Originally published in March of 2020 at the outbreak of the COVID19 pandemic which resulted in years of cobbled together, inconsistent management of Ontario public education: https://temkblog.blogspot.com/2020/03/covid19-desperate-times-call-for.html

My first instinct is to show some initiative and begin solving problems when things get difficult.  I’m frustrated at the lack of transparency, communication and minimal focus on effective learning process going forward.  Had I any say in how things are going down, I’d break this down into two approaches:


One unit would be working to immediately attempt to address digital divide issues and try and close the gap on the number of students without technology or connectivity at home to as close to zero as possible.  This would also have the benefit of connecting poor families as well as their children to the major source of communication the rest of us share these days.


The other unit would set up online learning officers at each school board who have the latitude to make agile changes to organize staff so that they are able to communicate with students and leverage existing digital communications to try and provide genuine alternative programming that will allow students to resume their face to face studies eventually without the time away being a complete loss.  Throwing out generic material online isn’t going to do any of that.

Being an ex-IT technician I’m very interested in trying to quickly resolve the logistical and technical issues around the digital divide:  Dusty World: Exceptional Times: Using a Pandemic to Close the Digital Divide.  I’d leave the people management to others better suited to it.


At times like this the top heavy nature of Ontario Education with all the ministries, unions, boards, colleges and goodness knows what else, really comes into focus.  We’re unable to put the focus where it should be (on enabling student learning, remember?) because they’re all too busy getting in each other’s way.


I was involved in a VoicED podcast yesterday on how student privacy could be compromised as we rapidly migrate online in response to the pandemic:  EP 06 – Special Pandemic Edition: Transforming Education Under Pressure | voicEd 


Student data privacy is already quite opaque and uncertain with boards all doing it differently, or not at all, with little ministry of government oversight and many questions around who has access to what.  A sudden shift online is only likely to make things worse, but it’s also an opportunity.  An opportunity to begin seriously teaching digital skills in a coherent and meaningful way instead of the piecemeal curriculum we’ve cobbled together to date.  With better digital fluency will come a more responsive and effective online learning response to this pandemic.


If this situation has shown anything, it’s that digital communications are vital in creating a coherent social response to this crisis.  Closing the digital divide would not only help those students on the wrong side of it, but would also create a more inclusive Canada.  We couldn’t be bothered to do it when life was easy, but maybe we could do it now when life is hard.


I’ll end this with the 3 suggestions I ended the podcast with:


1) Use existing board walled gardens (UGDSB’s UGcloud is particularly well put together) – that’s vetted material in a secure environment – all UGDSB students will know how to use it too. Whichever board your child is in, there will be an educational technology equivalent where they can work in a protected space… and communicate with classmates and teachers!


2) Parents shouldn’t stress out because of all the ‘we’re giving you the tools to home-school’ rhetoric coming out of the government. No one expects you do get a degree in teaching and begin doing it effectively. This piece from the NY Times might talk you down a bit: https://ift.tt/3abMd2l  Keep in mind that the ‘anyone can teach’ nonsense is recent Ontario government rhetoric and not true.  Putting that expectation on yourself at this difficult time isn’t fair to you or your family.


3) Talk to your kids’ teachers! If you’re in my board you have online access on UGcloud to do this – most other boards have similar systems. The vast majority of us want to help and want to do something. We’re generally frustrated at all the suits who keep telling us not to.  We should be signing out laptops to the students who need them and providing internet for those without, not doing PR.


Discussions about this are happening in many places:
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/temking_ep-06-special-pandemic-edition-transforming-activity-6647304569095274496-3P84
https://twitter.com/Stephen_Hurley/status/1241367358754770945
… just not where they should be happening between ministry, boards and teachers.

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 Almost ten years ago I came across Matt Crawford’s Shop Class As Soulcraft, a brilliant little book that helped frame the value of my tangible real-world skills after years of academic abstraction.  At that time I was changing gears from English to technology teaching and this book helped me reclaim my millwright apprenticeship and years of hands-on skills development in information technology I’d left behind when I wandered into ivory towers.

