Leading From The Heart

by Tracy Rosen, teaching & consulting since 1996, blogging about it here since 2007. All views are my own and you should take them with a grain of salt, I do.

Author: Tracy Rosen

  • A back-to-school like no other

    A back-to-school like no other

    On Thursday morning, someone from CBC News contacted me for a live interview later that afternoon. It was to talk about back-to-school in Quebec and concerns from a teaching perspective. It ended up being cancelled, I think Rob Ford bumped me on Thursday and something else did on Friday. These things happen.

    Before they cancelled, I spent the day thinking about what I would say because this year’s back-to-school is entangled with confusion, worry, anger, fear, hope, and love. I wanted to speak with clarity.

    I also asked some friends who are returning to the classroom in a few days what they would say, knowing that it would remain anonymous.

    I am not the only one with such mixed feelings and I feel I need to do something with what everyone told me.

    Here are some of the worries my teacher friends told me, in frantic text messages and phone calls, in between preparing for teaching in a pandemic. These are high school and elementary school teachers in the Greater Montreal area, from both the French and the English systems:

    • Class sizes are too large! (edit: each teacher I spoke with mentioned this)
    • We have 500+ students – today (Thursday) we saw parents and children outside of the French school for their first morning, hugging, no masks, no distancing. The same thing will happen here! How will this affect my class bubble?
    • I don’t feel I know all of the different rules we now have. Will I be blamed if children get sick?
    • We are missing teachers! One teacher decided to retire on Tuesday because she is over 60 and worried. It’s a day before school starts and the board still hasn’t let us replace her (edit: there is a process…). Who is going to set up that classroom for the children?
    • Not enough cleaning supplies!
    • Our day is longer by 30 minutes because of concerns with busing! Not sure if our principal should be able to do that – but that is what happened!
    • Inconsistencies between school directives. We have been told back to business as usual within classrooms, where other schools are physically distancing. 
    • My friend who teaches in another school has 15 children in her classroom. I have 28. How is this fair? She can keep her students away from each other, I can’t.
    • Some schools have given each room PPE, others nothing yet. 
    • Plexi being ordered for some, others nothing. They’ve created a have/have nots between the schools.
    • Imagine other government employees making/providing safe work space and PPE for themselves.
    • No definitive plan of action for what takes place if a COVID case is confirmed in any given school: is that school closed down for two weeks?
    • What about COVID pay? 6 sick days will be used up pretty damn quickly.
    • Before we even started we have some teachers in my school out and isolating. What will happen now that the children are here?
    • I worry that others think I am overreacting. But I am afraid to get sick.
    • I won’t see my parents this year, they are in their 80s.
    • We spent most of our day washing hands. I hope this goes faster as we get used to it. I did not become a teacher to spend the day walking my students to wash their hands.
    • We are missing teachers. Two classes in my school had a substitute teacher today, on their first day back since March!! I felt so bad for those children.
    • I work in 3 schools. This doesn’t make sense!
    • Zero mention/focus on mental health & well-being. 
    • No media blitz for how school might feel different upon the return.
    • It is hard to keep the children away from each other when they see their friends! I am worried.
    • Why can’t we delay the start a couple of days so teachers would have time to help get the school in order AND get ready for our actual jobs? Why don’t we have school-based committees for that?
    • Why is the minister of education allowed to have different health and safety rules for the teachers versus every other business in Quebec?
    • Why is money being spent on convincing people to go back to school, rather than spending money to make school safer?
    • I am busy preparing my room and the hallways for Covid protocol. I haven’t had a chance to prepare to teach and to welcome my children, who haven’t been in school since March!
    • I miss the kids. So much. I just don’t know how I will teach them properly because I am so worried. There are 33 children on my class list, last year I had 24. This doesn’t make sense.
    • I feel we are putting a lot of energy into preparing for back-to-school and we will just end up closing after a month because our class sizes are too big and we have no social distancing or masks. I am already so tired. How will I have the energy to move online?

    I always feel hope and love for teaching because we do what needs to be done for the children in our care. Sometimes, that is tinged with frustration and anger because it is expected of us even when our conditions are subpar – when the class sizes grow larger and the resources dwindle each year.

    But this year, I am so angry that teachers are put in the position to try to make confusing and potentially dangerous policy bearable because we always put children first.

    I am not returning to the classroom this year. I had returned last year after about six years away. But this year, I left for a position where I can work from home and keep my 9 year old son with me just in case. Because I am also worried about all of those things the teachers told me above. I lived all of those worries last year. So did my son. And because online learning is only being made available to a slim list of people with specific medical conditions, I will likely start homeschooling in September (Yes, in two days. And yes, I am still considering options…). It is the only solution right now that can guarantee consistency because there are so many inconsistencies with back-to-school this year. And it is sad that we will likely need to leave the system for that.

