Why it is that Alberta Premier Danielle Smith is still desperately trying to sell Alberta separation as an option? It now seems there’s growing frustration with that option. That’s coming from a population only too willing to sign a petition telling Smith to forget about it.

Still, at first glance most news watchers would have assumed that Alberta’s teacher strike was Headline Number One, on Oct. 25, when over 10,000 Albertans STILL showed up on the steps of the Edmonton’s Legislature to conduct what was to become a pro-separation rally.

Despite her being a member of PM Mark Carney’s Team Canada trying to manage Canada’s economic climate while skirmishing with the USA in what is President Donald Trump’s declaration of a Tariff World War, Smith has never been silent about her “hopes” that Canada will eventually strike a deal that stabilizes resource traffic management between our two nations.

Unlike Premier Moe, who seems almost frightened whenever commenting upon the speed bumps that keep slowing down an agreement process (e.g.: his disfavour with Doug Ford’s Free Trade advertisements that have recently run on American television), Smith’s bogeymen start with former Jason Kenney staffer David Parker, whose “Take Back Alberta” cultists almost insanely believe that the province has already given away too much power to the federal government in allowing them to stifle economic growth, mostly as a result of postponed or waiting for approval projects touted by Big Oil lobbyists, while demonstration a complete disdain for standard provincial vs federal duties or responsibilities as are highlighted in Canada’s Constitution. 

It therefore comes as no surprise to me that with Smith’s less-than-subtle way of “insisting” that voters must be given the choice in moving Alberta out of our Confederacy, pro-separatism speakers at the Oct. 25 rally came to Edmonton with absolutely no idea as how that process would work, and certainly knowing even less about how a nation formed on the backs of treaties negotiated between Great Britain and Indigenous leaders could take years or even decades to become accepted under international laws. 

Even if Albertans were to vote for separation, few seem to understand that it must be assured of a strong economic base that won’t last if all that is supporting it is a royalty stream based upon oil resource export that in less than 30 is going to simply disappear. What’s more, even if Quebec separatists had won the 1995 referendum, the very idea simply died when the province’s future leaders in this new national identity would be without its northern lands and the economic stimulator known as the James Bay Development, its structure based upon lands covered by treaty with its Cree people. 

To Smith, however, “getting the message out” to the sycophants and non-thinkers seeking to make Alberta a nation is the key to remaining in power after the next election, whether the eventual referendum returns a “Yes” or “No” on the ballot. Rob Breakenridge, a major contributor to “The Line: Alberta” podcast, sees that message being delivered in typical Trump style: confuse and baffle voters, to the point where they have absolutely NO idea as to what “benefit” future legislation will have upon the province’s economic pathway, but be certain that when an answer is arrived at, be certain that the feds will be blamed for any failure.

Nothing could be more obvious in our believing Breakenridge’s predictions than to take a look at the newly recalled legislature last week and what legislative gems were highlighted. For instance, it should have been obvious that Premier Smith’s first move would be to get striking teachers back to work – and Bill 2, the “Back to School Act”, complete with its Notwithstanding clause designed to roil organized labour leaders into considering a general strike in the near future did just that. 

Wait a minute – Bill 2? WHAT was more to the UCP than the chance to beat up teachers? Why, Bill 1, of course, the “International Agreements Act”. What’s its purpose, you ask? To Breakenridge, it is merely a “follow-up” touting the same message as did the “Alberta Sovereignty within a United Canada Act”, smoke and mirrors legislation that does absolutely nothing in a true legal sense save for voicing disfavour with any form of constitutional “meddling” into the affairs Alberta that the feds might undertake in imposing its will upon and of the province’s intended economic ventures when it comes to dealing with international concerns. 

Bill 1 further implies that “any international agreement pertaining to a matter of provincial jurisdiction would have to first be approved by the Alberta legislature”, as might happen, UCP spokespersons suggest, were the UN and WHO to come up with an international policy that addressed the need for a battle plan finally be drawn up to deal with a future pandemic. Theoretically at least, Bill 1 would then allow the Alberta legislature to veto Ottawa’s acceptance of the WHO’s action, most likely by obliquely mentioning the “possibility of having to administer full public inoculation by untested vaccines” or patient quarantining due to the contagious nature of this future virus.

Missing from this theoretical debate comes the question, “What if Alberta refuses to take the necessary steps mandated by pandemic protocol? That answer is simple to form: ALL Canadian economic activity across international borders would cease, including personal travel – because this is an INTERNATIONAL agreement, not one between two entities, one of which resents the reality that it’s only a branch plant operation susceptible to the rules set down by head office and its national shareholders. 

