Dispute is not just about the teachers
Re Students should not be used as bargaining
chips, Opinion June 1 Omer Aziz has done very well for himself as a J.D. candidate at Yale Law School considering how he laments how his education was affected by teacher strikes while he was in public school in Scarborough and Mississauga.
Perhaps he should reflect on how the many positive changes in our schools — more manageable class sizes, better trained teachers, more course offerings and resources, etc. — helped shape his success in ways that can never be measured with the metrics that corporations use to measure their success, mostly by financial profits, etc.
But I would be interested to learn what advice he would give to teachers who consider going on a legal strike in the fall after they feel angry that prolonged collective bargaining failed to reach an agreement. Contrary to public opinion, a strike is not only about the benefits teachers achieve for themselves but also about the benefits they achieve for their students. Robert Ariano, Scarborough Omer Aziz not only trots out the old, tired line about students being pawns, but mixes in a poker metaphor about bargaining chips as well. Chess and poker are two wildly different games, though they both involve strategy.
The stakes in education are, indeed, much more serious than in either of these games. However, there are a lot more pieces and cards on the table than he suggests. Besides the regal ones and the pawns and counters, there are knights and jacks, rooks and aces. When a teacher invests his life into the game, he is actually one of the middle pieces on the first line, and often the first to fall. Don Clement, Gravenhurst, Ont. Boards have long manipulated statistics to make it appear that the so-called “cap” on classroom size is being met, but students are regularly taught in overcrowded classes, in numbers that make individual attention impossible.
How much more hocus-pocus will there be with “guidelines” determining class sizes? How did it all go so wrong? Sophia Sperdakos, Toronto