Frenchspeaking teachers went striking and protesting in Brussel today.

2 comments

1. For nothing, the plan is to turn the school slowly toward a performance based system like in the private sector and they won’t turn back. Numbers will be all that matter, it was already the case with the external end of the year exams getting easier and easier to improve the numbers. Despite the level of our pupils going down constantly for a multitude of reasons.

   It’s even worse since french speaking teachers are hard to mobilise and the number of revendication show that none of us agree with each other about what would be the main priority to fight for.

   The real problem will be when they won’t be able to find enough teachers to run the schools. Lot of us are thinking to go forward and go toward another job, external factors like changing the diploma to 4 years from 3 and the extreme increase in useless administrative work will do the rest.

2. There are dozens of blatant issues disregarded since many years, even when I was in 1st secondary (that’s more than 10 years ago) they’d go on strike several Thursdays about the same thing. It’s not new, it’s only getting worse, and it’s actually impressive how nothing has changed.

   Old buildings can’t fit larger amount of pupils, be it per class or in total, and have numerous structural issues – insulation, heating, lighting, old or broken material, … – and they are the physical demonstration there’s a critical need for help since perhaps 50 years now. It doesn’t make sense that I got to listen to the same VHS as my mother born in 1970 – we even went to find her course to see it was indeed the same text. So much for bullying me, she failed too (with such audio quality, no surprise tbh).

   For several years I didn’t even have a math teacher. Ask me about trigonometry, logics, inferentials, … ; I know other pupils saw that, I never did as we lacked a teacher. And then there’s the audacity to still put an exam, which couldn’t last 30 minutes due to how little was seen during the year. From my understanding, math and Dutch are the rarest teachers, as they usually qualify for other jobs, which ‘can hardly be worse’ (last words of one of my teachers).

   There were also some other teachers just leaving the school randomly, from my understanding due to psychological issues… *if it’s that bad, they shouldn’t have to be here.*

   I’ll also never forget how I almost failed that year exclusively due to not being allowed to use the computer at home, and not having any teacher open the informatic room at school. ‘You should have used the informatic room’ said the teachers when I said I couldn’t do any work. Like that’s my fault the only person around there is a 80yo unpaid volunteer, and he’s too tired/pissed by other pupils to open the room for me?

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   And I haven’t witnessed any of the chaos Covid caused here.