Category: Education
Don’t you wish your kids went to this high school?
Mike Penney, a teacher at Abby Kelley Foster Charter Public School in Worcester, Massachusetts, invited his students to record their thoughts on the ups and downs of the school year, while secretly sneaking fellow teachers into the the video frame for some stealth disco. Then he set the footage to Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance With Somebody.”
H/T SP vis Gawker
Authoritarian Superintendent of the Month — feedback
Golly, tons of reaction — on all sides — to cyber-libertarian Jeff Shallit’s nomination of South Shore District School Superintendent Pynch-Worthylake as “Authoritarian High School Superintendent of the Month.” (Apologies for the delayed posting; it’s been a busy week.)
Chris McCormick writes:
I figure someone’s right to express their opinion is balanced by my right to ignore them; the principal’s reaction just valorizes the ‘victim society’ where we want to whitewash all differences and offending symbols…remember Lenny Bruce [language NSFW]? “It’s the suppression of the word which gives it the power, the violence…”
Jeannie Eyking:
I have been aware of Superintendent Pynch-Worthylake’s work for about 10 years. From everything I’ve heard, I understand her to be an intelligent, brave, and discerning professional and leader. When I read your blog this morning, I thought there must be more to this story than first presented. The editorial in the Cape Breton Post made the story more complete for me. My conclusion is the her decision was not only reasonable, but brave.
The young people in our schools are arriving with all sorts of things written on their shirts, much of which promotes disrespect. What was written on Swinimer’s shirt was not benign. The phrasing is significant. “Life is wasted without Jesus” is a judgment of what you should be and do, not an expression of what I choose for me. This is no small point. Tolerance and free speech can only be protected, if we have the intelligence to sort out the difference. The principal and Nancy Pynch-Worthylake tried to do that. I applaud them both.
A reader whose family includes a retired Anglican minister, passed along antidote apparel depicted at right:
A reader who is not from the Annapolis Valley or Bridgewater writes:
It’s obvious Jeffrey Shallit does not live in the Annapolis Valley or Bridgewater, because if he did, he’d know that no matter how strongly you felt it, you’d never say anything like this: “Swinimer’s t-shirt expresses a moronic and wrong sentiment, and he sounds like the typical evangelical jerk who can’t keep quiet about his own ‘good news.’” Because the fall-out from evangelicals, of which there are many who attend Baptist, Pentecostal, and break-away Protestant churches in the Bible Belt of Nova Scotia, would not be worth it. Shallit, safe from the wrath of God in Waterloo.
Reader Dana Doiron thinks the The Cape Breton Post got it right:
Proselytizing at school and suggesting that the international students at his school were damned (I spoke to students and parents) were the issue. The t-shirt was just the most recent manifestation to which the complaining students could point. Parents, teachers and religious leaders (and, politicians) should help students learn tolerance and empathy not just the assertion of individual rights. The student’s dad may have taken the best step toward resolving this issue by removing his son from school today to go home and change shirts.
What Shallit was reacting to, given the information available at the time, was Swinimer’s suspension for the sin of wearing a T-shirt expressing minority religious views. If Swinimer was browbeating fellow students, or proselytizing disruptively on school time, that’s another matter. Wearing a slogan the superintendent doesn’t like is not grounds for dismissal in a democracy.
Pynch-Worthylake named “Authoritarian Superintendent of the Month”
[Update below] A Canadian Internet civil libertarian has named South Shore Regional School Board Superintendent Nancy Pynch-Worthylake “Authoritarian High School Superintendent of the Month” for placing student William Swinimer on five days suspension for wearing a shirt that read, “Life is wasted without Jesus.”
University of Waterloo computer science professor Jeffrey Shallit announced the tongue-in-cheek award on his Recursivity Blog, but his denunciation of Pynch-Worthylake’s overreaction was anything but tongue-in-cheek:
North American high schools are not places where free speech and criticism of authority are welcomed. Instead of teaching lessons about free speech, free expression, the Bill of Rights, and the Charter of Rights, principals and superintendents routinely impose arbitrary rules and punishments….
Swinimer’s t-shirt expresses a moronic and wrong sentiment, and he sounds like the typical evangelical jerk who can’t keep quiet about his own “good news.” But when he says, “I believe this is worth standing up for — it’s not just standing up for religious rights, it’s standing up for my rights as a Canadian citizen, for freedom of speech, freedom of religion,” he’s absolutely right.
