journal features

stealing wages from teachers

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Toronto, 2020.02.25

As of this morning, the government of the province of Ontario has now paid us $250 in compensation for the strike days that saw our kids at home. This is, of course, money that should have been paid to the teachers.

The government claims that the teachers are unfairly obstructing their plans to make the province effective. Incredibly, the government is holding out Alabama as the model for what they're trying to achieve. By most standards, Alabama figures in the bottom five or six US jurisdictions when it comes to education. What the government claims they're doing is introducing e-learning to make education more efficient. It's an obvious argument in an era when remote learning is a common aspect of most adult's lives (I did a difficult professional certification and a master's degree that way).

Jon and I met for lunch and discussed how it could work. I suggested that they could have worked with the school boards to develop a curriculum and a means of providing the teaching that meets our needs (not the dubious low bar set by a poor Southern US state). Jon suggested they could have come up with a laptop purchase plan for any family who needed/wanted it. They could have contracted with local PC service shops to deliver repairs at a subsidized rate.

But no, the government went out and made contracts with parties unknown and then tried forcing it on the teachers. I suspect they'll now fail because our government can't seem to do anything right, and as Jon pointed out at lunch yesterday this will taint e-learning in this province for some time to come.

Anyway, now I have $250 for the pain of having the kids around. Thanks for underwriting our icing fishing trip, government!

rand()m quote

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

—Michael Crichton