Dear Alice (or maybe your name is Justin, William or Juliette), I’m about to go almost a week without seeing you in class and I’m already starting to get bored. I am your philosophy teacher at CEGEP, and for several weeks, even before classes started, I have been working hard so that you can learn and succeed. I don’t know if you realize all the work I do for you, although I think you suspect it a little.
I was at my desk preparing my lessons while you still had almost a month of vacation left; I work in the morning in the classroom, the rest of the day at my desk, in the evening and on weekends at home or in the library to correct your work, often even in my bath or in transport, while I enjoy of these minutes of brain space available to think about new educational ideas.
I often lack sleep, but I strive every morning to put a smile on my face and give 100% to my teaching, even when you or one of your classmates is asleep in the classroom. Of course, I have a family and I try (as much as possible) to have a life outside of work, but as you can guess, this work I do with all my heart and it takes a long time. major place in my existence. So, you understand that like you I have mixed feelings about the teachers’ strike that is coming.
The government, my boss, tells you that I am taking you hostage by interrupting my work. What he forgets to tell you is that he himself (like his predecessors) has been taking you hostage for a long time. The truth is that for several decades, successive governments, PQ, Liberal and now CAQ, have only neglected public services, including education, cut after cut.
Do more with less
Have you noticed that we regularly have service breakdowns at CEGEP? When a teacher is sick for one or two days, because he has caught a cold or stomach illness for example, he is never replaced; there is no money for that. Of course, management doesn’t talk about service disruption, they call it “reorganization of the lesson plan.” But this means that many teachers prefer to come to work sick rather than go to all the trouble that such a reorganization of the lesson plan requires.
For several years, we have been accepting more and more students in difficulty (and even students who have not completed their 5e secondary) and we had virtually no added resources to do so. Concretely, this means that your teachers have less and less time and energy to supervise you, correct your work, prepare interesting lessons, etc. Moreover, more and more teachers fall in combat, fall on disability leave, take unpaid leave or other because they can no longer take it.
We are having more and more difficulty recruiting and retaining new teachers. When one of us has to be replaced for several weeks, it is often another colleague (already full-time) who has to take on his task. The labor shortage is felt everywhere, especially when salaries are much lower than what other employers offer for comparable skills. Even though I love my job, I often think about what my exit route would be if my working conditions deteriorated further. But I wonder what would happen to you if a lot of us left at once, and that worries me.
And now, the government, my employer, far from taking note of this labor shortage and what should be done to keep the system functional, is making us counterproductive “offers” which are in fact not nothing other than demands: demanding that we teach in the evenings and on weekends in order to tire us out a little more and harm our family life, expand the distance learning offering, essentially with the aim of saving money (while we saw during the pandemic that it increased psychological distress among both teachers and students, and led to dismal failure rates), salary increases under the threshold of inflation (nothing to attract the next generation), less and less autonomy and decision-making power for teachers regarding their own work.
What I find most frustrating about my job is wanting to help you and knowing exactly how I could do it, but not having the means to do it. For example, it has long been shown that reducing the number of students per class increases the chances of success. Teachers have been asking for it for a long time, in vain (and on the contrary, distance learning would provide my boss with the perfect opportunity to increase the number of students per group, no longer being limited to class size or to the number of desks that can be crammed in).
For you and those who follow
The government is also taking you hostage, because it is not telling you that since our collective agreements expired (last spring…), it is sending its representatives to make up the numbers at the negotiation tables. He sends people to appear to be negotiating, but they only demand, ask, and when they are asked for something, they cannot promise anything, they have no mandate. We cannot negotiate in such conditions!
The only other choice would be to bow down and accept all of the bosses’ demands, no matter how absurd. If the government had wanted to avoid the strike, it could have done so a long time ago. We were very patient. We gave it every opportunity, but ultimately I have the impression that it was part of the government’s plan to put us on strike.
To sum it up simply, it frustrates me too, to go on strike and disrupt your session. But I am ready to do it as long as my employer, who will perhaps one day be yours too, does not understand that we do not move a society forward by letting its education system decompose before our eyes. .
Basically, I’m doing it for you, and for those who will come after you. Because my working conditions have a direct effect on your study conditions and because the way the government treats teachers says a lot about the importance it places on students.
Hoping that my boss understands my message and allows us to meet again soon, me to return to the work that I love in more rewarding conditions, you to resume your studies in conditions more favorable to your learning, knowing that society recognizes the importance of what we do.