Category: Dusty World

As thousands of young teachers are handed pink slips and those left behind are looking towards a system intent on cramming as many students into a classroom as possible, good will is drying up in Ontario education.  You might not think that this matters, but it does.  Good will is what has teachers doing hundreds of hours of volunteer work each year to maximize student experience in school.  All of the teacher coaches and club leaders spend time enriching their schools with these efforts.  I’m hard pressed to think of a single teacher I work with who doesn’t do some kind of volunteer work in addition to their paid work.

Beyond the volunteerism, there is a general misunderstanding in the public about how well teachers are paid.  From reflective edu-blogging and sharing best practices on a Saturday to marking on a Sunday morning, most teachers aren’t work free when they aren’t at work.  You might think this extra effort is well funded, but it isn’t.  With five years of university and the massive debt that accompanied it, ten years of industry apprenticeship and experience, five summers of additional qualification training and fifteen years of teaching in Ontario classrooms, I take home about $58k a year.  I don’t work all year round, true, but on the weeks I do work I typically average about 10 hours of work a day on teaching related activity and about five hours per weekend.  I typically put in at least 6-8 hours of work a week during holidays as well, just to keep up on marking and planning.  Out of my fifteen teacher summers off I taught summer school on five of them and took additional qualification courses that I had to pay for myself in another four.  On other years I’ve presented at conferences and learning fairs.  I don’t think I’ve had an actual summer off yet, so don’t get too carried away with those ‘summers off’.  The vast majority of my summers have been work related, and often at my expense.


Some Teacher Math:
2000 hours of work while teaching daily (40 weeks per year, 5 days a week, 10 hours a  day)
+160 hours over weekends (40 weekends per school year, 4 hours per weekend)
+25 hours over stat holidays (Xmas and March Break, Easter, etc)
=2185 hours of work.   That’s not counting the week before school starts when I’m usually in pretty much every day until things are ready to go, or extended field trips when I’m essentially at work 24 hours a day, or the times in the summer when I’m training, or presenting at educational conferences.  Nor is counting any of the hundreds of hours I spend working on Skills Ontario, CyberTitan or other extracurricular student enrichment.  Sure, not all teachers hit it this hard, but you’d be surprised at how many do.


At my $58,000 take home a year that’s about twenty six bucks an hour – and I had to spend huge amounts of money and years of my life to get myself trained to the point where I could even begin to do this job – a job that I still have to do even when I’m sick (teachers plan their own absence when away ill).  I then had to spend fifteen years teaching at lower salaries and paying for additional qualifications to get to where I am at the top of the pay scale.  If you factor in all the extracurriculars that many people believe should be a requirement of my job, my take home pay for the amount of time I put into this gig is about twenty bucks an hour.  If you think teaching is about the money, you have no idea what you’re talking about.


When I left millwrighting in the early 1990s I was taking home $918 a week for a forty hour week.  If I took an extra half shift, which I often did, my take home was more than I make now as a teacher some thirty years later.  Of course, when I did overtime in the private sector I got paid for doing overtime.  When I do overtime as a teacher, I get attacked by my employer.


I think teachers get paid sufficiently, but you’d have to be nuts to say it’s extravagant.  Unlike provincial politicians, Ontario teachers haven’t seen cost of living increases that keep up with inflation in the past decade, and we’ve had all sorts of contractual obligations illegally stripped in the same period.   So, if it isn’t the money and safe working conditions that keeps people at this, what does?  It’s good will.  Teachers go above and beyond for their students.  All they ask in return is to work in a system that honours that effort with equal bonhomie.


When we get into a situation like we do now, where a government uses our profession as a scapegoat for all of society’s ills, that good will evaporates at a startling rate.  A difficult but satisfying job becomes just difficult.  Young teachers who have been battling for years to find permanent work are shaken out of the system and the best senior teachers start thinking about all the other ways they could make a living with less hassle elsewhere.