Superintendent Pynch-Worthlake could have turned this into a teaching moment. She could explain that in a multicultural society there will be people who assert that their religion is the only valid one, and that’s the way life is. She could explain that the Charter guarantees “freedom of thought, opinion, and expression,” and even though she disagrees with Swinimer’s sentiment, she defends his right to express it in a non-disruptive way.
Instead, she took the authoritarian route. Shame on her.
[UPDATE] A reader who is not from the Annapolis Valley or Bridgewater writes:
It’s obvious Jeffrey Shallit does not live in the Annapolis Valley or Bridgewater, because if he did, he’d know that no matter how strongly you felt it, you’d never say anything like this: “Swinimer’s t-shirt expresses a moronic and wrong sentiment, and he sounds like the typical evangelical jerk who can’t keep quiet about his own ‘good news.’” Because the fall-out from evangelicals, of which there are many who attend Baptist, Pentecostal, and break-away Protestant churches in the Bible Belt of Nova Scotia, would not be worth it. Shallit, safe from the wrath of God in Waterloo.
Getting the green light from Rosa
At Premier Darrell Dexter’s request, the Hollis Street facade of Province House shines green every night this week in honor of the Green Porch Light Project for Organ and Tissue Donation, a grass roots campaign in which supporters of organ and tissue donation turn their porch lights green to celebrate National Organ and Tissue Donation Awareness Week, April 23-28.
As darkness began to settle over West End Halifax Wednesday night, Rosa Eileen Barss Donham got in the spirit with a green porch light and blue butterfly wings, symbol of Nova Scotia’s Legacy of Life program. Rosa knows someone dear to her may one day need a new heart,
Please take a moment to check your Nova Scotia Health Card. If the word donor does not appear to the right of your birthday, then please download this form, fill it out, sign it, and mail it to MSI at the address indicated.
Then take the next opportunity to talk with your family. Let them know you want to be an organ and tissue donor, and you want them to make sure your wish is honored.
If for no other reason, do it for Rosa. I can attest from personal experience, you don’t want her cross with you.
Hats off to Nova Scotia Power and Sobey’s for their support of this project. Let’s make Nova Scotia the province with the highest percentage of signed donor cards in Canada.
Happy second birthday, Julie Lyons
Julie Lyons of Halifax marked the first anniversary of her life-saving heart transplant this week, just in time for Monday’s kickoff of National Organ and Tissue Donor Awareness Week.
Two years ago, Julie’s congenital heart disease grew so severe she needed a Left Ventricular Assist Device, a mechanical pump implanted in her heart, and powered by a 10-pound pack of batteries that had to be changed every four hours.
Last April, the pump became infected. Overnight, Julie shot to the top of the national heart transplant list. She had only days to live.
Today, Julie has resumed her passion for gardening, she skated at the Oval this winter, and each week she voices her thanks to the anonymous donor who gave her a second chance at life by staffing a table at the Halifax Seaport Market, where she encourages market goers to sign their donor cards.
Everyone knows they should sign their donor card, but did you know it’s no longer on your driver’s license? It’s on your health card. If the word “donor” doesn’t appear to the right of your birthday on your health card, download this form, fill it out, sign it, and mail or fax it to MSI.
Don’t forget to tell your family what you’ve done. No matter how many cards you sign, no one will receive your organs or tissue over the objection of family members, so make your family knows your wishes. In fact, doing this is even more important than signing your card.
Finally, don’t assume you are too old to be a donor, or that some medical condition makes you ineligible to donate. Let the experts make that call, based on the latest medical practice in this constantly advancing field.
Just think if you could give someone the gift of life that anonymous donor gave Julie.
Julie and her friends will celebrate her second “birthday” at the Market Sunday. She invites everyone to stop by between 8:30 and 4, say hello, get some treats, and learn a little more about the amazing advances in organ and tissue transplantation.
Pushback on two ways NS could have better schools for less money
A Contrarian reader who does not identify himself, but who appears to work in the provincial school system, doesn’t think much of my suggestions for two painless, cost-free steps the province could take to improve schools.
To refresh your memory, these were (1) force school boards to implement modern hiring practices in place of the demeaning, talent-repelling, corruption-promoting way they now teachers; and (2) remove superintendents, senior managers, education department officials seconded from school boards, and non-teaching principals from belonging to the teachers’ union.
[T]he [hiring practices] you suggest… will not change the fundamental problem: the declining enrolment and the lack of jobs for new teachers. The boards can be as rigorous in their hiring practices as you might wish, that isn’t going to magically increase the number of available classroom teaching positions.
