This was written by a faculty member who was full-time and is now teaching part-time.
I teach a freshman composition course to 55 students at a large GTA college. I prep for two hours in the classroom and laboriously maintain an e-learn site for the third hour of online learning.
I was hired on the Friday of the first week of classes. I received the course syllabus four hours before my first class. I have no desk, no phone, literally no place to hang my hat. I meet students in the hallway.
I'm paid for three hours, but work anywhere from 8 to 20 hours per week depending on the grading. I'm expected to help each one of 55 young people reach a standard of sophistication in writing that gives them a fighting chance to get ahead in what's left of the working world.
I take this job seriously. I have three twenty-somethings also believing that education will prevent them from joining the underclass I now inhabit.
But I'm actually one of the lucky ones. I teach because I want to, not because I have to. The legions of contract college teachers who now make up the majority in the system don't have that luxury.
I met a young guy who teaches seven sections of freshman at two colleges 60 km. apart. He hopes to win the lottery if a rare full time job opens up. He was cheerful but couldn't stick around to chat as he raced out the door.
When I was among the chosen whose pay was well above average, whose workload was contractually limited, who had the time and resources to actually help my students, I knew about the gross inequality existing all around me. I knew of it intellectually, not personally.
I knew that contract teachers were propping up the entire system. I knew that they attended meetings for free, used their own printers and copiers and met students on their own time. They were not career teachers, but industry professionals. I knew they got thrown new courses every semester, scrambling to develop course materials and often not getting a chance to refine those materials by teaching the course more than once.
I knew they spent hours of their own time teaching themselves the educational technology required in the classroom and staying current in their fields. I knew they sometimes suffered lousy student evaluations at least in part because their working conditions were impossibly difficult.
In short, I knew that they worked in a system of entrenched inequality in which they did exactly the same work as the full-time teacher in the classroom next to them for a fraction of the pay, with little support and even less status.
The full-time faculty knew it, but felt helpless to change the juggernaut that was the government's relentless retreat from funding the college system. Year in, year out, the ranks of contract faculty swelled while government grants shrank. Those grants now make up less than half of colleges' operating revenues system wide and as low as 37 per cent in some colleges.
That's why I was honestly gobsmacked when the full time teachers through their union made the plight of contract teachers and by direct extension their students, the main issue in this round of collective bargaining.
There can be only one explanation for this ambitious move. Those full-time teachers are actually prepared to call the province out for its abject neglect of what was once a system of applied learning emulated in several other countries.
They are prepared to stand up for their students and their families, who pay more and get less every year, notwithstanding the rosy picture painted by college administrators, public relations and advertising departments.
They have taken the predictable amount of anti-teacher and union bashing in the press and on social media. They have put themselves at risk on picket lines set up at busy college entrances across the province. (Does anyone remember that Centennial College teacher John Stammers was run over and killed while picketing in a legal strike in 2006?)
They deserve the support of everyone who believes that college education is an important cornerstone of social equality in Ontario, and that it should be publicly funded by society, taxpayers, employers and students -- who are its beneficiaries.
To all of my colleagues on the lines, I urge you to stay strong, vote no to the cynical, divisive and utterly regressive offer from a team of of grossly overpaid college execs.