Good will is a fickle thing and it seldom beds well with politics.  As our populist regime with a mere 23% of Ontarian’s votes steamrolls our public support systems while paying off friends and family, the feeling that this is about balancing a budget feels less and less true.  If Ontario were to attack its financial imbalance in all areas, I think education would be more than willing to do its part, but when MPPs are voting themselves cost of living increases while removing many teachers’ ability to make a living at all, it’s hard to feel like we’re all pulling together.  As things tip further and further out of balance, there will be a brain drain from Ontario, which is a loss that is already hurting our classrooms and one that will cost the province for years to come.

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Originally published on Dusty World in April of 2018, two years before the COVID19 Pandemic:  https://temkblog.blogspot.com/2018/04/how-to-resolve-poor-technical-fluency.html

I’m revising my Computer Technology (TEJ) course offerings to encourage students of all technical skill levels to become more fluent with the digital tools used in pretty much every job these days. This has happened, in part, because of an article I read a few months ago about the atrocious technical skills human beings in general, and our graduates in particular, have.

Teaching computer technology has a number problems associated with it at a systemic level in Ontario education, but this is my local attempt to resolve some of those problems in terms of accessibility and functionality.

The presentation above describes how even a least a basic understanding of computer technology has become a useful skill in pretty much every pathway a student can take.  From straight into the workplace, through apprenticeships and college to PhDs, being able to make functional use of computers will assist you in many aspects of your Twenty-First Century workplace.


I was recently talking to a dairy farmer who was telling me about the computer network they use for milk capture and assessment.  This wireless system allows them to keep track of individual cow health and has produced a significant bump in the quantity and quality of their produce; he also thought it made for happier cows.  Last summer we gave a ride to a French PhD student from the University of Guelph who got stuck on a bicycle in a thunderstorm, he was a doctor of genetic engineering.  When I asked him if he wished he’d studied anything else he immediately said, ‘computer programming.’  When I asked why he said that all of the gene sequencing they are doing is taking place in computer simulations and not being able to program meant he couldn’t do it as well as he wanted to.  From farmers to gene sequencers – technical fluency in computer technology is influencing and redefining the work they are doing.

Individualized technology training for students at all levels of experience and skill.

My previous approach in M-level (post secondary bound) TEJ (computer technology) courses was to focus on students looking to make a career in the field.  This intensity frightened away a lot of students who were just looking to increase their technical fluency.  I’d initially thought this might have been resolved by offering essential level computer tech courses, but the poor handling of students in this high school stream made for an expensive and frustrating semester dealing with several students who have been groomed by the system to expect zero consequences for bad behaviour.  My goal now is to make M level courses more accessible and engaging for all students, regardless of technical experience.  I’m hoping that this also brings in more female students as they are vanishingly few in our conservative, genderized school where digital technology isn’t considered an appropriate course of study for a girl.

I’ve changed my grading and assessment from an absolute skills analysis to a vectored improvement approach.  I don’t measure what students know, I measure how much their knowledge and skills have improved, and grade them based on that improvement.  In this way a student with no background in computers can still improve their fluency and get grades that don’t drive them away from the course.  Post secondary focused students tend to be marks focused, so holding them to hard standards when they don’t have the background means chasing people out of computer tech, but if I treat it like a form of literacy rather than a specialty, students of all experience levels can improve their technical fluency without worrying about grades.  


Research indicates that the general technical fluency of Canada’s population is abysmal.  Holding students to an absolute standard isn’t a way to induce them into voluntarily (unlike geography, history, phys-ed and art, ICT isn’t a required course in any Ontario classroom) improving this deficit.  If we believe the simple fact that information and communication technical fluency will help you in pretty much every job these days, then this approach focused on accessibility and empowerment should be the norm, not the exception.

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The primary function of Dusty World is for me to reflect on my teaching practice in order to resolve problems.  This one’s going to sound like a lot of complaining, but it leads directly to the following posts that suggests outlets and ways to manage this overwhelming curriculum.


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I’ve long had difficulty managing the byzantine history and fractured approach to computer technology in Ontario high school classrooms.  Our subject council email is clogged with desperate pleas for qualified teachers to fill absences that, if not filled, will result in the closure of programs; most of them don’t get filled.  Meanwhile, existing computer-tech programs are treated as an afterthought, often overloading teachers and students with multi-stacked classrooms.

