RE: Teachers are Employees with Rights too
Dear Editor,
I am a teacher who has recently retired from the Toronto District School Board after having been employed full-time for over fifteen years. During that time, as usually happens during a career, there have been setbacks and disappointments, as well as good times. I loved teaching high school students and I felt that my success as a teacher was directly linked to their success as students in my classes. You’d think that my employer would be overjoyed with such successes and that the Government would take credit for this, as well. Alas, such is not the case.
The recent bargaining sessions that have been going on between the Toronto District School Board, among others (collectively referred to as the Government) and the Ontario Secondary School Teachers Federation (OSSTF) has led me to believe that teachers are no longer considered professionals who make a valuable contribution to society, but employees whose rights no longer matter. Truth to tell, if the Government could have its way in these “bargaining” sessions, there would be no bargaining at all. The Government would simply bully the OSSTF’s members into working in totally unacceptable working conditions. Those conditions would include the ability of administration to dictate every single minute of what teachers do with their non-teaching time. Instead of being allowed to properly prepare their lesson plans and mark student work, teachers would have to do things like hallway supervision and covering absent colleagues’ classes whenever scheduled. Ultimately, teachers would no longer be teachers per se; they would be doing the school’s administrative duties, which are designed to take them away from their professional work, making their true function obsolete. It is imperative that the public be informed of the truth.
Yours truly,
Anne Shier
copyright 2016 - Anne Shier - to be published in book format in the future (hard cover, soft cover, e-book / audio book)
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