Seeing comments/memes belittling the fatigue, stress and anxiety teachers and school staff are feeling. Many comments like, ‘quit if you don’t like it’ or ‘grocery store workers kept working while you were at home being paid to do nothing’ or ‘good thing they aren’t nurses’ 1/
First of all, kudos and endless gratitude to everyone who worked during the lockdown, for being ‘out there’ and providing essential services. Thank you! 2/
Even though teachers worked from home for the last 3 months of last school year, they were working too. They had to turn on a dime to figure out an entirely new way of doing their job, which many teachers found exhausting and taking up all day and every evening. 3/
Many teachers had an anxious summer, not knowing what/where they would teach or how it would work. They went in to physically rearrange their classrooms to attempt to get distance between the kids, even as class sizes grew and grew. 4/
Many admin. and school staff put in a lot of hours over the summer trying to get ready for a year with constantly shifting requirements, knowing that in a school, it would be impossible to maintain the health measures expected for everyone else. 5/
Everyone wanted to go back to school, but safely. During lockdowns, grocery stores had a limit to how many could come inside, and everyone else had to wait outside. Some stores allowed a TOTAL number of customers in the store that is less than teachers have in one classroom. 6/
It was easy to distance and avoid others in stores, plus most people would be there for maybe 20 minutes. If they had all the people in the store, plus more hanging out in one aisle for six hours, maybe it would seem different? 7/
People in other stores and even in hospitals had a right to limit the number of people in a given space and insist on distancing. Again, so grateful for all these people. 8/
The anxiety in schools is from being told that the same health measures we are reminded of daily for the rest of society cannot happen in schools. No ‘limiting’ gatherings and the distancing is usually impossible. Please stop belittling and downplaying this valid anxiety /x
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Even if you think LGTBQ+ rights and what Danielle Smith is doing has nothing to do with you, you should be concerned because:
-clearly she is beholden to an unelected group led by a dangerously ideological megalomaniac
-she has no mandate for any of what she just announced 1/
It was not part of UCP’s platform. Just like the APP, we can’t count on anything she did or didn’t promise prior to being elected. If Take Back Alberta gives her marching orders on whatever they want, she will do it. That’s concerning, and not just on LGTBQ+ issues. 2/
-she has taken it upon herself to BAN doctors in Alberta for prescribing medical treatment, even with parental consent, counselling, etc. because TBA disagrees with it. What if next TBA decides they don’t approve of another kind of medical treatment that matters to you? 3/
My sons went by shortened versions of their first names at school, even though I never call them that, because they prefer it. One doesn’t like how non-French-speaking people try to say his name, so he also uses an anglicized version of the name. No one asked me permission 1/
My brother is a _____ the 3rd. He always went by a short version of his name. No one asked my parents if that was okay. Maybe it was really important to them to have our father’s and grandfather’s name said constantly? 2/
My sister always used a diminutive version of her first name. No one ever has called her by her full length first name. My parents never signed permission forms for this. 3/
A little anecdote🧵 I worked one summer during university as a tour guide at the #ableg. We had our usual stops on the tour, like the ‘rain’ in the ceiling, the portrait eyes that follow you, etc. and we would look into the chamber. At that time there were 4 MLAs in opposition 1/
That’s right—FOUR. One was Grant Notley. Our tour patter included some jokes about this discrepancy—look how cute that is with 4 people in opposition! The mindset was that PCs were in charge, and aside from the occasional MLA who got elected just because everyone liked them 2/
(like Grant Notley), it was just taken for granted that no one in Alberta was ever going to vote any other way. Why would you? And there were good people in the PC caucus. Peter Lougheed was premier at that time. One of the cabinet ministers was a friend of my parents. 3/
Albertans were so averse to the idea of an APP prior to May’s election that UCP had to back off and pretend it was no longer on the table. May 15 Livingstone-Macleod MLA misleadingly claimed it was “not a topic of conversation anymore within the conservative government.” 🧵 1/
Dani said that “no one is touching anybody’s pension” and that the idea that UCP intended to pursue this was just NDP ‘misinformation’. She ALSO said an APP was “not in our campaign because I think we’ve got so many things that we have done that we’re excited about.” 2/
Anybody who was paying attention could see that those equivocations were INTENDED to mislead Albertans, because the APP was so unpopular, but that it was not really off the table at all. The report, completed months earlier, was suddenly not ready until after the election. 🤔 3/