A colleague recently noted that less than 30% of Ontario high schools even offer the computer technology course of study.  In 2018, being able to make effective use of computers is a fundamental skill that will assist students across the entire spectrum of employment and post-secondary training, yet few students enjoy access to this vital Twenty-First Century skillset.  If you can get a computer to work for you, you immediately have a socio-economic advantage; fluency in computer technology is foundational skill in the Twenty-First Century, but only 30% of students in Ontario can access it?

Ontario technology curriculum is based around absolute skills arranged in a hierarchy, so as courses progress they become less and less accessible to students with no previous experience.  This is at odds with the TEJ3M curriculum that describes the course as having no pre-requisite, yet the technical expectations of TEJ3M are complex and wide ranging (starting on page 76 – give them a read, they’re astonishing).  In post-secondary programs and industry, any one of the strands in this curriculum would be its own course of study and most are degree programs, but in Ontario high schools they are all lumped together in a course with no previous experience required.


Many students, even those who have taken the optional junior TEJ course, struggle to grasp the wide range of knowledge and build the experience required to cover the 3M curriculum.  Senior TEJ M-level courses are the equivalent of asking a student to walk into senior advanced science with no previous experience and then study biology, chemistry, environmental science, space science and physics simultaneously.  All of this highlights Ontario education’s poor handling of computer technology.  Yet fluency with information and communication technology is becoming a fundamental requirement in pretty much every pathway a student can choose in 2018, while specialists in the field enjoy clear advantages in the workplace.  I feel I’m well within my professional scope to revise and make these poorly formulated requirements more accessible for my students.  In the process I hope to address, in a small way, the digital illiteracy that plagues Canada’s (and the world’s) population while also supporting my digitally focused experts.


The fractured computer technology curriculum is one of many reasons why there are a dearth of educators qualified to teach computer tech (less than 30% of Ontario high schools even offer the subject).  Our subject group frequently gets emails saying programs from ICT to robotics will be shut down unless a qualified teacher can be found, but there are none available.  This seems at odds with how many computer tech programs are treated in the few places they exist.  In our own board we have schools closing down irreplaceable computer tech labs in order to support subjects more designed to entertain than employ.


The few teachers willing and able to take on digital technologies are overwhelmed by the expansive curriculum they are expected to attempt.  My technical background was as a millwright and then a computer technician.  I am professionally competent in information technology and networking and have a considerable (though not equal) amount of experience in electrical work.  My experience in electronics is passing at best, but I make do.  My coding background, which I’m also supposed to be an expert in, is mostly self-taught (Ontario has been failing to provide an applied technical education for computer focused students for decades).  Finding a teacher who can teach the Ontario computer technology curriculum is the equivalent of finding someone who isn’t just qualified academically in multiple fields, but is also has working experience across multiple industries; if they do exist they are polymaths making millions.  We accept science teachers who have never worked a day in the private sector, but computer technology teachers are required to show years of industry experience in addition to academic qualifications.


Then there is cost of teaching tech.  I used to take home about $920 a week as a millwright in 1991, and that was with a full pension and benefits package.  As a senior teacher with 13 years of experience, 5 years of expensive university training and three additional qualifications including an honour’s specialist I had to spend months and thousands of dollars on, I bring home about $250 more a week in 2018.  I often wonder why I’m teaching when I could have been making a lot more doing what I’m teaching, and with a lot less political nonsense.

The vast majority of Ontario Education is designed to feed that 10% unemployment rate in the Canadian youth job market.

Then there is the split focus of Ontario education with digital technologies falling somewhere in between.  If you teach in academic classrooms you’re what the whole system is designed around.  If you’re teaching a hard tech like transportation, carpentry or metal shop at least you fall into another category, albeit one that is often treated like more like a necessary evil than a valid pathway for millions of people.  However, digital technologies get the worst of both worlds.  Hard techs have reasonable course caps of 21 students in order to ensure safety.  Academic courses in standard classrooms get capped at 31, but digital techs have no specific Ministry size limits and are capped at whatever local admin wants.  At my school that’s a class cap of 31 students, the same as a senior academic English class, which is absurd.  31 students might work (barely) when you’re working out of texts in rows, but trying to teach 31 students soldering with guns running over 400 degrees, or working inside computers with power supplies powerful enough to knock someone unconscious?  


