….maybe I won’t go there

I try not to be too political on this blog. As my readership grows I am very aware of my audience. Many are friends, neighbours and colleagues but most of them are complete strangers to me. It is not the latter group that I’m afraid of offending. Even though I don’t use names on this blog the people I talk about know who they are.

Change is always challenging. We’ve seen a lot of change at our school this year. With full day kindergarten we have 6 new staff members in that area alone. We have 2 teachers in the primary hall on maternity leave and another on a medical leave so we have 3 long term occasional teachers. Just recently we learned that another teacher is pregnant and will be leaving in March and another teacher is going on an extended leave in November. More changes coming.

Those of us who are considered prep teachers are finding it challenging this year because we’re giving a lot of our prep coverage to the kindergarten teachers. Two of us started our careers in high school and middle school and all three of us were considered junior teachers for most of our years at our present school.

Today in the one kindergarten class where I was giving prep to the teacher I agreed to let the ECE teacher leave for a few minutes so that she could get a cup of tea. She no sooner left when I had an incident with a couple of the boys. Apparently the one boy wouldn’t let the other one use the toilet and consequently he wet himself. I had to call the office for assistance. Luckily we found him some dry clothes.

Tomorrow I’m going on a field trip with the grade 4s and 5s to the McMichael Art Gallery. For the last two weeks I’ve been preparing my classes for the trip with lessons about the Group of Seven and First Nations’ artists. In order to go on the trip I had to make sure that my classes are covered by the prep teachers whose classes are on this trip. Luckily I was able to arrange coverage for all the classes. I was having trouble filling one time slot and one of my colleagues kindly gave up his prep time so that I could go on this trip. I’ll have to come up with something special for him.

I never did talk about those different points of view. Some things are just better left alone.