Teachers have more responsibility than ever

By Lethbridge Herald on October 8, 2025.

Shelley Robinson
For the Herald

Teachers cannot really talk about being on strike on social media given their union and professional guidelines, but I can as a retired Alberta teacher.

I remember being on strike in Alberta (AI only researches the history of Alberta teachers’ strikes superficially, but my memory is reliable).  The most notable strikes happened to me in my first year of teaching in 1988, and then again in 2002.  There were other work-to-rule job actions along the way.

What I remember most is that none of us really wanted to strike because it meant losing pay and falling behind in our classroom responsibilities with our students, but we did it because life in schools had become unmanageable.

Teachers are logical people and we often work for free because we love our students.  Therefore, when we actually strike, things have hit a tipping point.  It took me six years to recoup my monthly pay losses from the first strike I was part of in 1988 and another few years after the one in 2002.

What I did gain soon after the 2002 strike were better classroom sizes and employee benefits.  Any actual financial gain benefitted the teachers that came after me.  

There was a time when I taught 54 band students all on my own; 45 English students (12 of them without desks) with new students rotating through my classroom six to seven times a day; and we never had enough textbooks for everyone in one classroom at any given time.

Janitors were allocated seven minutes a day of cleaning in each classroom after all of these bodies came and went.  My students and I were constantly sick from the viruses shared in these close quarters, but I kept working because teacher substitutes were hard to find.   

What many people do not know is that teachers work a ten-month contract and are paid out over twelve months.  It creates the illusion of teachers getting long summer breaks, when in fact, we do not.  I also worked voluntarily in August, prepping my classroom and preparing my unit plans like so many other teachers do while off contract.

Teachers actually only get three weeks of paid holidays for Christmas and spring. In the summer, teachers are technically off contract.  Teaching contracts are automatically renewed each year for those with tenure and negotiated for those who do not.Job insecurity has always been a constant plight for many of my colleagues.

What I see has changed for the teachers in the field now (and that I had a taste of in my later career as teacher and then administrator) is that there are more responsibilities for teachers now.  Where I used to be able to focus on curriculum lesson plans and assessment, teachers’ roles have now morphed into those of coach, social worker, counsellor and babysitters, not to mention many other duties.

I stepped back from the profession that I loved in public education after 29 years because my body told me to do so.  I was tired and had developed medical issues from the demands of my profession as teacher-administrator (which is a conversation for another article as administrators have a big job too).

Teachers in Alberta work hard.  They work in “loco parentis” which is in “the place of the parent” each day, and operate on behalf of dozens to hundreds of children a day. As a secondary teacher with rotating classes, and often six to seven classes a day, I could sometimes see up to two hundred students a day.  The pace was relentless.

What I will say, having taught out of Alberta and in British Columbia for the latter part of my career, is that the Alberta Teachers’ Association is a class act  comparatively.  The ATA has acted on my behalf over the years in very professional ways and even granted me scholarships when I chose to go back to school.

In the end, the ATA membership as a whole has something valuable to say about the schools and I hope the general public listens and supports these people who will educate the next generation of our society, hopefully sooner rather than later.

Shelley Robinson is a retired teacher and administrator with a PhD in education and a background in education journalism.