I wrote this tweet on the same day I stayed after school with a student for an hour helping them catch up.

As an OCT certified teacher with over 10 yrs of experience, did you know that if I became a private tutor, my hourly rate could be $60-80?

So yeah. Unpaid labour.

https://twitter.com/mclolcat/status/1532860746941575170

And that wasn't my first tutoring session. I've been staying after school and working over lunch all year helping students catch up.

Why not during class? Because the class sizes have gotten too big to offer everyone one on one help during class time.

This letter recognizes the unpaid labour of educators filling in gaps left by lack of good social policies, but doesn't advocate for change or support.

It also doesn't identify what safety measures are needed beyond vaccines.

How can this be in students' best interest?

https://twitter.com/HargreavesBC/status/1397181527797215234

Yes schools are a source of food security for students. How are we okay with this? Schools were not made nor funded to tackle poverty.

Yes schools are a source of mental health support. Yet we don't fund MH properly in schools.

https://twitter.com/mclolcat/status/1395732369827672066?s=20

I taught ceramics. Depending on how the piece is made, it can take 5+ days for it to dry before it goes in the kiln.

I had a trick to cut the drying time in half (sometimes more): put it all in my colleague's classroom.

That's how hot her room is.

She also teaches in there. For the record: I always seek permission before doing that.

My previous thread talked about course offerings & education cuts = less high school courses.

And it reminded me of some of my favourite optional high school courses!

So here's a🧵about awesome Ontario HS courses your child should consider.

Teachers feel free to contribute! Before I start, a brief explanation about course codes.

First 3 letters is the course.

Number that follow is the grade. (Grade 9 = 1, grade 10 = 2, etc.)

The letter denotes level. (E.g. open, applied, college, university, mixed, etc.)

Example: ENG3C = Grade 11 College English

The #OntEd system offer a HUGE variety of secondary courses & now we can add ASL and LSQ.

But you'll never be able to take any of those courses if @Sflecce go through with the billions in education cuts.

A brief🧵to explain why and how course offerings work. The most important thing you have to understand is your local high school's obligation is to offer enough courses so that your child can graduate with a diploma.

Your local school are assigned a certain amount of Instructional Units (IU). Each unit represents a course.

I missed today's provincial press conference because I was busy working on my AQ course. I was told that apparently @Sflecce now hates online learning?

A large part of why remote learning was a nightmare was because of Lecce.

It's disingenuous to act as if you're not involved. I don't envy the job of politicians. Inevitably, some people are going to disagree. Some of those people will be angry even.

But I respect politicians who put a genuine effort for public good & own up to their actions. It's a sign of strong leadership.

People are worried about the abuse of paid sick days. Let me tell you as a teacher with 11 paid sick days:

1. Not everyone will take their full allotment of sick days.
2. It'll take a lot more than paid sick days to change our toxic work culture.

Let me explain. Why are schools a cesspool of germs? It's simple:

Everyone goes to school sick.

Not only is it more work to take a sick day, we disapprove of teachers taking them. From our politicians to punitive attendance policies, we send the msg that you're better off going to work sick.

In my virtual staff mtg today, admin stressed to focus on reconnecting w/ students as oppose to assess/evaluation.

Oh, BTW OUAC might want marks in late April.

Wait what?

Also: remote learning does not work well w/ Growing Success, the gov't's own policy doc on assess/eval I teach all art courses. The last minute announcement to school closures meant that most of my students left behind half-finished art pieces in a building that now no one can access except once for 15 mins.

I have a half full kiln of unfired clay.

It takes 10 hrs to fire clay.

This is problematic on so many levels that I need a thread to explain.

Background: I teach at a blended learning school. Many of our students work during school hrs so our flexible timetable allows for it.

https://twitter.com/sabrinananji/status/1237006647001833475

I'm not necessarily opposed to students working in itself. There are many reasons why students need to work:

- Support their family
- Support themselves
- Extra spending cash

But it takes a particularly disciplined student to successfully balance work/school.