All Posts Tagged With: "high school"
20% of older teenagers no longer in school
Canada stands out among OECD countries with young people not continuing education
A newly released study has found that one in five older Canadian teenagers were no longer pursuing a formal education in 2008. The 20 per cent rate among teenagers aged 15 to 19 in Canada was higher than the average of 15 per cent across the 31 countries of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
Statistics Canada reports the OECD proportion was down from 20 per cent in 1998, but it remained stable at 20 per cent in Canada. The agency says the proportion of teenagers aged 15 to 19 no longer in school varied from 14 per cent in New Brunswick to 26 in Alberta. The corresponding estimates for the territories ranged from 25 per cent to 34 per cent. StatsCan says employment and earnings prospects increase strongly with educational attainment.
In 2008, the employment rate for Canadians aged 25 to 64 who had not completed high school was 58 per cent, whereas the figure for college and university graduates was 83. Graduates from university programs earned considerably more — 75 per cent more on average — than high school or trade and vocational program graduates. According to the most recent data available, the college graduation rate in Canada, which includes only first-time graduates, was 26 per cent, well above the OECD average rate of 10 per cent.
The Canadian Press
Your high school teachers are wrong
Five reasons why university is a happy place
For some unexplained reason, lots of high school teachers describe university as a scary place. Sometimes, after assigning a ridiculous amount of homework, they’ll say something like “I’m just getting you ready for university.”
Yeah, sure.
Why not have a bulldozer smash half your house off before a tornado strikes, just so you’ll be “more adjusted to it.” You know, in case it ever happens.
There is a lot of work in university, but here’s the part your high school teachers aren’t telling you: for a million different reasons, university is way better than high school.
Here’s the top five:
5) You set the pace
How much homework do you have in university? To a certain extent, it’s up to you.
On the first day of classes, most professors give out a detailed course syllabus. There’s a list of readings and study questions, which help prepare you for the midterm and the final. In some courses there aren’t any assignments, essays, or research papers- for the whole semester, you’re preparing for two major tests.
Yeah, I know that doesn’t sound like a good thing. It might seem a bit scary to have your entire mark resting on two tests, but it gives you a lot of study flexibility. In university, you’re given lots of tools to succeed: in addition to a detailed schedule of readings, you’re often given study questions and practice quizzes. When you’re preparing for a midterm or exam, you’ll know exactly what you need to do, and you’ll know when you’re ready.
This might sound extremely lame, but in university you’re given a formula for success. There are a certain number of steps you need to take- reading the textbook, doing the study questions, looking over the practice quizzes- and then you’re ready.
4) Bully teachers are a thing of the past
In high school, everything depends on your teacher. It doesn’t matter if you normally love a certain subject: if your grade 12 biology teacher is a bully who decided on the first day of class that she simply doesn’t like your face, or the way you exhale, you’re not going to enjoy biology very much that year.
In university, things are different.
Sure, there are lots of professors who are worth seeking out because of their enthusiasm and engaging teaching style, and there are some professors who should be avoided at all costs because they’re boring, or make it clear they’d rather be anywhere else but standing there in front of 500 first-years.
But unlike in high school, your professor doesn’t determine whether you love or hate school. You’re an anonymous student in a sea of hundreds and hundreds of first-years. It’s never personal.
3) University is a safe-haven for nerds
In university, there’s room for everybody. If you want to party, there are definitely plenty of opportunities available. But if you’d rather study and get good marks, nobody will hold it against you.
2) Four months of summer vacation
May, June, July, August. Seriously, I’m not kidding.
Sure, most of us have part-time jobs year round, and full-time jobs during the summer. But four months away from school is still four months away from school.
1) Three day week? Totally possible.
In high school, you don’t have much control over your schedule. Once you’ve filled in all the mandatory courses, you get to choose between visual arts and music.
University is completely different. Depending on your program, you still have a certain number of mandatory courses. But there’s even wiggle room when it comes to these core courses: you can often choose between a one-hour lecture three times a week, or a three-hour lecture once a week.
And the rest is completely up to you.
University gives you a chance to pursue your interests and passions, with a range of courses spanning dozens of subject areas.
Or, if you’re anything like me, you can score a three day week.
In my first year, I managed to cram all three of my labs and my physics, chemistry and biology courses into a Monday, Wednesday, Friday schedule.
Of course, university is an opportunity to expand your horizons and challenge your ways of thinking. But why not expand your horizons while maintaining a three day week? Just something to think about.