Safety is a constant stress in the computer tech lab.  We’re expected to maintain all the same safety standards and testing as hard techs, but with a third more students.  On top of that, since my classes are capped at 31, if 20 students sign up for it (which would run as a section in any hard tech), my courses are dropped or combined into stacked nightmares of assessment, management and differentiation.  Classes that only load to 60% are usually cut.  Last semester I had five preps, four of them in one period.  If you think the breadth of computer technology curriculum is already too much, try teaching it in a stacked class with four (4!) different sections at once.  The majority of computer tech teachers experience this joy every semester.  Taking all of this into account, it’s no wonder there aren’t more computer technology courses running in the province.


With little hope of the curriculum getting sorted or computer technology being treated as anything more than an afterthought, I’m still working to try and make my courses as applied, effective and accessible to as many students as I can, because it’s important that young people understand the technology that so influences their lives.  If more people knew how it all worked, we’d have less abuse of it.


I spent time on March Break getting my heart tested because I’ve been having trouble sleeping and have been getting a jittery feeling in my chest.  My doctor tells me I’m strong and healthy physically, the nerves and jittery feeling are a result of stress.  I can’t imagine where that comes from.  He suggests I take steps to reduce it, but I told him it’s not in me to mail in what I’m doing.  I find teaching to be a challenging and rewarding profession and I believe my technical background is an important field of study.  I tend to dig my heels in when I believe that something is important, even more so when there is systemic prejudice against it.  I intend to keep fighting for what I believe is important learning for my students, but this is one of those times when swimming against the tide of indifference feels overwhelming.

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I’ve written a couple of pandemic teaching reflections recently that I’m not going to publish because staring into that abyss isn’t doing me any good.  What I have put out acknowledges the difficult situation we find ourselves in, how poorly it has been managed and what we can do to fix it, but I don’t know that fixing or improving education is on anyone’s radar in the Ontario government at the moment.

At best, our current government’s interests seem to be driven entirely by making education as cheap as it can be.  At worst I fear the intent is to drive public education into such a state of disrepair that private charter schools will suddenly appear as a solution to this managed failure, but privatization produces a whole new set of problems and charter schools often result in poorer performance at greater cost.  I always thought Ontarians deserved better, but perhaps we don’t.

Meanwhile, we stagger to the end of this absolutely terrible school year that began with the former minister of education telling us our children will learn resiliency by being abused in large classes and ended most recently with the current minister demanding the use of banned software that breaks a number of Canadian privacy laws.  In between this government has belittled and attacked my profession at every turn, and yet they still managed to lose the battle for public support, though that didn’t stop them from forcing a contract on us that degrades system performance in every way during an unprecedented health emergency.

With no end in sight frustrated teachers are rightly complaining about a lack of engagement in this remote learning situation where expectations change week to week, digital divide issues remain largely unaddressed and there are no consequences for a lack of participation.  But we shouldn’t be surprised, ineffective pass rates are the rule in remote elearning – making marks meaningless is the only way the system can push an entire generation of students through the system.


Ask any teacher who has done remote elearning and they’ll tell you that a two-thirds credit achievement rate is about as good as it gets – and that’s in a group of students who volunteered for remote learning and all have the ability to access it.  Attrition is more common in elearning than learning is, they should call it eAttrition.  This is the kind of false economy the repeated demands for mandatory elearning will give us – it’ll look cheap on the surface but high drop out rates will make it more expensive in the long run.  The fact that any Ontario students are still engaged at all in remote learning is a testament to the thousands of teachers doing back-flips to try and reach them by any means available in a system that seems intent on doing it poorly.

While all that’s going on, proudly trans-illiterate teachers are still sniping at the situation and blaming everything on the fact that the medium they grew up with isn’t the medium literacy is delivered in half a century later.  If you can’t navigate the medium, you can’t fully comprehend the message – this is one of the basic foundations of media literacy, yet there are is a majority of righteous teachers intent on protecting this dated idea of what literacy is.  Instead of putting their outmoded concepts of literacy on a pedestal, perhaps it’s time to learn something new and accept that the society you grew up in fifty years ago has moved on significantly.


