK is wrong with the system.

Yes, that takes time. What does not take time is to reinstate some of the fundamental needs in the system, more resources:

  • frontline workers (educational assistants, special education teachers and specialists) – paid fairly and appropriately for the work they do;
  • other specialized resources, like mental health workers, psychologists, speech and language therapists, occupational and physical therapists;
  • spaces that meet the needs of students – alternative learning environments that can meet the sensory needs of students;
  • and, adequate and appropriate sick leave that allows education workers to properly heal mentally and physically from injuries sustained on the job.

The trouble with trouble in education is that it is not going to get better without a major effort on the part of governments – the public and media need to demand accountability for the erosions of funding. Without that, the outcomes for students and education workers will be more (and more and more) of the violence occurring daily in schools across the country.

reflections on the unexpected – 2017

December 31, 2017

It’s the time of year where people reflect on their year and for some reason, I’m feeling the need to join in.

Perhaps it’s because my longest held ‘big goal’ was achieved.

Or more likely, it’s because of the things which happened which were unexpected.

Let’s get the big goal out-of-the-way:

I received my Honours Degree in Anthropology from McMaster University, 37 years after I began. I walked across the stage and that was it. Bucket list item number one, check.

And I was happy, even gleeful that June day cause I was truly proud of myself. I did it up right. Done and done.

The last year of university was not golden, though. I had a terrible first semester course with a prof who believed that talking for three hours and using outdated research and technology was sufficient. It was not. I did not learn anything and my final mark proved it.

My second semester was amazing and included one of my favourite and inspiring courses: art history. Sadly, as I was working full-time, I could not fully relish in my final months. I was resentful of my divided attention, even though it was my choice to ‘do it all’. Immediately upon graduation, I wanted to go back and do it again, or more likely, do more.

Which brings me to a somewhat unexpected decision: not to do my masters, at least not yet. I was sure that I would jump back in as soon as possible. Head back to full time university in 2018. As the months wore on, I decided I was not ready to make that commitment. The moment I sent an email declining the opportunity to apply, I felt relieved. That’s when I knew it was the right, albeit unexpected, decision.

In 2017, I had also decided to stop working for the school board. For about 10 years, I had a goal to successfully apply for a job in professional development, a job that is one of a rare few at a higher level of pay and responsibility for teaching assistants. In 2016, I got the job. At first, I thought my displeasure in the role was that I was still in university and was torn between the two worlds. I started off on the wrong foot as my predecessor had not trained me properly (or at all really). My office was isolated from others whereas I had spent the last two years in a sea of people all the time – and the previous 12 years in classroom settings, full of activity and people and interactions.

I was disillusioned, dismayed and distraught. Once I accepted that I didn’t love the job, or even like it some days, I knew that the opportunity needed to be given to someone else, someone who truly wanted the job. So, I resigned – another unexpected decision.

At 55, you’d think I had things figured out, but I really got to know myself this year. As someone who has walked several half marathons, I am familiar with the concept of training, but this year, I took my training very seriously. I strictly followed the training schedule for my November race including a ridiculously hot 21 km walk in Florida in late October.

The night before the race, I set out my schedule for how I wanted to walk the race and I initially kept to the schedule. As I wrote previously I came up short of my goal, but only by a smidgen (as in two minutes). As I reflected on the race I was able to clearly see – embody really – the results of negative self talk. This was an unexpected, but critical, realization.

Shortly before my race, I had begun to work with a personal trainer. I knew that cardio work was only half the battle for my health and fitness, especially as I head to the upper range of my 50s. I needed to take seriously the idea of strength training. I did well with the trainer, having someone nag me and take me through my paces. (I often said I hated my trainer and loved the feeling of having trained!).

One day, though, I decided I would only feel successful if I could do it on my own. I spoke with my trainer and he developed a three-day a week program for me. In the weeks since then, I have surprised myself by only missing one day and that was due to weather. One other bad weather day, I used weights I have at home.

I have a long history of giving up physical activity when things get tough and I don’t actually like to work out. I really like how I feel after – a lot. I like how much stronger I feel overall. I have been surprised by how I have found ways to work around obstacles to my training rather than ways to avoid it – totally unexpected.

I asked for hiking poles for Christmas because of another surprising thing that happened this year: I have fallen in love with hiking. Not days long hikes, but several hours at a time. I like hiking with people, I like hiking alone. I like being in nature, even when it’s cold.