In addition to framing skills honed in the real world where results rather than opinion mattered (you can’t fake brake repairs like you can literacy test scores), Crawford’s philosophical treatise on manual skilled labour also explained the challenge of trying to manage in a world where success criteria are both invented and met in a fictional world of plausible deniability:

“Crawford also does a brilliant dissection of the ‘peculiarly chancy and fluid‘ life of the corporate manager (substitute administrator or educational consultant for equal value here). In a world with no objective means of assessing competence, the manager lives in a purgatory of abstraction using vague language “…staking out a position on all sides of a situation, so you always have plausible deniability of a failure.” Crawford goes to great lengths to point out that this isn’t done maliciously but rather as a means of psychic protection for the people trapped in this morass.”

– Dusty World quoting Shop Class As Soul Craft back in 2012

This chancy and fluid nature has been stretched beyond breaking during the pandemic as the people running public education, sometimes in the same sentence, can offer completely contradictory direction.  From “students must maintain masked cohorts while in class” followed by: “everyone should leave the building in large unsupervised, unmasked groups at lunch” to the arbitrary rules around classroom layout (all tables must face the same way, unless we’re trying to stuff 31 students into your room then you can ignore that), I’ve come to find that I don’t thrive in a chancy and fluid world of conflicting absolute rules.  The past two years in OntEd provides ample examples for another Milgram Obedience Experiment.

This was cast in a stark light in a recent online PD session my lovely partner attended on equity.  This is another wildly contradictory example of what is either cynical manipulation or peculiar, chancy and fluid management think:  equity matters, but pivot online during snow days even while we refuse to provide any connectivity or technology support for students in need.  When it costs something or requires effort, equity suddenly becomes quite diffuse.

In that PD session, Alanna noted that many of the people in ‘lead’ roles aren’t walking the talk.  A righteous curriculum lead jumped in to tell her she was wrong and that everyone in administration got into it with the best intentions.  When I heard about it after I found this rhetoric interesting.  I don’t doubt administrators get into it for all the right reasons (and never because classroom teaching was something that was beating them up causing them to look for an alternative).  I’m also not so oblivious as to think that administrators have any say in what is going to happen – they’re middle management and are told what to do by people higher up.  What I am curious about is, if they’re so intent on looking after students with best pedagogical practices, why they push directives that directly hurt student well being and learning.  This has happened a lot in the past two years.

As things have staggered back from the brink last year we continue to see irrational and often cruel decisions being made, often under the auspices of public health in order to prevent an ongoing pandemic health crisis, but they seldom make sense.  I set up my room with as many tables as I could stuff into it following public health requirements and then was told to change it out of compliance with those guidelines so we could stuff more students into the room… during a pandemic.  We’re told we have to wear inferior, poorly sized PPE even when we’re willing to bring our own superior, properly sized masks.  Staff are being made to cover (but don’t call it coverage so we’re in compliance with our contract that would have limited the number of coverages) other classes putting them in front of what can end up being hundreds of students every day in order to make a cruel, marathon class quadmestered schedule work.  A schedule that is utterly meaningless as students mix freely before and after school and at lunches every day.  Yesterday I watched a dozen boys leave a washroom together, most of them not wearing masks correctly, and walk back to different classrooms.  The union is very proud of dunking our membership in this much face to face teaching every day in order to enable the directives of a vindictive government.

Nothing makes sense, in many cases it’s contradictory and completely irrational, and it’s also hurting students.  An English colleague the other day told me her applied 2.5 hour class is one step away from complete chaos every day.  Many other teachers are noting the impossibility of covering curriculum in marathon classes that directly contradict the data we’ve collected on best practices around student learning.  Yet when told to execute this cruelty everyone in management makes it happen, though, I’m sure, they all got into it for the right reasons.

I’ve been reflecting on Dusty World this fall but the negativity of the posts has me not publishing them as I’m trying to find some sense of well-being in this ongoing mess.  Wallowing in the cruelty and absurdity of what we’re doing won’t get me there, but I still record what’s happening because one day I hope the public education system does more than talk about student learning and wellbeing and actually acts on it.

These past two years have turned into a cautionary tale about what a vindictive government can do during a public health crisis.  They’ve also shown that the people running public education are willing to do whatever they’re told even when it’s contradictory and cruel.  I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, until education (and healthcare) can operate according to best practices rather than the whims of populist politicians this will keep happening.  I need it to stop happening.  I can do good work when given the framework or even when the framework isn’t actively working against me while trying to support student learning and well-being.

Not yet but 2022 is looming large.  COVID might be behind us by next summer, and if Ontario comes to its senses we might have a government that isn’t so maliciously short sighted.

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