Negotiations between teachers and the government have started in the world of education. The situation there is, as we know, nothing less than tragic, in particular because of the glaring lack of personnel, retirements and professional desertions.
The two most recent episodes of the saga that is just beginning have seen the Alliance of Teachers of Montreal approve by more than 98% the use of a strike for the start of the 2023-2024 school year and the government offer a bonus of $12,000 to some 7,000 teachers eligible for retirement if they agree to stay on full-time next year.
I had the idea of asking four acquaintances who teach — two in elementary school, two in secondary school — to name me, not to mention the salaries, one thing, a reality, which makes it particularly difficult to practice the profession and, if possible, to tell me what could be done in this regard to make the profession less painful, more pleasant.
I was not deceived. We talk about things that are fairly well known in the community, but which we hardly hear about if we are not there… Here are the two secondary school teachers to begin with.
Time outside of class
Stéphane Angers teaches maths in secondary school. He chose to talk to me about the heaviness of the task… outside the classroom. Students, he tells me at first, find it increasingly difficult to concentrate for long periods of time — and he’s not the only one to say so.
For this reason, more and more stimulating lesson plans must be made. “Gone are the days when the teacher asked his students to do the exercises on pages 22 to 30 in their notebooks! ” Concretely ? Mr. Angers tells me that a teacher like him (and many others) will often work two hours from home to plan a 75-minute lesson.
In terms of the heaviness of the task outside the classroom, he also tells me about the drudgery of exam corrections, this, one would have guessed, “due to the poor quality of the language and the calligraphy”.
There are also, still on this same subject, the many meetings imposed by the school administrators, the pedagogical days filled with training, the meetings with specialized educators to talk about all the cases of increasingly difficult students, without forgetting all the emails from parents to which we must respond…
Possible solutions? Mr. Angers suggests that young teachers should be better supported — with a mentoring system, for example. He also thinks that we should maximize pedagogical autonomy, spend less time in meetings and spend more time with colleagues who teach the same subject and with whom we can exchange ideas and ways of doing things.
Programs and assessments
Luc Papineau also teaches high school, in his case French. You probably know him from a book, The great lie of education, which he co-signed in 2006 with Luc Germain and Benoit Séguin, and through his current radio and newspaper appearances. He is an experienced teacher who tells me that he has “seen and known all the colors”.
To answer my question, he points to the heaviness of the programs and the laxity of the evaluations. In French, in high school, he gives me the example, many colleagues have the impression “that they must train writers, grammarians, linguists, literary and media content critics, experts in audiovisual production and so on”.
At the same time, he assures me of this programme—and this is the second part of his answer—teachers “have learned not to respect it completely so much, each year, they welcome into their class students who have succeeded or not in their previous year and who have not mastered the skills necessary for their success”. So what do teachers do? Well, naively, “they carry out an interminable leveling which will often be for nothing because the evaluations to which the young people will subsequently be subjected are too permissive”.
In this sense, Mr. Papineau compares the work of a teacher who has become debilitating to the myth of Sisyphus, and tells me that the excesses of results-based management (he invokes Goodhart’s famous law) combined with the weakness of the students that we are told “that we are sometimes reduced to foolishly teaching in order to evaluate”.
Possible solutions? Mr. Papineau would like us to put mastery of the language back at the heart of our teaching and our evaluations. “It is abnormal that a student can pass his French course by writing one error per word in a text, as is currently the case. »
Doctor of philosophy, doctor of education and columnist, Normand Baillargeon has written, directed or translated and edited more than seventy books.