Surprise.

So, the year that has been unexpected has challenged me, surprised me and made me content with life. And has made me pretty keen to see what’s up ahead.

Stay tuned.

Feedback as a gift

December 27, 2017

I was at a great workshop a while back and one of the presenters talked about how you can take feedback as a negative or as a gift.

The comment got my brain reflecting on my experiences at McMaster, partly because feedback is a big part of being a university student.

Being a university student was a gift; a multilayered, surprising, challenging, amazing gift.

So there’s feedback. When I first began, I took feedback hard. In the lower year classes, feedback was often a mark only. There are hundreds of students in each class and if there are no teaching assistants doing the marking (and even if there are), there simply is not enough time to give in-depth, meaningful feedback to all students. Even in some of the upper year classes, I did not receive significant feedback. I found it hard to get a mark and not know what I did right or wrong to deserve that mark. I was clamoring for more.

Then life and readings and assignments took over, and I moved on.

When I hit my final year, some events occurred that opened my mind. I had done an independent study and received an excellent mark. I felt good about the mark because I had worked really hard and the prof is someone whose work I really respect. I was confident he did not hand out marks.

During the feedback session, the prof spoke for more than 30 minutes about all the things he disagreed with, that he didn’t like or that I had wrong. As we headed towards 45 minutes of this, I stood up and said I had to go. Not because I had anywhere to go, but I had to stop hearing criticism. It was soul crushing.

Maybe he did hand out marks?

I was enrolled in one of his courses that fall and I paid closer attention to how he worked – how he gave feedback. It was months before I realized what had actually happened: despite being having come to an invalid conclusion in my study, I had presented a really strong argument for my perspective. Being wrong is not always “wrong”.

The second example of my shift in feedback came when I handed in a proposal for a final course project and the prof – a different and equally brilliant prof – told me I was headed down the wrong path and directed me to a pivotal article. That reading allowed me to crystallize my thoughts and my direction. I ended up with my highest mark in university on that paper because I was able to improve when I opened myself up to the feedback (and the feedback was truly constructive).

And then, there’s the gift part.

I went back to university to complete my degree, to have the piece of paper that I somehow thought I was not complete without. The gift of those 3 years is that the paper is nothing compared to the moments and the learning and the relationships and the vision I have of myself. Everyday was life-changing, even when I was too tired or too stressed to see that.

It is like every experience of university was a type of feedback. It helped me realign my thinking and my being.

It’s not only about the lessons learned. The people I was surrounded by helped me by allowing me to bounce ideas around and have them share their worldviews. They made it impossible for me to see anything in the world in black and white ever again.

I am so lucky to have had that gift, those moments, those experiences. The paper I got is not my trophy – although it is a beauty.

It is those moments culminating in the shifted way of being; that is what remains and what matters in the end.

Decision to try

December 21, 2017

“Every accomplishment starts with the decision to try”  JFK

As this year winds down, we tend to reflect. 2017 will always be the year I graduated from university, a long term goal achieved.

Without question, I am so glad that I decided to try – to try to finish my degree that I started in 1980 and to try to be as immersed in the experience as possible.

I have difficulty remembering where my head was at when I began, why I ever wondered if I should try.

I cannot even begin to fathom what my life would have been like without this experience.

I am getting to know myself within the new framework of the knowledge and experiences of my three years in university. Other than the first years of being a mom, nothing has changed me more than this.

One thing that I do know is that I want to give more – spend time giving back. I always knew I was fortunate; going back to school has shown me the depth of my privilege. I have deeply missed volunteering.

For the past several months, since I stopped working full time, I have been focused on regaining a foothold in the world of volunteering and also spending time dedicated to the part of me that got neglected while in school – the physical part. My new sense of accomplishment comes from hitting the gym and exceeding what I think I can achieve. It’s not as fun as university, but it does give me a keen sense of accomplishment.

In the New Year, I will return to McMaster and work one day a week on a research project. It’s an incredible opportunity and a way to keep my connection to a favourite “home away from home”.

Sometimes you wonder if your memories of an event or experience are true. Lately, I’ve been converting old videos into digital files and am frequently reminded of the joy that we did get to experience with our kids because we decided to try to build a family.

Looking back at my grad photos, it’s pretty evident that I was truly glad I made that second big decision to try.