Anyone wishing to be a teacher in this era of out-migration and fiscal restraint in Nova Scotia must accept that they have two basic choices: go elsewhere for full-time employment or work as a substitute teacher in their local area until a job becomes available.
They only have to accept that because boards refuse to adopt modern hiring practices, to wit: a public call for applications; review of resumes to produce a short list; interviews, tests, and reference checks to decide who they hire. That’s how organizations hire rocket butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers. Why not teachers?
The school system is not an employment program for recent education grads. The fact there is a surfeit of applicants and a scarcity of positions should make it easy for boards to hire superb candidates for the few available positions. Instead, the current method operates as a negative screen, discouraging candidates who are ambitious and adventuresome, while opening the process to favoritism, nepotism, and opportunities to game the system.
The best possible construction to put on the current system is that boards are cynically taking advantage of the surplus of aspiring but unemployed teachers as a cheap and infinitely flexible pool of substitutes. The substitute issue is a separate one, and should be dealt with separately.
My correspondent offers two alternative solutions:
[Because] Nova Scotia will always need a surplus of teachers… the province should reduce the number of positions in the education programs to more sustainable levels and apply all those “modern personnel practices” to the applicants. That way, the best candidates will get into the program and will have a reasonable expectation of employment when they leave.
Restore the pay for substitute teachers to reasonable “livable” levels and find ways to reduce the huge debt burden most graduating teachers are forced to carry (for example, return to a one-year education program, perhaps).
I have no objection to asking universities to be more selective in admissions to their education programs, but it’s a mistake to think the school board’s mission is to provide employment for everyone who wants to teach. Its mission is to educate students. To do that, school boards should look for ways to select the best possible teachers. If they were doing that, I’d support excellent salaries for excellent teachers.
The proposal that the education system should opt for less education of its core employees strikes me as bizarre.
As for getting superintendents, middle managers, and non-teaching principals out of the union, my correspondent says:
Not surprisingly, there are many classroom teachers who would agree with you on this issue. However, in other provinces (such as British Columbia), removing the administration from the union has proven to be a mixed blessing.
Especially in small schools (of which Nova Scotia has many), drawing a management / union line has reduced the collaboration that is required for these schools to flourish.
For the B.C. government, the exclusion of the administration from the teachers’ union has simply meant that it has to work with a number of education organizations instead of just one. Worse, each one of these organizations has a mandate and an agenda.
Be careful of what you wish for.
I am unmoved. Managers should not be in the union–any union–and many problems with the culture of Nova Scotia’s school system can be traced to this anomaly. Maybe, just maybe, Premier Dexter’s shot at the NSTU this week in the legislature means he would consider changing this.
More news, less faux psychodrama in legislature reporting, please
I don’t mean to be overly cranky with my former colleagues in the political journalism racket, but I could do with a little less psychoanalysis and a little more content in reports from the Nova Scotia House of Assembly.
CBC legislature reporter Jean Laroche’s weekly debrief this morning was long on the former and light on the latter.
Premier Dexter, he explained, normally doesn’t have a short fuse, but the Chignecto-Central Regional School Board’s threat to decimate library staff caused him to blow his stack. The debate, opined Laroche, had an unusual, intensely personal character.
Really? None of the clips Laroche played showed anything like that. In them, the premier calmly, if wearily, pointed out that the board’s empty threat was the oldest, tiredest arrow in the school board’s threadbare quiver, a tactic described here months ago as “Kill the Friendly Giant.” Laroche himself must have seen it play out 50 times, as have the opposition leaders who cynically played along.
After a decade in which school enrolment dropped by 30,000 students, while school board budgets marched briskly upward, the government has rightly ordered modest restraint in the coming year. The Chignecto board responded by announcing that a popular program with a vocal constituency will be eliminated as the only possible means of coping with “massive cutbacks imposed by the province.”
Yawn.
The real news in the exchange was the premier’s sharp (and long overdue) criticism of the Nova Scotia Teachers’ Union for its obdurate defence of the status quo in a system undergoing thermonuclear demographic implosion. Dexter thinks a progressive union should be an enthusiastic partner in the search for better ways to operate a system that hasn’t changed much in 100 years.
Laroche helpfully explained that this is entirely untrue, that teachers embrace change every year by adjusting to annual tweaks in mandated curricula. Do tell.
Perhaps, just perhaps, the premier and his education minister will consider two cost-free proposals for injecting a spirit of innovation into the system.
‘Fraidy cat province: Strait-Richmond edition
The Strait-Richmond Regional School Board cancelled classes in all schools today. Apparently there’s a wicked storm underway.
