Jinny Sims' Failing Grade
According to her bio on the BCTF website, Jinny Sims taught English and social studies in Nanaimo after she emigrated from England in 1975. She apparently also worked as a school counselor. She came to Canada armed with union movement experience in the National Union of Teachers in Britain, a movement that proudly and with no apparent sense of irony refers to itself as NUT. Its newsletter is the NUT News.
The BCTF website says Sims “was deeply involved in the first round of local bargaining when BC teachers began the drive to unionize”. That was 1993 under the Harcourt NDP government and since then it appears that she has concentrated on union activities serving on the provincial executive of the BCTF since 1998.
In her letter to the teachers of British Columbia dated October 6, 2005 she declared that the vote to strike was “an overwhelming endorsation of the goals we have set together”. What sweet irony when the leader of the teachers union of British Columbia uses an invented word to praise her colleagues as they prepare for an illegal strike. You won’t find endorsation in the Oxford, the Cambridge or the Merriam Dictionary, but that doesn’t stop this English and social studies teacher from using it.
The word of course is endorsement and the fact you can find endorsation in the minutes and resolutions of BCTF meetings doesn’t make it a word. This means precious little to Jinny Sims and sadly most of the teachers she leads would either be ignorant of her error or too disengaged to care. Certainly those teachers I saw on television singing songs and plucking guitars on picket lines or at rallies seemed more interested in making certain their lyrics rhymed than accord with even the most rudimentary rules of English composition.
It is time for the silent majority of teachers who have a real interest in pedagogy -if indeed it exists - to stand up and be counted. If your leader thinks she is Rosa Parks and relies on invented words to communicate, perhaps it is time you find new leadership.
The BCTF website says Sims “was deeply involved in the first round of local bargaining when BC teachers began the drive to unionize”. That was 1993 under the Harcourt NDP government and since then it appears that she has concentrated on union activities serving on the provincial executive of the BCTF since 1998.
In her letter to the teachers of British Columbia dated October 6, 2005 she declared that the vote to strike was “an overwhelming endorsation of the goals we have set together”. What sweet irony when the leader of the teachers union of British Columbia uses an invented word to praise her colleagues as they prepare for an illegal strike. You won’t find endorsation in the Oxford, the Cambridge or the Merriam Dictionary, but that doesn’t stop this English and social studies teacher from using it.
The word of course is endorsement and the fact you can find endorsation in the minutes and resolutions of BCTF meetings doesn’t make it a word. This means precious little to Jinny Sims and sadly most of the teachers she leads would either be ignorant of her error or too disengaged to care. Certainly those teachers I saw on television singing songs and plucking guitars on picket lines or at rallies seemed more interested in making certain their lyrics rhymed than accord with even the most rudimentary rules of English composition.
It is time for the silent majority of teachers who have a real interest in pedagogy -if indeed it exists - to stand up and be counted. If your leader thinks she is Rosa Parks and relies on invented words to communicate, perhaps it is time you find new leadership.
posted by Ben Buan | 12:42 a.m.
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