Daily Dose of English 215
No School November
Daily Dose of English 215
Intermediate
Hey everyone, my name is Ben and you're listening to a Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, we're going to be talking about no school November. because today is the first day of November and there's this thing in the US that happens every November that ends up being called no school November because we end up having a lot of days off in November from like national holidays and so it ends up feeling like there's not very much school in November. Actually, let me look up NoSchoolNovember. I think it's going to come up. There aren't very many results actually online. All of them are from Portland, which is where I'm from, which is very interesting. So we'll talk about that in a second, actually, because this is really interesting. But in November, there just ends up being a lot of little holidays that are off of school, federal holidays, where you don't have to go to school as a kid, which means that it feels like there's less. I just said that. I don't know why I said that again. So mostly it's like Thanksgiving and there's like a couple more. I don't actually know off the top of my head. There's Veterans Day, Election Day. I don't think you get off school. But yeah, there's less than I thought now that I'm looking at the list here. So let's see. Holidays in November. Let's see if that brings up other things. No, I wanna look in the US please. English, sorry. Let me get this thing pulled up because I feel like there's more than I have on my list. So, okay, there's a bunch on here. Oh, geez. This is not very helpful. This is listing everything. So November 1st is All Saints Day, Extra Miles Day, International Pet Groomer Appreciation Day, National Authors Day. These aren't real holidays. I wanted to know what the actual holidays are in November, please. Is that a thing I can look up on the internet? If not, I'm just gonna talk about it. Huh, it doesn't look like there's actually that many. Maybe I'm just wrong. Um, because it doesn't, there's just like regular, not interesting holidays, us election day. Um, and then that's like it. Okay. This is just not a thing. I am making stuff up apparently. Huh, I would have sworn that, yeah, because there's only, there's Veterans Day, that's a real one. That happens on November 11th, I think. And then there's Thanksgiving, which is a whole week off of school, which isn't as much as like a December because December has less school. So maybe this is just a thing that started in Portland and I'm just completely lying to you. That could be, that's very possible. which is, I didn't realize. So we're all learning today. But I guess I will talk about the no school November thing because that is a thing. When I Googled it, it did come up. It came up as some stuff in Portland that happened back when I was in school. And it's the reason that I guess we know this and that's when there were strikes. There were teacher strikes in November, which led to us having basically no school It was like a week of school in the entire month because the teachers were striking. So I guess we might as well talk about strikes for a second. So a strike is when a group of workers together decide not to work. They say, this is unfair. We're not getting paid enough or whatever it is. We're not going to work until we get better something. And Portland Public Schools, this is the school district in Portland, back in, what, probably like 2014, 2015, something like that, there were some teacher strikes. There were some relatively prominent ones, at least in Portland, and a lot of schools had no school because the teachers didn't show up. Because they were getting very unfair pay, very unfair hours, and very unfair expectations. So that's actually where the name no school November comes from, but I thought it was a real thing in general. Guess it's not, but there is, there are a lot of holidays at the end of the year. That's true. So November, October, November, December, that you generally get a lot of time off from school because of Thanksgiving and Christmas and new years and all that. So there's like four or five weeks in total that you just don't go to school in the end of the year, but it's not just November. That's something that I made up. Um, and I guess then in that case, I'll talk a little bit more about strikes because they are, we, we saw a fairly big one recently. Um, the, the dock workers in, uh, New England, some part of, of, of the, of the East coast of the U S um, Long Island, something like that. It was in close to New York. But the New Jersey, it was New Jersey, I think it was in New Jersey. But anyways, the strike was for the dock workers, the people that basically unload all of the goods that come into the US via boats. And they were striking because they're worried about the future of their jobs because of increasing automation and artificial intelligence, and they weren't seeing the wage increases that they need. And something very interesting about that is that a lot of people in the media especially, so the media we're talking about how it's their fault, they're being greedy, it's a bad thing, et cetera, et cetera. But really they should be seen as a good example because they've been striking, they've had this very strong dock workers union for many, many years. And if you look at their wage increases, they have always gone up as they should. As they get more productive, the workers get more productive, they produce more money for the company, they get paid more. Which doesn't happen in other industries. In most other industries, people get paid either the same or less. Usually less because of inflation, but sometimes just actually less. And so they were just doing what they always do when there's a potential issue for their jobs or their future is that they strike and they get paid more for the work that they do, which they should be doing. And the same similar thing happened with Portland Public Schools where the teachers were striking because they are doing very hard, difficult work every single day. And not getting paid very much at all. It's pretty well known in the US that teachers get paid garbage. They get paid barely anything. Even a starting teacher salary is really low for the amount of time and effort and work that they have to do. it's the teaching profession is isn't not doesn't exist for people that are interested in having a good solid career that they will be able to retire well after working for however many years right it is it is set up for basically for people that really want to be teachers and want to teach um and they're sort of in some ways taking advantage of the people that um everybody interacts with Right. Everybody goes to school. Everybody has teachers that are really important in their lives. And yet they get paid very little. And so that was sort of the basis of the teacher strike and why I guess we get the term no school November. And so basically it's important to realize that strikes are almost always good for the workers if they're organized enough and there's like a good purpose behind it. If you just don't want to go to work, that's a different thing. That's not a strike. But it also is meant to protect people that might lose their jobs, right? So in the dock workers thing, some of them are going to lose their jobs to automation, that's going to happen. But part of the strike is that they're saying, okay, if you're going to remove these jobs, we need you to also take care of the people whose jobs you remove. Because a company will, if they can do something cheaper automatically with a robot, they will. They just will do that and they will fire the person that had that job. They don't care. The whole purpose of the company is to make more money. But the person that has that job should get some of that benefit at least and be given however much time to find a new job that they're going to do or to be adequately paid in order to be like, okay, you thought you had this job, now you don't. So we're gonna give you whatever, three months of pay in order that you can find a new job. or to take this course to get a new skill for a new job or whatever it is, right? And so that sort of thing is also really important to make sure that you have in place, right? So as we're going into this age of artificial intelligence, a lot of people are going to lose their jobs with no protections. because they aren't in a union. They don't have a strong negotiating power against the companies that just want to make more money or want to cut costs. And I think a similar thing is going to be happening with teachers in some way. We'll see how it actually plays out. But it is important that teachers get paid fairly and are around because they're so important in our lives. and that we don't have more no school Novembers for kids. Even though I swear I thought that was a real thing where there was more holidays, but there's really just not that many. It's a couple of them. But anyways, that's my weird false episode, I guess. Sorry for lying to you in the title, but I hope that you found this interesting anyways. And if you enjoyed it, let me know in the comments below. But other than that, I will see you again tomorrow for another November episode of A Daily Dose of English. Have a great rest of your day.
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