Ah, National “Parents as Teachers Day” in the USA … I wonder how Donald and Melania are celebrating? Perhaps in Canada we need a National Day to celebrate Parents as Teachers, particularly during this tumultuous two years of online learning.
In this continuing saga of pandemic pressure, school aged children have been placed under more stress than coping with the usual growing pains of dealing with academic expectations. At the beginning of the pandemic, children sat at home in front of computer screens dealing with class cohorts and ZOOM meetings while their parents became teachers at home.
That was an eye opener for many parents as they dealt with a complex set of curriculum expectations beyond the experience of the average at home caregiver. Now, if we multiply their stress levels by the number of students in their child’s class, we will have a fleeting glimpse into the stress levels with which their regular teachers were dealing. Most parents are not professionally trained teachers, and no manual comes with a newborn child, so the parent as teacher is a double edged sword.
Beyond the formal education pressures put on us by the isolation of the pandemic for schooling at home, is the whole plethora of care and life lessons taught by parents. We hope that all will be loving, thoughtful, empathetic, well informed, and respectful parents as we prepare our children to inherit the twenty-first century.
Will we teach them to be flagrant consumers, seduced by corporate messaging and fake news, or will we teach them to be careful conservers, informed by science and the voice of the Earth? Will we teach them to appreciate diversity as it is found in our biosphere, or be corrupted by nationalistic fascism? Will we teach them that every child matters, and that before reconciliation comes the truth?
Imagine that Jacob Anthony Chansley, the painted, buffalo horned ringleader charged in the Capitol Hill insurrection riots, was your parent. Or that you had been raised by Hermann Göring, or Pol Pot, or Rodrigo Duterte, Imagine you had been mothered by Karla Homolka, or Ma Barker, or Countess Elizabeth Bathory, or Madame Mao. What would these parents have taught their children?
How different would you be if your mother was Ada Lovelace or Marie Curie or Severn Cullis-Suzuki, or Michelle Obama. Perhaps your father was Nelson Mandela or Elie Wiesel or Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan or Tommy Douglas.
Imagine that you were one of the anti-vaxxer parents now responsible for the continuing spread of the corona virus. Or one of the People’s Party of Canada parents spreading a white nationalist message across your community. Would you have produced a child like Malala or Great Thunberg or Abhayjeet Singh Sachal? Probably not,
For every Obi-Wan Kenobi there is a Darth Vader. We are sending this National Parents as Teachers Day salute out to all who teach on the light side of the Force. Remember, the legacy we leave in our children will be with us always.
The way I see it.
Canada just had a federal election. I live in Caledon, a riding so safe for the Conservatives that the locals claim you could run a dead cow as the CPC candidate and it would win. The Conservative MP recently re-elected in my riding of Dufferin-Caledon is Kyle Seeback. This parliamentarian occasionally pens a column in the local paper entitled “Report from Ottawa” which one would suppose would be filled with vital information for the riding’s citizens. Alas, the column would better be titled “Raving Partisan Rants from Ottawa” filled with plenty of wistful speculations and accusations but nothing of substance.
It is now Friday, the morning after the English version of the last two Leader’s Debates in the Canadian federal election. The first, held in French, was on more global topics that ranged from international affairs to cultural identity, and produced no clear winner. However, Mr. O’Toole was on the defensive from the outset for his sly release of the CPC platform funding just hours before the debate.
The Bolton Protest of August 27, 2021 continues to make the news as the federal election campaign criss-crosses Canada. The obscene, angry, anti-vaxxers, anti-maskers, pro-vapers, pro-smokers. pro-gun, pro-oil pipeline protesters, pro freedom to be selfish continued to disrupt almost every campaign stop made by the Prime Minister of Canada. And yesterday, September 6/21 in London Ontario, a gravel throwing goon assaulted the Prime Minister as he got on his campaign bus.
For example, if we place a People’s Party of Canada sign it lets our neighbours know that we are on the extreme alt-right of the spectrum where the leader of that party tends to racism, sexism, intolerance, and we are basically registering a protest vote because the Maxime will get the minimum.
On the other hand, if we display a GREEN party sign on our lawn, we probably tend to care for the environment and have a respect for diversity, but again a protest vote after the party ate itself alive in public. I have seen one of each of those signs in my neighbourhood.
Sadly, nary a single orange NDP sign, which would however indicate that we had a strong sense of social justice and had bought into the myth that the ghost of Jack Layton, who played footsies with Stephen Harper for years, will save the party from anything but a mid-field finish.
Which brings us to the two parties that will likely battle it out to form another minority government. If you are displaying a Liberal red sign on your lawn, you are content that the current government has brought us safely through the first few waves of this pandemic. We have emerged with a stable recovering economy and strong global health rating. And despite the opposition parties trying their best to manufacture scandals and create crises, it turned out to be all smear smoke and no fire.
Finally, if you are displaying a bluish Conservative Party of Canada sign on your lawn, you probably tend to more right-wing views on things like tax-breaks for the rich, building pipelines for fossil fools, the Right to Choose for vaccinations but not for women, the right to own automatic assault rifles, and a suddenly found respect for drug addicts, all things indigenous, and military veterans. Better late than never. Sorry, my bias is showing here.