We’ve always had a hate on for changes in medium, life long learning is just such hard work.  Instead of moving with the times, these Luddites will cling to their habits to the end.  That they’re usually senior teachers in leadership positions with the most secure jobs and highest pay says a great deal about how well our system is able to adapt and stay relevant in a constantly evolving media-scape.


As we stagger to the end of this absurd year I’m just trying to keep my head above water.  I had a momentary sense of traction the other week when we were finally allowed into our school so we could put together some computers that we had sitting in there and get them out to teachers who desperately needed them – over 8 weeks into this remote learning crisis.  Getting out and doing something felt good, maybe too good.  It reminded me of the multi-dimensional approach to teaching I’d always adopted, doing work both in and beyond the classroom, school and even my board to help improve our practice in as many ways as I can.  After getting a taste of it for a day it was difficult to go back to the do less with less mandate of remote learning.


Instead of engaging in this simple and inexpensive solution to minimizing the digital divide on a system wide scale, I’m back at home repeatedly hearing about a digital divide that no one in management seems to want to acknowledge.  Only about one third of our staff responded to our short survey of who needed tech at home.  Even though we resolved the digital divide for those staff members, two thirds of them in our building may very well be trying to remote teach without the right tools.  In other schools across our board and across the province we could be addressing the digital divide in terms of a lack of technology access for staff.  Suddenly finding myself back to doing less isn’t how I approach my profession and is a source of constant frustration that I have to let go of less it drive me mad!

Which is where I’m at on this lovely Saturday morning.  Not caring eases the anxiety and frustration, but it also means the clowns running this circus get to sell it off to their cousins who happen to be starting up charter schools.  In the process we will have sold Ontario’s children to these greedy bastards and made things worse for everyone.


Even though I’m exhausted and feeling defeated by this today, I’ll be back when I’ve had a couple of days away, because I have an important job that it’s important to do well.  I may be playing dead right now (and I’m not even doing that particularly well), but I’m just waiting for an opportunity to move when we have a chance of winning Ontario education back from the hands of this circus that a minority of mis-guided people elected.

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The mighty Peter McAsh shared a link to Yale’s most popular course: The Science of Well Being, which is designed to address the psychological misconceptions we all labour under that have produced some of the worst depression in human history.  Laurie Santos, the professor running the course, describes the course (which has since become Yale’s most popular) as a necessary response to the plunging rates of happiness in her students.  It’s free on Coursera right now.


I’m only a day in and it has already raised a number of interesting questions around how I approach things.  I’m currently watching Martin Seligman’s TEDtalk on positive psychology:

It’s worth your time.  Seligman was a pivotal researcher into applying psychology to finding happiness rather than just treating illness.  I’ve since been sucked into Dan Gilbert’s The Surprising Science of Happiness.  Dan’s book was suggested in the course.  In his TEDtalk he’s hard pitching the idea that our reflexive over estimation of outcomes to our choices makes us select things that make us less happy – we overestimate the opportunities choice gives us and it seldom makes us happy.  He gives the example of Harvard students who select a course that gives them more choice, but those choices produced a lot of unhappy students.  This has some interesting ramifications in a world where choice is considered a sacred right, whether it’s choice of government, partner or anything else.  We’ve designed our society around choice, but choice is a mechanism that defies happiness.


If we’re pre-programmed to select for choice (which I suspect is another word for control), and more choice makes us less happy, then we’re pre-set to make ourselves less happy.  Our consumerist economic system and our democratic systems are designed to make us less happy – and they’re working.


That I’m looking at this at a time when everyone feels hard done by due to their individual freedoms being curtailed by the COVID19 pandemic is pretty ironic.  Perhaps people will find some happiness in their lack of choice, but soon enough that’ll all be forgotten as we struggle to restart all the social systems that are strangling us.






Some post apocalyptic music by Sturgill Simpson helps frame the situation…

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