Trim the Fat

One of the main things that everyone is always stressing as an evil of Bill-160 is that it would allow some positions in schools currently held by teachers to be taken by other qualified professionals. What's so bad about that? Why should we waste money paying teachers to do something that we don't need them to do? As an illustration to my point, I present some of my personal experiences dealing with some of the departments that would be affected by this rule change. Just remember that all of the people I mention are teacher, holding certificates from teachers college and paid accordingly.

Guidance Counsellors

What do guidance counsellors actually do? As little as possible, that's what. Oh sure they do a couple of course selection days, and work a few long days at the start of either semester making course changes, but what about the rest of the year? As an example, let me relate my recent experience trying to drop a course before midterm. The first thing I did was try to make an appointment with the guidance department receptionist. "What do you want an appointment for?" she asked "I want to drop a course" I said. "You can't drop courses before midterm" she said, "So I can't give you an appointment. You'll just have to talk to your guidance counsellor when she's free."

The next day, I went to see my guidance counsellor, and not surprisingly I found her free. I told her how I wanted to drop a course, and she fed me the same line about it being impossible to drop courses before midterm. "But I know three people who've dropped the class already" I said. She seemed to be a bit surprised by that one, saying "I don't know how they could have since you can't drop courses before midterm." Eventually she told me that I could talk to Mr. Pirk, who might make an exception in my case if I could prove that I was the victim of some kind of exceptional circumstances. It took me a few days (three weeks) to meet with Mr. Pirk, who seems to spend a lot of time either a) engaged in important meetings outside the school or b) playing ping pong in the cafeteria. After I explained why I wanted to drop the course, he told me that he would talk to the guidance department.

The very next period I was called out of class to go down to the guidance department. After waiting for almost twenty minutes, I was finally able to meet with my guidance counsellor. She told me, rather begrudgingly, that she was going to let me drop the course. "So it looks when you said that it was impossible to drop courses before midterm, it was kind of not true" I said. She just looked at me. It had taken me a lot of time, but I had accomplished what I had set out to do in the first place. The main role of the guidance department in all of this was making the things unnecessarily difficult for me, possibly to deter me from doing something that would actually require them to do work.

Librarians

There are two main things that Librarians do, both of which really annoy me. Firstly they wander around the library, harassing anyone who is talking or trying to do any kind of group work. Most of the librarians seem to be almost made mad with power, but luckily they can be escaped simply by sprinting through the plastic sensor gates and back into the rest of the school, where the librarians hold no power. What can not be escaped, however is the mind numbing tedium of in class sessions spent in the library. Most courses have at least two classes which take place in the library, partly to let students do research and partly so that the teacher doesn't have to do any work. The first period is wasted on the dreaded "blue sheet talk" which takes up almost the entire period, and apparently will help us learn how to write a bibliography. While this lesson is pretty boring, it gets even worse with each additional time you hear it. I know people who have had this same lesson taught to them in six different course during the course of one school year. When you spread that over five years of high school, it gets kind of frightening. The presentation is almost exactly the same, year after year, right down to the quiz at the end (...and here's a tricky one; if the book says Toronto, Montreal, New York, London, which do you write down?) I have even had teachers who hated this tedium so much that they refused to sign their classes up for in-library sessions, choosing instead to let us sneak into the library a few at a time in an attempt to trick the librarians. Do we really need to be taught how to use the library over and over again, or is this whole system simply to justify the fact that we require our librarians to have teacher's certificates?

Tech Teachers

Based on my limited personal experiences with Tech courses, being a Tech teacher seems like a fairly easy job, when compared to teaching Calculus or Biology. My grade ten Woodshop teacher did almost nothing at all, except make fun of the Portuguese. Occasionally he would teach us something about drills or saws, but he would always start to explain some sexist anagram for remembering the parts of the drill and than stop, look at the only girl in the class and say "Gee, I guess I can't use that one anymore." Sometimes when we ran out of wood he would climb up a ladder and bring down some more. I was kind of surprised that he could actually climb the ladder at all, because he was pretty fat and pretty old, but he never fell. After he brought down the wood, he was cut it into pieces for us to use. In short, he didn't exactly teach us all that much.

Career Centre Teachers

The career centre is actually an extension of the guidance department, which kind of gets things off on the wrong foot. Apparently our School is a leader in Peel in having guidance counsellors who also teach, but so what? I personally dread going to the Career Centre almost as much as an in-class session at the library, because in terms of tedium it's right up their. The lesson is always something like "blah, blah, blah, here's how to write an essay." The stupid thing is that the way you're supposed to write the essay keeps changing, because its just someone's idea of what's trendy in the field of essay writing with no basis in the real world. After they teach you how to write the essay and the covering letter, you have to actually write up one of each and submit them for marking. The whole basis of marking is your ability to copy the example perfectly, since you lose a mark for ever change you make. Using my resume on two separate occasions, I got a sixty from the career centre, but I also got a job that summer. All this leads me to believe that the career centre is to youth unemployment what the duck and cover method is to a nuclear holocaust, i.e. pretty useless.

In Conclusion

Sure its nice to create jobs for teachers, but its not like the education system has a whole lot of money lying around just itching to be spent. Whatever a Teacher/guidance counsellor can do, a competent office worker type could do for thousands less. The same goes for all of the other examples I have mentioned. If money is going to be cut from somewhere, it had might as well come from here, because I personally won't even notice that its gone.