    I also feel sad when I see teachers posing in their masks and face shields inside their classrooms that they are preparing for 25+ children to spend their days not wearing masks. Not social distancing. We can’t have 25 people in a SAQ at the same time …. even with masks and with social distancing!

    The masks can hide the trembling smiles at least. I feel like schools are the band that plays while the Titanic sinks and this will have an impact on mental wellness. Teachers hold emotion for themselves, their colleagues, and their students. This year, the task is downright dystopic. Our government continues to insist that the best place for children is at school. But the current directives lack not only empathy but a reflection of current knowledge about this virus. The directives are inconsistent and school staff don’t have the time to make sense of them, not to mention what they are going to teach and how they are going to connect with their students who have been away from school for so long.

  • Day 1 – Trauma, Mental Health, & our Students

    Day 1 – Trauma, Mental Health, & our Students

    This week a friend of mine challenged me to do 25 pushups for 25 days as a way of raising awareness for mental wellness issues that can lead to suicide and it goes by the tag #matesofmatesformates.

    Yesterday was Day 1 and I questionned – what can we do beyond the challenge? How does doing 25 pushups for 25 days actually help anything?

    What I will do is find out more about mental health. It is one of those things that we (at least I) think I know about. That kind of thinking means I need to learn more.

    And I’ll share what I find out.

    Yesterday evening I saw a TEDx talk by Phillip J. Roundtree where he talks specifically about Black mental health. I need to listen to what he says more.

    In the video, he talked of trauma and how it affects black people, how it affected him.

    Some questions to ask ourselves:

    As teachers, how often have we described a black student as rude or that they don’t care about their education based on specific behaviours before stopping to think about the effects of trauma on that child? I have always believed that there is a reason for every behaviour. Sometimes those reasons lay deep.

    How often have we done this with an Indegenous student?

    When we take a look at our resource and behavioural programs – have we stopped to think how these knee-jerk responses are built right into our school system?

    How are we going to change this?

  • Checking ourselves. When good teachers are racist.

    Checking ourselves. When good teachers are racist.

    Close to 15 years ago, I became friends with a teacher in South Burlington, Vermont. She was a master at differentiation and I met her first through a webinar and then in person. She graciously allowed me to bring a group of teachers from Montreal to spend the day in her classroom. It was a great day that I still use as a spring board when talking about classroom visits as professional development. We have kept in touch ever since and I considered her as a sister-teacher.

    But earlier this week, she broke ties with me on Facebook, which is how we have been keeping in touch for the past almost decade. She posted a meme equating rap music with hate and violence. I questioned it and was first made fun of for questioning it and then told she wouldn’t be answering any more questions about it. And then, rather than talking about it, she unfriended me.

    I hope I hit a nerve.

    But this situation hasn’t been sitting well with me. This is a teacher I admired because of her openness and care for the children she teaches and her colleagues.

    How many of us seem to be wonderful teachers yet hold racist beliefs?

    How many children are silently (and not so silently) determined to be a certain way because of wonderful teachers who hold these beliefs?

    (Imagine the numbers, over an average 25 – 30 year career teaching groups of 25-30 kids a year. Or 2 groups, or 4)

    We need to check ourselves every day. As teachers, we model belief and values through our behaviour whether we want to or not. And I think we need to check ourselves more than others because we have littles (and bigs) in front of us who just soak that up as truth.

    How do we check ourselves?

    Environment: We can start by checking what we have in our class libraries and on our walls. Who is represented in our rooms?

    Culture: We can start by making sure racist tropes don’t end up in our yearbooks.

    Self: We can start by asking ourselves these questions every single day after (or during) our work with our kids: Who am I paying more attention to in my groups? Am I seeing everyone in my classroom (or online) with potential and what am I doing to make sure I do?

    And that is just where we start.

  • When we talk, when we listen. We get better together. (epilogue)

    A story in 3 parts – epilogue

    I already posted an article earlier today called English Sector Exclusion: A story in 3 parts and I don’t usually post twice in one day but today, I need to.

    The survey that excluded anglophone school boards (and therefore the voices of teachers who work within these boards)? It now includes the English School Boards! The survey is still uniquely in French but at least now, our voices can be included in the conversation about teacher experience during the Covid-19 pandemic.

    Below is a link to the survey- please share it with all of the teachers you know and if you or anyone you know would like some help with translation, please contact me and I will be happy to help out!

    —> Survey on teacher experience during the Covid-19 pandemic (en français)

    Catherine Beaudry and I spent much of our morning writing back and forth to each other. I spoke of the same sentiments I expressed in my previous post and she spoke of roadblocks related to translation and validation (this is a huge roadblock in all aspects of Quebec Education and is the number one reason given for a scarcity of English versions of documents. Three or four years ago, I worked on a project with some teachers for the ministry. We are still awaiting approval to publish based on linguistic revision…there is a backlog.) and she also spoke of the lengthy process for Ethics Committee approvals (In a University setting, whenever you do research with people, your research methods must be approved by an Ethics Committee and that could take months. Here is the UQAR ethics approval process.)

