Rosie DiManno's report card

It takes a certain sort of either courage or stupidity to post one's abysmal report card. I suspect, in DiManno's case, it's more the latter than the former. Like many of my students, DiManno is eager to assign blame to anyone other than herself for her various failures. "The teacher failed me!" she whines, expecting sympathy. "It's not that I'm easily distracted, it's that I'm boooooored."

This intellectual laziness is abundant in most of DiManno's columns. She's the adult version of the child who proudly declares that she never reads books, the special snowflake who raises her hand in class just for the purpose of hearing her own voice, regardless of whether she's done her homework (and she rarely, if ever, does her homework).

If she'd bothered to do some of the background reading rather than simply spewing out a column about how much she hates teachers, she might know that teachers today are told by the administration to choose from pre-packaged report card comments written in educationese that is largely incomprehensible, particularly to parents whose English is less than fluent. A one-line comment written by a teacher is likely to be much more useful and comprehensible. Withdrawal from voluntary extracurricular activities is just that: Some volunteers (not many, by the way) are choosing not to volunteer right now, and they have every right to do that. Voluntary doesn't need scare-quotes; I choose to spend my time at lunch and after school enriching the students' educational experience, but I don't get paid for it and it's not part of my job description. She would know that Ontario's education system, post-Harris years, is considered an international model because government and school boards have viewed teachers and teachers' unions are partners rather than adversaries, and yes, because teachers here get paid more than they do in underfunded, underperforming U.S. schools. And she would know that the reason we've gone "ballistic" is because Bill 115 illegally takes away our basic rights as workers.

But DiManno admits that she has problems in math (which might be why her argument for austerity measures leaves a lot to be desired) and it's clear that she has problems with reading comprehension and concentration, and so she would prefer, like so many in the media, to demonize an entire profession rather than to actually educate herself on the issues.

Fail.