For a second year in a row, thousands of Quebec students will be deprived of qualified teachers at the start of the school year, a catastrophic situation recently announced by the Minister of Education, Bernard Drainville.
No matter how many hypotheses explain such a shortage in the world of education, it is clear that the teaching career is in need of love, in other words, that it has lost its letters of nobility. Gone are the days when students in education sciences jostled for a place at university. Gone are the days when candidates for a teaching position faced other aspirants to obtain the coveted position.
But what happened for such enthusiasm to fade so abruptly? In my opinion, the answer to this question is closely linked to the burden of the workload faced by today’s teachers, particularly the presence of students with special needs in so-called “regular” groups. As long as teachers do not receive help from specialized staff to support them in their work, classroom management will occupy the majority of teachers’ time, to the detriment of the quality of the teaching.
Today, our Quebec schools welcome young people from often very different backgrounds. Some of them arrive in elementary school with specific problems, including attention deficit disorder, very often linked to addiction to social media. In this regard, if leaders in the world of education wish to put the attractiveness of a teaching career back at the forefront, they will have to offer students aspiring to a career in teaching a climate conducive to their aspiration, that is, to communicate knowledge to students.
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