Please forward this to ONE Canadian immigrant today and tell them to subscribe here.
My first son was four when we landed in Ottawa in February of 2021, mid-pandemic. Before then, he had spent the last ten months at home because his school in Nigeria had shut down due to the lockdown, with a homeschool teacher doing her best to fill the gap.
He had barely settled into his first Canadian school before we found a permanent place and had to move him to another one within our catchment area. Within a week, the new school went remote so he finished the term learning at our dining table, with me acting as a faux teacher and online classroom guide.
By the time he walked back into a real classroom, he had spent more of his life out of school than in it.
Week one at the kiddo’s first-ever Canadian school.
He lasted about two weeks before the complaints started. He wasn't sitting still, or he was distracted, or something else I can’t even remember now. It was always the same note arriving in different words every few days. We kept saying the same thing back to his teachers: this kid has been through a lot of changes, can we give him some time?
What we got instead was a referral to a developmental psychologist who would assess him and, they said, get to the bottom of what was going on with him.
We were stunned. A four year-old who had left all he knew behind, missed a year of school, and bounced through three learning setups in six months was being read as a problem to diagnose rather than a child to understand.
What he had been through didn’t matter. All that seemed to matter to his teachers was what was wrong with him. We ended up moving to Calgary, so we didn’t need to deal with that again, or so we thought. However, the little man is in grade four now, heading into grade five in a couple of months, and he’s thriving.
Which has me asking the question: Why does the Canadian educational system reach for the test before it reaches for context?
Once I started asking this question out aloud, I found out I wasn’t alone. Other immigrant parents told me weird and heart-breaking stories. A nurse told me that during her training there were open conversations about colored children being often flagged for assessments by teachers.
First day of school after remote learning.
At daycare, my second kid suddenly started hitting other kids, something that had never happened at his previous day-home, our home, or at the hundreds of playdates he had gone on. Every time we asked why this was happening, we got a different version of it being his fault. When he told us at home that a kid had hit him or he had seen another child hit others, the daycare insisted that nothing of that sort had happened. Someday it got to a head and I asked if they were calling my son a liar.
The reply didn’t come back about my son. It was about me, a curt warning saying they didn’t like the way I communicated and that it mustn't happen again.
There’s usually a label waiting for a parent who pushes back too much in those rooms. And for a Black father, it can arrive quickly. I earned mine for asking a daycare to take my child seriously. I could keep complaining. But I would rather focus on what I can control.
That is why The Newcomers is working with Manpreet Kaur on a series of guides, and potentially a podcast episode for immigrant parents. Manpreet is an educator and the founder of The Learners Pathway, a literacy and leadership academy, and over twelve years she has worked with close to 400 children across India and Canada. She has watched from the inside what I only learned from the outside of one family.
Each piece will hand parents two kinds of tools. The first is for the child, on how to rebuild a kid's confidence and language when everything familiar has been swapped out under them. The second is for the parent, on how to read what is really happening in that classroom, how to walk into the meeting prepared, and how to push back on a premature label without becoming the story yourself.
The second kiddo.
I needed those tools four years ago and didn't have them. I need them again now. It didn't stop because my first son turned out fine. But it’s happening again, in real time, to my second child.
That is exactly why this series exists.
