Educational harm
The emotional, cognitive, and academic consequences of exclusion, burnout, unsupported needs, and systemic discrimination in school settings.
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Insults I could have slung
The gaping mouth of motherhood finally open in a scream. Do you know that feeling—two hours after the meeting, after the disciplinary debrief, after the hallway humiliation—when you finally start to breathe again and suddenly, the sentence arrives? The thing you wish you had said while they were weaponising tone and clipping your sentences short,…
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Introductions are an access issue
Every structure carries weight. And when you ask us to begin with a name and a smile, but offer no container for safety, you are asking us to choose between authenticity and self-preservation. What seems simple is often a site of harm For people whose presence in institutional space is routine and unremarkable—those whose titles…
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On teachers, trust, and the long unravelling of support
When my children were in kindergarten, they had a teacher who specialised in what I can only describe as an extremely curated performance of niceness—a kind of plasticky, high-fructose charm that made my skin crawl and my muscles tense from the moment I entered the room. Her voice slowed to a sing-song drawl as she…
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I am just me: What it costs to show up
If I could have walked away from this institution, I would have—but I couldn’t, and so I came, and the price of showing up was almost everything I had left to give. Showing up is not the beginning—it is the aftermath By the time I appear on your committee call or log into your engagement…
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Ego has no place in accessibility
This work requires transformation, not performance. Your legacy is not what you protected. Your legacy is what you changed when you were told it was failing. Leave your laurels at the door Accessibility work is not about legacy preservation. It is not about titles or tenure or whether your department once won an innovation award…
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We must start with an acknowledgement of harm
Before we talk about solutions, or even feelings, we must name what has been done. We begin in the wreckage When an institution convenes a committee to explore accessibility, equity, inclusion, or anything vaguely shaped like justice, it often opens with a bright, empty cheerfulness—a blurb about building community, a land acknowledgement read like punctuation,…
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Poise as pedagogy
There is a cost to composure that institutions never count. When schools reward mothers for staying calm in the face of harm, they turn grace into a gatekeeping tool and punish those who dare to grieve out loud.
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The meeting was on their birthday
It was the twins’ birthday party day and I was meant to be somewhere soft. I was meant to be preparing a cake, or folding small clothes, or breathing in the warm scent of their hair in that quiet way mothers sometimes do when the day still belongs to them. But instead I was seated…
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Bound by blood
Maternal embodiment and the unbearable violence of institutional disbelief. We were once one body There is a biological, emotional, and moral reality so fundamental that no policy manual can contain it, and no professional training can domesticate it—my child once lived inside me. His limbs pressed against my ribs before they ever touched the outside…
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Too competent to help, too angry to believe
The impossible performance of grace in systems that harm our children. Holding two pieces in tension This essay is written alongside a truth that cannot be softened. A truth that spills out, unsanitized, unmanageable, and fully lived. A truth that takes the form of intrusive thoughts, violent imagery, desperate poise, and carefully practiced restraint. That…
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How do you live with yourself
Part of my neurodivergence is fatalism; part of it is hyperphantasia; part of it is the inability to look out at a beautiful landscape without imagining loss, rupture, and death, because even as a small child on the ferry to Victoria, while other people were looking out over the water and the mountains and the…
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I have thought about writing her a letter
I have thought about writing her a letter—something long and deliberate, something shaped by memory and moral clarity, something that names what occurred and places it in her hands before the door finally closes. The idea moves through me with a kind of gravitational pull, neither urgent nor calm, just pressing and circling. I return…
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Why I’m reviewing school codes of conduct
To the student who found this page because you typed something scared or confused or angry into a search bar—something like “are teachers allowed to take away recess?” or “can I be suspended for a meltdown?” or “why did my teacher say I wasn’t trying hard enough when I couldn’t stop crying”—this is for you.…
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Institutional gaslighting of caregivers
You refuse to forget, because forgetting would mean abandoning your child’s reality—and you have already watched too many adults do that with a straight face and a professional tone. You refuse to downplay what has happened, because the harm is not theoretical—it lives in your child’s nervous system, in her school avoidance, in her refusal…
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Food, rewards, and collective punishment in the classroom
It might seem harmless. A teacher stands before a class with a box of lollipops or a bag of Freezies, offering them as a reward for good behaviour. But there’s a catch: everyone only gets one if everyone behaves. What appears—on the surface—as a treat, quickly becomes a threat. For neurodivergent children, food-based group rewards…
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Wait and see: a mother’s warning
Before kindergarten began, we told them—unequivocally, painstakingly, with as much specificity as we could muster—that our son had been harmed in daycare, that he had a long line of diagnoses and was awaiting an autism assessment, that his nervous system was thrashed, and that he would require sustained, full-day relational support in order to experience…
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We stand with BC teachers
The BC Teachers’ Federation (BCTF) has launched a new ad campaign ahead of the provincial election to spotlight BC’s worsening teacher shortage and demand urgent government action. The campaign, titled Hire More Teachers, features TV and digital ads showing the real impact on students and calls for a fully funded workforce strategy similar to health…
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What replaced the strap in Canadian schools?
They took the strap away—or at least, they removed the physical instrument, the leather loop of institutional discipline that had once been the sanctioned mechanism of control in classrooms across the country. Even if we never felt it on our own skin, we knew what it meant; we had heard the sound of it slapped…
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Summer school blues: on being excluded from the gifted program
In the spring of 2018, I applied to the Vancouver School Board’s summer Gifted/Challenge Program for my twins, Jeannie and Robin, who had just finished kindergarten and were, in different ways, already outpacing the curriculum. Robin was already captivated by the ancient world—particularly Egypt, with its pyramids, its rituals, its mythologies of death and continuity,…
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She called the police and the principal told them not to come
They used to be friends—Jeannie and Adam, two children who grew up side by side, navigating the same schoolyards, chaotic birthday parties, playdates, and a sense that their differences were both misunderstood. They went to the reptile show together and settled into the rhythm of primary school routines, and the kind of familiarity shared by…