Now that Smith has acted, though, will Scott Moe stupidly follow Alberta’s moves as quickly as he has in the past? I’d hold my breath before answering that one… 

When I first decided to become a teacher, I never considered it to be a position wherein one could become a “political instrument”, especially when the subject in which I was planning to specialize was High School Mathematics; man, I’ve never been so “wrong” in my life.

Please don’t misinterpret that statement to be me suggesting I’m “apolitical”; one half of my family background is Ukrainian, which makes such a claim preposterous. My background as a union representative who worked as a freelancer to get himself through university is also a serious “tell”, not to mention my all-too-eager tendency to on “occasion” to simply speak my mind, even if that urge ends up sounding like fingernails scratching a chalkboard and grinding normal conversation to a complete halt.

No, what I’m referring to is the fact that in a classroom setting, I’m trying to teach to a curriculum because in my view that knowledge should be the very minimum of materials covered in a year or semester’s instructional time – and yet our so-called school “administrators” are increasingly doing absolutely nothing in holding teachers to account for not even reaching that level of learning need.

That last statement in itself would under normal circumstances have a bevy of my former colleagues challenging its contention, in turn providing me with arguments as to the “approach” to subject understanding doesn’t necessarily manifest itself as objectives within the curriculum. Unfortunately, that’s true, especially those whose topics are gleaned from the research of social science or historical interpretation; however, this same group of teachers will when asked as to the desirability of having so-called “standardized exams” maintain that such instruments require an advanced level of “critical thinking”, for which the school timetable does not allow to develop.

Fortunately, there are teachers who have been well mentored and see the benefits of developing or encouraging critical thought as opening the gateway to what Piaget considered essential for the expansion of existing knowledge. What we all seem to miss, however, is that even should expression of new ideas result in controversy or social turmoil, their very utterances provide an opportunity to expand the parameters required to placate the antagonism that originally followed the creation of that idea, thus avoiding further controversy.

Additional research into applying Piaget’s theories has demonstrated that teachers have seriously “underestimated the cognitive capabilities of infants, preschoolers, and elementary schoolchildren”, while overestimating those of adolescents and young adults. Ironically, it is this “fast learning” process in the young that results in their becoming “bad reasoners” and potential victims of unrefined logic and biased thought processes, conditions that can only be corrected through the continuing introduction of critical thought that now challenges the biases we’ve allowed ourselves to bury in the original formation our own ideas.

Were we then capable of understanding how Piaget’s methodologies could be utilized to “measure” our learning standards, AND getting teachers to rigidly follow such practice, we could simply tell our students to “don’t sweat the tests”, because all they’re doing is confirm what one’s teacher should have already told you, namely, that you DO understand at this level. However, that’s when the political processes start to collect in self-protecting dust bunnies in encouraging children to NOT learn, or to show contempt for such learning through the creation of havoc and mayhem in class.

Principle sources requiring the continuous cleaning of a student’s learning vents is the ongoing presence of Mr. and Mrs. Helicopter attempting to influence the teacher’s ability to do his job by claiming such a skill does not exist. Equally contributing to your child’s potential never being attained is the still ominous presence of administrators who believe that “new” teachers, whether those straight out of university or having years of experience but new to a school should be beaten into conformity with so-called “community standards” through constant “observation” and classroom teaching evaluation at the slightest murmur of dissent coming from within the student body.

I’ve had experiences with both forms of negativity, and as a teacher over a 35 year period I’d be surprised if such “exposure” is not only the teaching equivalent of getting the measles before being properly vaccinated, but the life story of someone else actually believing in the capacity of kids to be kids, but still learn.

In my first year teaching in Quebec I was given a Grade 11 class of 14 students with an average IQ of 119, ALL of whom were enrolled in Mickey Mouse Math. After switching their programs to the academic stream that required their having to write provincial exams at year end, I was “evaluated” for six days in a row, threatened with termination and criticized for explaining a math concept in a different fashion because the student didn’t fully comprehend the first approach that I’d used to demonstrate the principle in the first place.

The students “killed” the provincial exams, the Principal was eventually fired, and parents suddenly became interested in what their children were learning in my class, attending parent-teacher nights, and even coming to school with their children to help in class. In the end, it was a privilege to go through these experiences with the students – and only a teacher can understand what I mean in saying just that.

