The North Park Student Newspaper Since 2023
Why are there more white teachers than white students?
GENERAL NEWS
Astitv Chhabra
6/11/20261 min read
Have you ever noticed that there seem to be way more white teachers than white students at North Park?
I started thinking about this a couple weeks ago, so I decided to ask some people about it. I talked to a couple of my teachers and asked where their families came from and how long they had been here. Most of the teachers I spoke to had family backgrounds from Europe and said their families had been here for several generations. Interesting…
Then I asked a bunch of students the same kind of question. From the people I talked to, I noticed something. A lot of the non-white students said either they or their parents were immigrants. Most students had only been in Canada for one or two generations. Meanwhile, many of the white students I spoke to had families that had been here for generations.
This got me thinking. Maybe the reason there are proportionally more white teachers than white students is because teaching takes a long time to get into. You probably need years of school, training and certifications. Families that have been in Canada for longer might have had more time to settle and enter careers like teaching. At the same time, Canada's population is way more diverse than the last few decades because of immigration, which means the student population is changing faster than the teaching population. Also I think you need to be more used to the school system in Canada. My mom still asks me what summatives are.
Of course, this isn't an official study. I just asked people around the school and noticed a pattern. But it does make me wonder if, in 10 or 20 years, our teachers will look a lot more like the students sitting in their classrooms today.