[logshipper]

I wanted to like this article - I couldn't. The author lost my respect right off the bat when they hand-waved recent trends in Ontario education as "Marxism" or derivatives thereof - a failing of intellectual rigour on the author's part [1].

I will not comment on the actual court judgment itself simply because I'm not super privy to conversations surrounding public schooling in Ontario. I will, however tackle one point the author brings up about "rote-like teaching and learning methodologies". I grew up in one such "rote-like" learning system, and I'm witness to how it _kills_ the beauty of math and sucks all joy out of it. I was privileged enough to find Khan Academy around my HS days and Sal's intuition-backed approach to math was a godsend in a place where we were told to redo the same problems till our "hands memorized the problems". Rote-learning is great for multiplication tables, but anything after that is begging your students to fear/despise math. We need creative ways of teaching math so students are actually interested in the subject, and I see far more of that in the west (I have worked part-time as a math tutor in Toronto) than the rote system I was subject to.

This romanticisation of rote-methods and painting all activism as Marxism leads me to believe the author is no better than those he/she seeks to criticize and is victim to the same intellectual trappings they accuse their opponents of. If I had a kid in the Ontario public system, I'd probably be wary of my kid learning anything from this teacher - my political beliefs notwithstanding.

[1] - I'm not denying the author their right to criticize the system (they probably have valid criticisms), but if they're going to do it in a self-important manner, I'd expect more intellectual rigour than calling anything moderately activist as "Marxism".