I know that there are many things wrong with our schools, but most of them are NOT the fault of students. The problem starts – and ends – with there being a lack of qualified subject trained teachers, especially in STEM programs. If your own teaching credentials are weak, how can you expect your students to become “critical thinkers” so as to be able to answer Question 37 on the Level C section of selected problems that become your homework?

Which in turn brings up another question – are we even learning “enough” to survive in the next post-educational level?

We’ll discuss that factor in next week’s column…

Over the past five weeks, I have been attempting to paint an updated picture of an educational process that is ever increasingly stifling our capacity to learn. This phenomenon’s growth is now being fertilized by the complacency of governments unwilling to incorporate the increasing levels of scientific achievement in research into their economies through sheer ignorance of its potential, or, as is the case in Canada, by the overinfluence of the world’s super-economies placing barriers in the rollout of such reform due to its potential to limit their continuing grasp of such power.

Unfortunately, teachers are having difficulty in getting government officials to sit down and discuss such factors, as there also exists a countervailing force within society whose appetite for any form of “strenuous” learning having been dulled by the seemingly unlimited knowledge available to them through the Internet and the ease at which such knowledge can be accessed, which is further complicated by such media presentations only providing “fact”, which by itself is fairly well guaranteed to be inappropriately interpreted by its writers.

None of these influential factors even consider how one even learns. For a parent or student to even grasp this very simple concept, I suggested in last week’s column that only Jean Piaget’s four stage cognitive developmental model fully examines this process, as well as linking its results of true learning are chemically stored in our brains. For instance, each stage of development is heavily weighted by one’s own age and maturity; unfortunately, too many adherents to this subject tend to ignore the possible overlapping of stages of development, particularly when discussing male versus female example.

 For instance, in the sensimotor or “rote” stages of learning that occur mostly from birth to about two years of age, a female child may herself start simple toilet training techniques as early as seven or eight months, whereas males may have to be pushed to even consider the process at Year 1. As well, during this same period, the child’s response to language prompts from their parent teachers overtly influence other cognitive skill development; and as such both “sexes” are actually capable of beginning to learn several languages at once, then sorting them out in the preoperational or basic stage that follows up to age 7.

On a theoretical level, developmental progress is defined by the child learning to think “symbolically”, to represent ideas for which no picture exists, as well as working on increasing their language skills. Here, once again, we find teachers who are defining their children’s growth by their adherence to the semi-concrete walls of age learning paying scant attention to the “need” for the female child to seek more mature learning behaviours associated with the tasks they will be required to perform in an “adult” life, and as a result are ready to begin studies in subject areas people still incorrectly refer to as “left-brain” tasks, including analysis of data and an almost immediate understanding of introductory mathematical principles.

The final two stages of learning, concrete operational (application of a principle of learning, generally occurring from ages 7 through to 11 or 12) and formal operation (also known as the “intuitive” stage, usually starting at around age 12) completes the developmental process, first by allowing the child to take a specific learned fact (e.g.: a baseball) acted upon by something else (e.g.: gravity) to explain that reaction (e.g.: why the ball only goes to a certain height, before “stopping” then returning at an ever-accelerating speed towards the ground).

In all these situations of learning, the child’s mind is chemically etching a position on brain tissue, so as the learning tasks become more complicated, that process takes longer and longer. In the final intuitive stage of learning, a secondary thought wherein its results may pair with a previously “discovered” or remembered thought will naturally take a child longer to find any relevant solution with which to pair itself. This delay occurs because the mind merely allocates these factors randomly within the brain’s structure, so in looking for a solution, your brain is randomly etching an erratic pathway linking the two separate facts to one another, stopping at one piece of data to see is a solution is possible, then moving onward until it finally arrives at a point of clarity.

It is this “delay” in reaching a final solution to the problem that is the most frustrating to the child; however, that struggle is necessary in order to further understand how these seemingly unrelated thoughts or ideas are actually connected. Were the teacher to seek answers to similar forms of problems, eventually the pathway between the nodes is linearly shortened and the time to arrive at a solution radically cut back.

In measuring student development and progress, Piaget’s model is then used to create testing procedures to measure these factors. Generally speaking, these tests will allow for as much as 40 per cent of topics tested to be rote in nature, another 35 per cent to focus upon applied concepts, and the final 25 per cent then become problem orientated.

If this process sounds simple, that’s because it is; so why doesn’t it appear to work to the satisfaction of the Saskatchewan government, which has now chosen to “retire” provincial examinations altogether?

At this point, educators find themselves in a finger-pointing contest where teachers are paired against school boards and governmental consultants to find “fault” with the process, so in next week’s column we’ll try to address the sticking points annoying trustees and educators alike.

