AS ALWAYS A MINORITY OF TEACHERS GIVE THE REST A BAD NAME

Today's Waterloo Region Record carry this story "Teacher absenteeism on the rise". Unfortunately the Record have a new on-line presence which is making linking to their stories more difficult. This story is all about teachers playing hookey and getting paid (by us) to do so. In summation ""It's very unprofessional, and we consider ourselves professionals," said one longtime Toronto Catholic teacher who asked not to be named.". Boy that really covers the behaviour going on currently by some teachers. The sub heading of this story is "School boards struggling to find substitutes as teachers use up sick days they can no longer bank".

I couldn't believe the numbers as follows : "A record 1,664 of Peel's 10,000 teachers were absent last Friday, of whom only 1,210 could be replaced with a substitute teacher.". That is 16% of the teachers absent on one day. To add further insult to injury it was a Friday. This article makes it clear that Mondays and Fridays are the favourite days for teachers to get "sick".

Clearly our school boards have been hiring "qualified" teachers for a very long time. Equally clear is that these university educated and teachers' college grads are less interested in teaching our youth and more interested in wages, benefits and longer holidays than the rest of us. The current situation is a direct consequence of incompetent self serving school boards combined with incompetent, self serving politicians at the provincial level. Meanwhile the puffery about our world class educational system goes on unabated. Get ready because this mess needs serious fixing and the teachers have no one to blame but themselves. It's long past time the majority of teachers and their unions started applying pressure to self discipline as clearly nobody else is much interested in doing so.