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Professionally Speaking welcomes letters and articles on topics of interest to teachers. We reserve the right to edit letters for length and to conform to our publication style. To be considered for publication, letters must provide the writer’s daytime phone number and registration number. Address letters to: The Editor, Professionally Speaking at ps@oct.ca or 101 Bloor St. W., Toronto, ON M5S 0A1.
My husband and I are both teachers who love to travel abroad in the summer months and look for opportunities to volunteer or teach. Our dream is to take a leave in the future to teach overseas together. I was excited to read “Passport to Learning” in the June 2014 issue. I enjoyed reading about other teachers’ experiences and learning about organizations and opportunities. Thank you for this article.
I was disappointed, however, to find some resources were out of date or limited, and there was a lack of resources for secondary school teachers. In the future, I would love to see a more comprehensive list of organizations and overseas opportunities published in time to apply to these.
—Colleen Lebar, OCT, is an English teacher and guidance counsellor at Chinguacousy Secondary School in Brampton.
I am a teacher from Montréal who subscribes to Pour parler profession. I love this magazine!
The December 2014 “Tech Class” column discussed how to use Skype in the classroom. I was motivated to try this with my class. My school board even posted an article about the experience on its website. Thank you for the inspiration!
—Olivier Forest, OCT, teaches Grade 5 at the École Vinet-Souligny in Saint-Constant, Qué.
Professionally Speaking is moving in a certain direction, an optimistic embracing of the latest computer technologies. It troubles me, as education ought to be for the questioning of “truths,” offering a space for dissent and critical awareness.
The December 2014 Professionally Speaking poll on teaching tools indicates that many contemporary educators cannot teach without recourse to electronics of some type, relegating the dictionary, thesaurus and chalkboard to curated curiosities. As teachers, we rarely ask the difficult questions of our environment or its technology, or of our ethical complicity in technology’s degradation of human life. If we profess anything worth professing, we must speak truly and, in many cases, against the thoughtless and uncritical praises of technology.
—Joshua Christopher Weresch, OCT, is a singer-songwriter and an occasional teacher with the Hamilton-Wentworth District School Board.