Jill & Kath: Best Friends Forever!

February is Heart Month at The Worthy Educator, honoring those special colleagues who make a difference in our lives and careers, celebrating how longterm, loyal, caring, nurturing, professional friendships enhance our experience as professionals!

Jill McPherson pays tribute to Kath Rivadeneira:

Kath Rivadeneira and I met in teacher's college at Brock University, (St. Catherines, Ontario, Canada). Even though we have been miles apart ever since (I live in Ontario and she is in Florida), we stay in touch regularly. We have called each other many times to share our challenges within our careers as teachers. Sometimes we have offered each other an empathetic listening ear, sometimes strategies to solve problems, sometimes we share celebrations, sometimes we share our frustrations with the beliefs and limitations within education and sometimes we share our hopes and dreams for the future of our education system.

Over our thirty-year friendship, I remember countless conversations where we shared our heartbreak and frustration with the increasing rigidity in education — the expanding job descriptions, the pressures, and the slow erosion of humanity as rules and policies began to outweigh individual human needs in learning spaces. We spoke often about what education could be instead: places of safety, curiosity, compassion, and dignity for both children and teachers.

We reflected on the way we watched kindergarten students skip into school with joy, only to see that lightness slowly replaced by heavy shoulders and quiet resignation just a few short years later — where skipping seemed reserved for Friday afternoons. We taught them that.

Those conversations didn’t feel like venting; they felt like visioning. They reminded me that I wasn’t “too soft” for the system — I was simply human in a system that had never fully learned how to hold humanity at its centre. A system that too often values compliance over curiosity, conformity over self-reflection, and productivity over presence — forgetting that we are not factories producing compliant workers, but communities entrusted with nurturing the intrinsic love of learning and the diverse gifts the next generation has come here to offer the world.

During our countless moments of laughter as well as a few tears, I am often reminded of the importance of having a dear friend to remind us that we are not alone in our struggles as well as recognize all that we do as educators to make the world a better place for our students and our school communities!

Jill McPherson

A Worthy Educator

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See our entire celebration of #edufriends and share your tribute to a special colleague or group of peers here so that we can honor you and them!