By Chinta Puxley
The school year is off to a shaky start for elementary school teachers, who began September without new textbooks to back up the province’s new curriculum.
Ottawa schools only received the new textbooks a few weeks ago, leaving teachers no time to plan a teaching strategy to meet new education standards. While some say the new books are not essential, the teachers’ union feels differently.
“It’s like a doctor performing surgery and reading the manual at the same time,” says Doug Carter, president of the Ottawa-Carleton Elementary Teachers’ Federation. “The teachers like the new curriculum but there is no time to study it and implement it.”
School administration is being centralized by the Ministry of Education meaning schools no longer order their own books individually. Ottawa’s board now receives all the area’s books and is responsible for their distribution, causing a backup of books this year.
But teachers say the new books are particularly important this year since, under the province’s new rigorous curriculum introduced last June, their pupils have education standards to meet by the end of the year.
Carter says those education goals, and lack of support, leave teachers overwhelmed and under pressure. Getting the proper textbooks to guide teachers through the changes, he says has been a “fiasco from beginning to end.”
“They are trying to figure out how to teach the new material,” he says. “My wife is a Grade 1 teacher and her kids are supposed to know who Samuel de Champlain is by the end of the year. She’s trying to figure out how to do this for kids who barely know they have a middle name.”
It all began in June when teachers were given money for textbooks and told to spend it within a couple of days. The selection of province-approved books was limited.
Now that the books have arrived, there are other problems. Pages are missing from some editions and the print in other “environmentally friendly” books wipes off with an eraser. Distributing half a million new textbooks through Ottawa schools presented a whole new set of roadblocks.
“In the past, schools always ordered individually in April,” says Bob Powell, principal of program at the Ottawa-Carleton Board of Education. “This time, (the books) all came in one big shipment. When they came in, they were all mixed up. There were some math books, some reading, some spelling so it was a major job to sort it all out.”
But Powell says teachers were not overly inconvenienced by the lack of textbooks. Books are only one teaching tool, he says, and are not as critical as they used to be.
“We don’t go through textbooks page by page like in the olden days. We gear programs individually for students’ needs. Many kids learn through auditory processes,” he says.
Teachers didn’t necessarily need the textbooks to plan their courses either, he says, since summaries of the books were provided and the board organized displays giving teachers a preview of the books.
Now that teachers have them in hand, Powell says it’s not too late to draw up detailed teaching strategies to phase in the new requirements.
Terry Davis says that’s already begun at Elgin Street Public School. The principal says her teachers would have preferred to have the books before October, but understood the cause of the delay.
“The teachers used other materials to plan,” Davis says. “They understood this was taking time because the board had to sort through the orders. It would have been nice to have them Sept. 1 but we did have a program already.”
Davis says teachers shouldn’t be too concerned about phasing in the new curriculum since the province has allowed five years for its implementation. Relying on old textbooks has not been a setback either, she says.
“Old math textbooks still have similar content, but the new texts present it in a new way,” she says. While teachers have started using the new textbooks, their union says the whole process has left teachers in an uncomfortable position for the year.
Says Carter: “The teachers don’t want to be whining all the time but it’s hard to figure out how the government could have botched it up better.”