Dear future teacher, as a new episode of collective negotiations draws to a close, I see you preparing with enthusiasm and passion to do this job that excites you. I see you with all your hopes and the firm conviction that we can change the education system, while my own hopes have just been severely shaken. These precious hopes that our education network sorely needs. Allow me, in the time of a letter, to help you protect these hopes by offering you the lessons of this strike.
Don’t get too attached to your training or your diploma. I know it can be frustrating to read this after going through four years of mandatory training, four teaching internships (not all paid, of course), a French certification test written for teaching and hours of teaching. In recent years we will have learned that none of this has much value. In a society where a lack of teaching professionals can be resolved by “an adult in front of the class” and where accelerated training is available to people who will demand the same treatment as you, I advise you not to give too much credit to importance to your time spent at university.
Your expertise is not essential. After all, why trust the people we train in teaching in universities to save the education network? What is the point of consulting people who experience the reality on the ground when our politicians can find a single expert who supports their vision of education and base all their actions on this person who supports them?
Don’t believe a minister who tells you that education is the top priority. At best, you will have a minister who receives the mandate from the Ministry of Education as a consolation gift and who thinks that no one dies from not having books in their classroom library. At worst, you will have a loud radio mouth who reserves his tears for the absence of additional concrete on the river, leaving only long sighs for the fate of our dilapidated schools. After all, why make sure you manage education well when you can simply send your children to private school and avoid these problems?
Don’t have any illusions of solidarity. In a Quebec where teachers are leaving the profession at high speed, those who remain prefer to play a game of who will reach an agreement with the government first, even if it means letting colleagues go to bat and put themselves in financial danger. Others take to the streets chanting that they are doing it for the students and not for the money… only to give in for a pay increase. Your situation will be even worse if you are a teacher of an artistic subject, because in a world which obviously needs more beauty, you will have to annually defend the relevance of your subject to your colleagues to protect it from various cuts (schedule, resources, premises, support, etc.).
Make sure you’re not over-teaching. Who would have thought that this argument would be a reason to be vigilant in the midst of a teacher shortage? But apparently, a government can offer 21% raises to police officers and 30% to politicians, but refuse an equivalent raise to teachers because there are many more of them and we don’t have the means to pay. offer this expense. Because yes, that’s what education is for these neoliberal governments: an expense and especially not an investment.
Be careful not to have too much “the vocation”. This will be used against you to justify poor conditions. It will allow a prime minister to say “that we cannot harm our children”. It will allow columnists who earn three times your maximum salary to vomit their opinion and accuse you of “taking children hostage”. It will allow everyone in the world to discredit your training, your expertise, your reality, your intentions, your educational context and even your pedagogy. And in the end, when you have fought so that we stop abusing this vocation, we will try to place the blame on you for the province’s deficit.
Keep hope. This is my last and most important tip. I know that the outcome of this conflict will have given you a bad portrait of the education network as well as every reason to want to flee it. But please keep your hopes alive. Feed them. Pass it on to your students and teach them to hope for a fairer, more equitable and more educated society that will invest in education. Tell them your faith that a society will reflect its education system and its teachers. Teach them to fight for a society that makes it its duty to have accessible, innovative and fair education.
Teach them to keep hope and fight for it.