Wednesday, March 07, 2007

Teachers On Strike!

Well it's Wednesday and sorry I haven't posted in a while. Life has been busy. But I shall go on with my daily rant.

Teachers are still on strike in the Parkland School Division. In other words the kids have lots of days off and they have no "technical homework" because the teachers couldn't assign homework further than what they would've over the weekend that they were going on strike. So in other words kids are falling behind, teachers aren't in class, and parents/taxpayers are mad because they paid for the kids to be in school. I know a few grade 12s that are afraid that they wouldn't be able to graduate in the spring because of this strike.They are unsure if they will be ready for the diploma exams with the pace that the negotiations are going.
Also I think I would be taking the strike more seriously if the teachers were seen sitting around picket signs, like the CN, Telus or other workers have. I think my other problem is that the catholic schools are still in class so it's hard to tell which school is closed for the strike and which ones are still open. Of course the catholic board doesn't have the same problems as the public system does. I have heard through various people that the class sizes are smaller, even down to 5 kids in one grade nine graduating class. If a public school went down to that few of numbers then they would be shut down. I think the graduating (grade 12) class of the christion school here in town was 34. Versus my graduating class from memorial was over 300.
But you know they are like a private school. You can't be any riffraff to join these schools, no you have to be of a certain religion and isn't that discrimination?

2 comments:

Unknown said...

It's unfortunate for all of the kids and parents that the teachers are on strike. But really, the government does need to do something about it. Class sizes are insane, there's so many kids squished into one school, and yet all you hear about it schools closing. How can they do that when all the schools are packed? It's just insane.

But as for the thing about catholic schools not accepting everyone, I don't think it's discrimination. I mean, you could then say that universities only accepting certain people and not everyone could also be discrimination. Gosh, then you could say that guys not being able to use the women's washroom is discrimination. To me, that's just silly. I'm sick of freakin' everyone in the world guilting everyone else to be a certain way because of all this political correctness and discrimination garbage. Maybe that's just me. And you know what? You don't have to be Catholic to go to a Catholic school. Heck, I was going to go to St. Thomas in Gr. 10 before I changed my mind and went to Memorial. And I'm DEFINITELY not Catholic.

Kami Akai said...

It's just as bad when they are taking tax money to fund the catholic system. In my opinion it should be just like a private school and the people have to pay for their kids to go there, just like in college or university or a private community school. I think if the catholic system wasn't leaching off the public tax system there would be more money for the public schools.

For example: Memorial Composite was sapposed to have a overhaul of it's structure to add another level to it. If that happened it wouldn't be so crowded. Anyways because of the change in demographics in the area only one school was allowed to be redone instead of all three. One was needing it so badly that there was mold in the floors and the school was literally falling apart, so it was closed. After that all the high school kids were shipped to Memorial. There was a boom from Grade 10 to grade 11.

Also I was talking to one of the principals of the catholic system and there is a closed book bible test now because us "non-christens" were causing the christen schools problems with introducing drugs and sex, etc. into the school. I don't know about the rest of us, but I wouldn't be able to pass something like that, I only know one bible story that they have now omitted out of the bible.