Diving back in

I have been sitting here this week reflecting a lot on teaching. There is uncertainty at the moment about what this year will look like. Alberta teachers are in the midst of a contract dispute, and the chances of job action are increasing every day. The government does not seem keen on negotiating, and teachers have authorized their professional organization leadership to strike if necessary. I think about the last few years and the time I am required to put in outside of my contracted hours, and I can’t help but wonder if maybe there is just a degree of ignorance. It seems like the government and much of the public do not understand that I spend most of my evenings and weekends marking and planning. I can’t do that kind of work during the day because during the day I am teaching and working with my students. I am not typically a complainer, but this past week the government seemed to imply that teachers are being selfish—that perhaps we don’t care about our students and only really care about a paycheque. Personally, I would love to sit down with my elected official and compare how much of our personal funds go to supporting students. I would love to ask him what he has done for our communities, what he has done to earn a paycheque that dwarfs mine for fewer hours of work, but I don’t imagine those answers are coming.

I love my job. I love teaching and working with students. I love seeing them develop as writers. I love hearing them work through the ideas in a text we are studying. It is the most rewarding job. I also love to cheer for them at all the extra things. Last year, we drove to Calgary a few times to cheer on teams. I volunteered to help coach, and we hosted several team dinners in our home. We drove to Medicine Hat for baseball, and we are already setting our schedule for the away trips we plan to make this year. I stocked my cupboard with snacks and a mini fridge for my lunch, which quickly turned into a protein shake and electrolytes fridge for their pregame needs. Again, I am not saying any of this for a pat on the back or congratulations, and I certainly don’t believe all teachers are like me. We have the luxury of being able to do these things and support the kids because other parts of our lives did not go as planned—a sad story turned into a positive one. However, now we have a government that is trying to paint us as greedy, a government that is trying to pit the public against us. I can’t lie when I say it has put a bit of a cloud over this year’s start-up.

The additional, and for me personally far more pressing, issue is our government’s newly announced standards for books in schools. They don’t like it when we call it a ban, so I will do my best not to call it that, because it gives them room to scream that we are misrepresenting them. So I will represent them as honestly and accurately as I can. The Alberta government was notified by a conservative parent organization out of the U.S. that some books with content that would certainly not be aimed at elementary students were found in a K–9 school library. The government quickly notified the public of this and put forward a survey asking if the people of Alberta wanted the government to set rules about what content is and is not appropriate for students to access. I will say for the record, I do not think the books that caused the initial firestorm should be in a school library. Personally, I don’t think content depicting anything overly sexual needs to be in school libraries, and parents should be making the call with their kids for when they are ready for that content. I wouldn’t tell a parent what to do with their own children; my job is to teach, not to parent.

Now back to the issue. Parents in Alberta, by a large majority, said the government should keep their nose out of it. The government took this as permission to make guidelines about what is and is not appropriate for school libraries, including classroom libraries. Because I know that people will read this who live to defend our current government, I will say that I don’t wholly disagree with the government’s position in that I do not think books containing explicit sexual material should be in classrooms or school-funded libraries. Personally, I would be uncomfortable with a student reading a gratuitously sexual scene in the middle of my class. Again, curation is not censorship. I wouldn’t say they can’t read those books, but I am not supplying them.

The issue becomes concerning to me when the government starts making wide-reaching regulations for all. My issue is the slippery slope. The other day, a friend called out my use of “slippery slope” when I discussed book bans. See, the government doesn’t need to ban books outright when they just make rules that, through compliance, create a pseudo-ban. One district practiced what some have called malicious compliance (she actually said “vicious,” but I will use the correct term). They have already released a sweeping list banning multiple books from their classrooms. Pictures are popping up all over social media of teachers with their libraries boxed up or covered. You don’t need to explicitly ban things when the criteria are left to interpretation and even those who wrote it can’t explain it. The vagueness of their language was intentional. They want confusion.

I have long believed in the words of Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop, who said, “Books need to serve as mirrors, windows, and doors.” My friend Dr. Sonja Cherry-Paul spoke specifically of the need to begin this phrase as Bishop always intended—with mirrors. Students must be able to see themselves in their literature. Book bans, or criteria that lead to book bans, as Alberta’s ministerial order has done, disproportionately target Black, Brown, and LGBTQ authors. This isn’t because their content is inherently more explicit; it is because those who tend to complain about book content are often complaining about something that makes them uncomfortable. Those folks are typically of a certain demographic, but I don’t want to get caught up in pearl-clutching, so we will leave it at that. It always starts with checks for appropriateness and always ends with books off shelves and marginalized people feeling more marginalized.

Five years ago, I brought a book into the classroom called Ghost Boys. It tells the story of a boy who is killed by police, and his ghost befriends the daughter of the police officer who shot him. The story explores racism and the disproportionate number of African American boys who are innocent and killed by police. At the time, there had been recent shootings, and the topic was something kids were hearing about. The book became so popular that I had to buy four additional copies, and yes, I bought them with my own money. A while after its release, this book was temporarily banned in some states because it was viewed as propaganda against the police. A book that explored the true events of the shootings of Black boys by police officers was viewed as propaganda. That bears repeating.

Tango Makes Three, a story about penguins—two male penguins—that adopt an abandoned egg and raise it, has not been outright banned but has been removed from libraries because of certain “Don’t Say Gay” laws in some states. A book about penguins.

When we open the doors of censorship in our libraries, it never stops at the initial target. Today, it is books with explicit sex (who determines “explicit”?). Also, I am not arguing for those books; I don’t have them. Tomorrow, it will be a book that is determined to be explicit because of its themes. Maybe in a month, we will start removing books that shine a light on our darkest moments in history because the truth is uncomfortable. Wait—that is already happening. Indian Horse, a book that looks at the true life of a residential school survivor, has already been challenged because it exposes the sexual abuse carried out at residential schools.

I have been reading a book these last few weeks between tanning and pool time called This Book Won’t Burn by Samira Ahmed. The story focuses on a girl named Noor who moves to a new community and tries to stand up to the “not book bans” happening there. The community just wants to make sure everything is “appropriate,” and so they are removing any books they do not agree with. This is happening everywhere. This book could be a true story. As I read, multiple pages made me do a double-take, but I’ll share these now.

Oddly, I have heard the "not a ban" line a lot. Almost like they are following a script.

Read the whole page.

Read the book

I am excited for the new school year. My cupboard is stocked with granola bars for the inevitable, “Mr. G, I’m so hungry, do you have anything?” My fridge will be filled, and the candy drawers are full. So are my bookshelves. I have been going through them to make sure I comply with the government’s order, as our Premier said we should be taking out books with the intent of their law and not the letter. She wanted four books removed, and the Education Minister wrote an order that will likely remove hundreds. I will make sure those four are not on my shelves, but I will not be covering the mirrors or closing the windows and doors that books provide for my students. We can follow the rules and protect our jobs while advocating for better. Both things can and sadly need to be true in this new Alberta.