What it must be like to be a teacher in Alberta; to be taking on significant risk by returning to the classroom with no extra funding, fewer support staff, and kids that haven’t been around each other in 6 months.

Kids who are coping with the greatest crisis any of us have seen.

Kids who will see their world through the pandemic lens. Whose history, economic prospects, relationships, hopes for post secondary, and family life are all impacted by COVID-19.

Kids whose families are worried sick, and whom you will have to reassure.

Enter the Kenney government, who labels you a union boss. Who says that your desire to be there for all of your students with smaller class sizes is foolish. That smaller class sizes are impossible.

But that’s not all.

They take this moment, of all moments, to attack the curriculum you helped develop.

They say it was in their platform, don’t you know. Quite a popular item with some parents!

Anyone else make a plan in 2019?

How many have had to change those plans due to the circumstances?

But Kenney barrels forward on recreating the curriculum in his image. He’s not clear about what he has a problem with, but he trots out men who say we need to make things more like school when they were young.

God Save the Queen stuff. Outdated math learning methods.

A version of history that is easy for old men to understand, but that seems so far away from the relevant, evidence-based, teaching methods you’ve been using for a decade.

So mom and dad can help with homework, I guess.

But you’ll be teaching in the age of Covid.

And this is the stuff your training has prepared you for. You will be a lifeline to kids that need you more than ever.

And they will need the critical thinking skills, they will need the ability to process information instead of learning by rote. They will need a curriculum...

... that you helped creat

And instead of funding your safety, instead of responding to your concerns, Kenney appoints an all-male panel or #manel to come up with as many reasons as possible why you are wrong.

Why your university training is wrong.
Why the evidence is wrong.

Why experts are wrong.
Why teachers are wrong.
Why parents are wrong.

And yet you mask up and go into the classroom in early September.

What it must be like.