News - October 3, 2011

So... been a while since I darkened anybody's subscription or RSS feed. Stuff has been kinda busy.
The big news: It is now T minus 5 days. On Saturday Alyssa and I will be married. Which makes me very happy. A little busy, but happy. I think one of the reasons it's been so long since I wrote was I felt this strange pressure to feel something on command, but my actual processing hasn't really followed the schedule of when people have expected me to be excited/nervous/overwhelmed/existential. It's a bit like an extension of this other feel-on-command thing I've noticed happening: people will come up to me and say, "Wow: only 5 days!" and then look at me expectantly. And this isn't like family or Alyssa or best friends. It's people the next-circle outward. People I don't talk to every day or week. People know I'm going through a period of great significance that is profound and yet still highly relatable. And they want to be in on it. But I feel like sometimes my actual state of anticipation doesn't line up with the expected schedule.
For example: right now I actually feel pretty firm-footed. Stable. Lots of other people might be freaking out. I'm either past it or not there yet or both. But I feel almost guilty when people ask me how I'm feeling and if I'm nervous. It makes me feel like I'm supposed to feel differently than I do; like I'm breaking some kind of pre-groom convention. And not only does that make me feel a bit defensive, but it seems like that's an emotional weight I don't really have time for. I have lots of other things to think about.
Maybe I'm naive or I'm a special case or I'm only 48 hours from my own meltdown, but I don't understand grooms freaking out pre-wedding. If I wasn't ready, in the fullest sense, to say "I do", I wouldn't have got down on one knee in the first place. I know that extra bit of discernment cost my bride a bit of anxiety as she waited for me to pop the question. But I think the time was well spent investing the certainty and security of purpose up front so that I really can quite comfortably rest on it now. I don't think I would have felt good about myself if I'd asked before I knew what my answer was.
Of course, we've had a pretty short engagement, and so there hasn't bene much time for new facts/circumstances to develop. But marriage is a covenant that persists regardless of circumstance, and so that doesn't even seem like a good reason for uncertainty to exist either. Maybe I can afford to stand on my soapbox by virtue of an inclination to be rather definite anyway, but I think that doubt or questioning at this stage of the game is a symptom of either lack of forethought or fickleness. Neither of which I think are particularly admirable qualities in a husband.
To summarize: yes, the wedding's only 5 days away. Yes I'm very excited. No, I'm not really nervous.

As for other news, pretty much everything is all set for the trip to the UK, for which I have high hopes as the renaissance of this blog: when it becomes my favourite communication medium with Canada, I hope I'll update it far more regularly.

A random bit of news-news, since I still have some ranting energy left I'd like to work out of my system: The past several days some articles have been published in the Toronto Star about bad teachers in Ontario schools. It makes me sad. And angry. And not a little bit irritated that unions protect incompetent and even abusive and inappropriate teachers while so many of my very competent, professional and driven friends can't get teaching work in this province. The Star's chief target, at least in the first article, seemed to be the OCT (in layman's terms: the licensing and policing association responsible for making sure teachers are qualified and skilled and professional). The author, who I won't call a journalist even though he wrote for a newspaper, seemed to be constructing a case that the OCT has been protecting some of these extremely bad teachers and shuffling many cases of teacher misconduct into settlements and un-publicized arbitrations so that bad teachers end up back in schools with no or little professional consequences. The case wasn't bad, although I think all the wiki-conditioning I'm getting makes me wish there were footnotes for everything the author claimed in the article.
The real axe I have to grind with the article, however, is the premise and goal. I certainly would never stand up and defend the teachers who have been "outed" by this reporter. If anything, the paucity of teaching jobs should mean that the OCT should feel more free to revoke teachers' licenses for far less than they do now. Maybe the consequences should be much more draconian. But the case the author makes against the OCT is ridiculous and sensationalist and just straightforward enough in appearance to convince the average reader that the OCT is some evil organization trying to get children molested. Which really couldn't be further from the truth. Of particular demerit was the third case treated in the first article: a former panel member who was severely disciplined for leaking information about classified OCT hearings to CTV news. The author of this essay-article made it look like the harshest punishments fall on people to try and shut them up. Which is dumb. The member in question was in violation of confidentiality agreements, the standards of professional practice, and acted in a way calculated to degrade the reputation of the teaching profession. If he got slapped with a fine and a reprimand I call it mercy. Breach of contract is a serious crime. And as a member of an OCT panel, he should have had the interests of teachers and teaching first. That is, after all, what the OCT is for. I know that people unacquainted with the political intricacies of education in this province may be tempted to let the demagoguery of this article have them looking around corners for OCT illuminati, and that bugs me. A lot. Because people, for reasons I don't understand, trust the Star to be a newspaper. A News Paper. We might be used to this sensationalist and partisan crap from Rosie Dimanno, but I wish there was a line that even the Star wouldn't cross. I wish that newspapers were about journalism and not money. And I wish that, if that wasn't possible, that at least people would read them critically.
Of course, if we keep riling people up in paranoia over their teachers, then we teachers will never get a chance to teach your kids how to read critically in the first place.