    She also spoke very frankly of not being familiar with the English community and that she thought a survey had to be in English in order for us to be included. She wondered if people would be willing to answer it if it were in French.

    My response was that ideally, it should be in English. But that including teachers from the English School Boards in the conversation is an important step.

    I know that many people will feel put out that it is not available in English but I think that being included in this study is important enough to answer some questions in French.

    Professor Beaudry also mentioned that when she relaunches the survey, she will make sure to emphasize that the English community is invited to participate.

    Now, I think that ideally an English version of a survey (or of Ministerial evaluations or programs of study) would be available along with its French counterpart. We should be developing together, in true inclusion, and not after the fact, in annexation.

    In order for us to move towards that ideal, we need to keep talking and listening to each other. If I had said to my circle of friends and colleagues – “Typical! The English community is once again left out!” and not asked why, I would have held on to my resentments and we would still be excluded from the study. If Professor Beaudry had said, “Too bad! It is already published!” instead of taking the time to validate what I told her and then explain her reasoning, then I would never have learned that we were excluded because she thought we wouldn’t want to be included based on the language of the survey. And we would still be excluded.

    So once again, Yes. We should be included from the get-go, in our language. And also yes, we can still be included, even if it means (this time) we read a survey in French.

    My hope is that Province-wide surveys and resources in education are one day truly Province-wide and respond to the needs of both the English and French sectors AT THE SAME TIME.

    I think that conversations like the one Catherine Beaudry and I had this morning are a start.

    Bonne St Jean.

  • English Sector Exclusion: A story in 3 parts.

    Part 3

    Yesterday afternoon I was forwarded this questionnaire by a colleague in another province.

    picture of woman in doorway of classroom with headline: Le vécu des enseignantes et des enseignants pendant la pandémie de la COVID-19 au cœur d’une recherche
    English translation of headline: Teachers’ experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic at the heart of research

    I was attracted by the headline because I thought it was important to gather this kind of data. But when I went to fill out the questionnaire, I realized that, though I teach in the public system in Quebec, my experience didn’t matter.

    The questionnaire was developed by Catherine Beaudry, a researcher from UQAR who is doing a province-wide poll of teachers to find out the impacts of the coronavirus and subsequent government management of it on their practice. But the province-wide poll is limited to teachers in the French sector (Quebec’s public education system is divided along linguistic lines – French and English). So I wrote to her and asked why. I also asked if she was worried about painting an incomplete picture by excluding the anglo system. Her response? They wanted to do this quickly and did not have time to translate the questionnaire into English. But a part 2 will likely happen and we may be included then. (So, it was easier to just exclude the whole community rather than allow the majority of us who can fill out a French questionnaire participate. Or to ask someone in the English community to help out and provide an unofficial translation until an official one could be validated by the University…)

    Part 2

    In 2017, I went to a presentation by the Université TÉLUQ Canada Research Chair in Media Literacy and Human Rights, Normand Landry. He presented a meta-analysis he conducted on media education across every single program of study in the Quebec youth sector. His conclusion was that there was little to no mention of media education within the Quebec education system. My colleagues and I were a little confused because the English Language Arts program is based on media literacy. So we asked Normand Landry about it. He answered that he did not include the English programs in his meta-analysis because he assumed they were translations of the French language programs. (And no one on his team questioned the absence of the English system programs.) (So, essentially his results were flawed.)

    Part 1

    In the Spring of 2017, I was working as an education consultant with the RECIT for Adult Education and learned that a group in my office was going to launch a redesigned website for the Adult Education community at the beginning of the next school year. But only the French site. The English version would follow at a later date. I expressed my concerns and the initial response was a frustration about the English community – that even when we are included, we aren’t happy. That even when we are included, we often decide to create our own resources anyways. But my boss was a good one. He has strong beliefs about education and is open to listening to other beliefs. And is open to change when change is needed. We had a series of conversations that came down to this: when communities are excluded in order to push up an agenda, you are saying that those communities do not matter in the grand scheme of things. When we are added on after the fact, we still realize that we weren’t important enough to include from the beginning. When we don’t see ourselves represented in major research studies or on educational councils or in educational resources, we get the message that we are not part of the community. And that is why we forge on and create our own resources.

    As a result of our conversation, the site was launched in both languages at the same time. And both versions had their own official launch events within each community. There was a sense of equity across the two sectors.

    The English and French systems are two parts of a whole. When we speak with each other, we can create a community based in equity that responds to all of our needs.

    Essentially, we are not something to be added on once everything has been decided upon and developed. That is not inclusion, that is annexation. And that is how people in the English education community feel each time resources – from Ministerial course evaluations to teaching or professional development materials – are created months to years after the French ones are made available.

    And each time we are excluded from research studies about education experiences in Quebec.

    (And this is just along linguistic lines…)