I was beginning to think that the last three columns I’d written hadn’t had much in the way of readership, until a casual friend asked me straight out, “What is the big deal about the government dropping provincial exams? Don’t you realize that virtually every teacher, at least at the high school level thinks you’ve gone off the deep end on this one.”

The answer is simple: I like the exams because to fear them is to ignore the fact that their arms-length presence and material presentation in my classroom provides me with a certain insight: a sense as to whether or not I’ve given them sufficient knowledge in preparing for their life’s journey in learning, while now telling me how to improve so as to make that journey easier for the next group of students I’ll teach.

Many of my colleagues describe the process of constructing such exams as being nothing more than “picking and choosing” specific topics that might not have been covered during class time but were more than adequately dealt with in other segments of curriculum coverage. I can understand that concern, but having majored in both Mathematics and English, I’d love to meet a Grade 12 English teacher doing the “30B” program whose way of “evaluating” student progress is to assign a 6 to 10 page essay on the emergence of this dystopian train wreck threatening today’s society over the Christmas holidays, have it count for a sizeable percentage when calculating a final mark, and include references to current factors and conditions suffering from the process, such as environmental violence caused by climate change, warring religion undermining their own belief systems, racial strife, and our increasing inability to properly socialize due to our now worshipping technological advancement as opposed to personal growth.

I’d even kick in a hundred or so just to be able to read something that a student has written that demonstrates he/she “gets it”. What learning objective have I missed in describing this “test”? None – and yet what makes it most important to me as a father and grandfather, we have to adjust our learning expectations to a level where instead of being “replaced” by such technology (e.g.: Artificial Intelligence) we continue to control the direction technological advances must take.

When they talk about just “how well our students are learning,” teachers fail to realize that their students are treating course materials much like a disposable diaper– the moment the course is done, student notes end up in the recycle bin. However, many of our STEM-related programs, including math, build their structures based upon previously well-proven theorems or stand-alone axioms that must be continuously reinforced in the “essentials” allowing the next phase of lesson planning to properly develop.

What makes things worse from a time constraint is that the Department of Education expects the curriculum to be covered in 100 classroom hours, yet administrators are reluctant to encourage teachers to provide homework assignments on a daily basis for fear of parental backlash. This inability of our educational elite to confront the reality of a need for continuous remediation is therefore lost, and students suffering learning setbacks as a result. For instance, in the mid-1990’s the U of S Department of Mathematics issued a Calculus 100 final examination to over 1,100 students. More than 90 per cent of those writing it miserably failed, begging the question as to how could that happen when my own Grade 11 wrote that same exam, took only about 45 minutes of the 3 hours allocated for its writing and everyone passed?

Perhaps the fact that the “test” was just a recycled provincial examination from around 1936 for Grade 10’s might have had something to do with my students faring better in its writing…

Unfortunately, analyzing what mathematics teachers have to go through highlights where many of our educational intentions end up mired on sandy beaches. For instance, we STILL have administrators who believe that someone with a PhysEd degree can teach mathematics class by staying one day ahead of the students. Trustees don’t believe in mentorship, or we’d have not lost the services of so many who’ve retired rather than watch as something else gets “cut” from its availability as a classroom resource. Add to this the ”politically correct” administrators who skeptically stare at your resume and wonder how any student could ever get a university scholarship when you describe your teaching approach as by allowing students to first get to know me before trying to “evaluate” that individual’s interaction in school affairs.

Nothing, however, puts a strain on a teacher’s desires to impose a standard of learning on their courses than watching Mr. and Mrs. Helicopter, the bane of educators everywhere and destroyers of society as we have known it from its past, entering the school on Parent – Teacher nights. I’ve gotten to the point where instead of listening to their complaints as to how Junior or Princess never had “problems” in mathematics before I came to town, I merely remind them that what they’re really doing is enabling their children to do worse, but if they want to be part of a “solution”, perhaps they might choose to come to school with the child and help in the areas in which they appear to be struggling.

I’ve actually had parents take me up on this offer, and the speed with which their children improved was stunning, to say the least. However, considering the fact that in high school one’s friends are not supposed to know one’s parents, much less watch them embarrassingly helicopter over them eventually resulted in a curative vaccine being concocted.

In creating measuring standards, though, we also must try to evaluate how our minds develop and how to push the boundaries of that process. For us to have such understanding, though, we first must acquire some sense of the psychological process in how we test for true learning, the topic for next week’s column.