Thank God the children are safe. Not to mention the teachers and board administrators, union members all, right up to the superintendent.
To be fair, there is snow visible in half of these highway cam images from the school board’s catchment area, just none on the actual roads beings monitored. In case you missed Jim Meek’s column on this subject in Saturday’s Herald, you can find it here. Said Meek:
My idea of hell is [CBC weather dude Peter] Coade broadcasting the weather forecast in an endless loop on TV, which is pretty well what CBC Nova Scotia passes off as news these days. (Just add in crime, and you’ve got the formula.)
It’s not that I have anything against Coade, a good man stuck in an assembly line job. It’s just that we have now endured months of warnings about weather bombs that never exploded; slippery roads that didn’t materialize; and storm forecasts that yielded to sunny days.
What will it take to restore some common sense to these decisions?
The snow day debate continues
Too damned many.
In response to my note about the 40-something Norwegian who had never seen a snow day until he came to Nova Scotia, Contrarian reader Joyce Rankin of Mabou Westmount blames consolidation of schools and secularization of society for the proliferation of snow days. Her response sparked a lively email debate.
I remember we never used to have snow days either. But then again, we were close enough to school that we could walk.
The questions to ask, for a proper comparison, would be how far children in Norway travel to school, and how far people drive to work, and over what kind of roads? And if there’s not an official snow day, does that mean that everyone shows up? Or does it mean that those who can make it come and the place functions (or not) with a skeleton crew, accomplishing little.
You can drive in this.
All valid points. But it could also be there that Norwegians are just a little less timid about driving when there is half an inch of snow? We do have snow tires after all. This implies that driving on snow is something we do.
Why doesn’t Alberta have snow days? We have too many damn snow days. I hear it from everyone.
It’s not so much snow that’s the problem, but rather ice. In Alberta it tends to get cold and stay cold, and it is not as wet. Not so much temperature fluctuation and hence less ice. Plus in areas where it’s flatter and the roads are straighter, the driving is easier. (Note that the accident often happen at curves and hills.)
I’m not disagreeing that it gets a bit silly sometimes. But the school board is to blame, too, because the new procedure is for the board superintendent to make the call for the whole district, rather than the principal making it for each school. I guess they haven’t noticed the variation in weather from, say, Ingonish to Sydney River to Louisbourg, or from Pleasant Bay to Louisdale to Canso to Antigonish.
Plus it’s because of liability. Administration is afraid that someone will get hurt and they’ll get sued for making them come to work.
Birds do it. Squirrels do it. Even bright yellow buses do it.
I take your point about one-size fits all in boards that stretch over a huge territory. But I think the issue shows a problem with the way society handles small risks of terrible outcomes. We place policy makers in an invidious position. They might be criticized for over caution, but they would be savaged if a child is injured or killed. But life is not risk free.
This issue also dovetails with another bugaboo of mine: the fact that too many school system managers, up to and including superintendents, are in the teachers’ union. Unions should not be given the task of deciding when a day off is appropriate.
The bottom line is that we have far too many snow days in NS. We have snow days where there is barely any snow. We have snow days on days we would not have given a second thought 15 years ago. It has crept up on us, and it has gone too far.
I have driven long distances on bad roads to work, and I have worked in places where there’s a lot of pressure to be at work no matter what (and where you don’t get paid if you don’t come in).
It would be interesting to compare accident stats –was there a larger percentage of serious accidents and fatalities when people were more willing to drive on icy roads? I’m guessing yes.
Some wintry jurisdictions keep on bussin'.
While you’re at it, compare snow-day attendance at Nova Scotia ski hills compared to weekdays when schools remain open.
I think one of the results of secularization is that people value themselves and their physical well-being more than they used to. We expect to have control over our lives. We have less of the kind of humility that a) leaves it up to God or to fate, and b) views oneself as only one of many. We have learned to expect that we should be taken care of and insulated from risk. Most workplaces are much safer than they used to be, fewer people work outdoors, and there’s less call to be tough and resilient. (Which probably explains the rise of extreme sports -these are the people who in another century would have gone to sea or been a trapper or something.)
We expect things to be okay, we see it as an entitlement. And when something does go wrong, we want to blame it on someone. People in administration know this, and they don’t want to be the one blamed.
The giftie gie us
I met a Norwegian immigrant last night, a man in his 40s. He has lived in Nova Scotia for four years. At one point, the conversation turned to snow days.
“You know,” he said, “in 40 years in Norway, I never saw one snow day. Not from school. Not from work.”
Four years in Nova Scotia, and he’s seen about 40.
Just saying’.