And in later years, there’s always the possibility of a two day week…
-photo courtesy of dave_mcmt
Your grades will drop
How universities and high schools are setting students up for disappointment
Scott Penner was a model high school student. With a grade 12 average of 93 per cent, and with math and science as his strongest subjects, he was poised to be a successful engineering student. That is, until he started at the University of Manitoba. Penner was not expecting to glide through university, though he “was still expecting to do fairly well.” Even by these lowered standards, his first year was less than encouraging. Not only was he receiving an uncharacteristic assortment of Bs and Cs, he failed first-year calculus, a prerequisite to continue on in engineering. “It was a bit of a shock,” he says.
Penner is not alone. The vast majority of students see their grades fall, often dramatically, once they get to university. What is sometimes called “grade shock” can have devastating consequences for students, as they struggle to cope with the fact that they are no longer at the top of the class.
Within the course of a semester dreams can be easily whisked away. “The business program or engineering program that they thought they were going to pursue [is] not an option for them anymore,” says Brock University economist Felice Martinello who recently co-authored a study on the changes in grades between high school and first-year university.
There are also financial repercussions. In 2008, Maclean’s surveyed the rate at which students who received entrance scholarships kept the requisite grades to maintain their funding going into second year. At York University, where fully 60 per cent of incoming students received an entrance scholarship, only 10 per cent kept their funding. At McMaster the rate was 21 per cent. At Ryerson, seven per cent.
As grades have long been known to predict whether students will complete their program, significant grade drops may be contributing to dropout rates, suggesting that students coming in, even with an A+ average, may become discouraged and simply give up. In fact, the best evidence we have suggests that it is the highest achieving students that are most at risk for being disappointed in university.
In his paper, Martinello, and coauthor Ross Finnie, find–consistent with previous research–that on average students see a 10-point drop in their grades once they are in university. Using data from Statistics Canada’s Youth In Transition Survey, the study concludes that nearly half of all students surveyed saw their marks decline by one letter grade. About 23 per cent saw their grades plummet by two letters or more. Only 2.5 per cent of students saw their grades improve, and about a quarter maintained averages consistent with their high school marks.
But, what is novel about Finnie and Martinello’s paper, and pertinent for high school academic stars like Penner, is that the economists determined that “the highest achieving group (in high school) has the largest decrease in grades.” Students entering university with a 90 per cent or higher experienced a drop of 11.9 points. Students with high school marks in the 60-79 per cent range had only a 4.4-point drop. Prior studies tended to assume that even with a drop, that there was a linear relationship between high school and university grades. Finnie and Martinello’s research challenges that assumption.
“You’d think that maybe, oh, it’s the weaker students, that once they go to university, they’re really going to get killed, but it turns out that’s it’s the 90 plus group,” Martinello says.
Recent trends suggest that the challenges of grade shock are only going to become more widespread. That’s because students with average entering grades, in the B or B+ range, are slowly disappearing. And when all, or most, of the students come in with an A or A+ average, many will have nowhere to go but down.
At the University of British Columbia average entrance grades across the university are expected to be 87 per cent this year, a two per cent increase from last year, and up from 80 per cent ten years ago, and 70 per cent twenty years ago. Andrew Arida, UBC’s associate director of enrolment says higher entering grades are simply a matter of supply and demand. “Because students are presenting higher grades, we’ve had to raise our admission averages to avoid over-enrolling,” he explains.
Only a few years ago, UBC was admitting around 15 per cent of students with grades below 80. That number is dwindling fast. Although Arida didn’t have final figures for the fall, he says only a “small number” of students will get in with less than an A. Students entering the two largest faculties, science and arts, will need a minimum high school average of 86 and 85 per cent respectively.
Similarly, the University of Waterloo increased by seven per cent this year over last, the number of entering students with an average of at least 85 per cent.
Schools like Waterloo and UBC, already considered prestigious, are joining an elite club of universities that are inaccessible to all but the highest achieving students. With an average entering grade of 88.9 per cent, Queen’s University rarely admits students with less than an A average. At McGill, the median average entrance grade for Canadian students is 92 per cent.
Go ahead sleep in
Giving students 30 extra minutes to start their school day leads to more alertness in class, better moods, less tardiness, and even healthier breakfasts
Giving teens 30 extra minutes to start their school day leads to more alertness in class, better moods, less tardiness, and even healthier breakfasts, a small study found. “The results were stunning. There’s no other word to use,” said Patricia Moss, academic dean at the Rhode Island boarding school where the study was done. “We didn’t think we’d get that much bang for the buck.”
The results appear in July’s Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine. The results mirror those at a few schools that have delayed starting times more than half an hour. Researchers say there’s a reason why even 30 minutes can make a big difference. Teens tend to be in their deepest sleep around dawn — when they typically need to get up for school. Interrupting that sleep can leave them groggy, especially since they also tend to have trouble falling asleep before 11 p.m. “There’s biological science to this that I think provides compelling evidence as to why this makes sense,” said Brown University sleep researcher Dr. Judith Owens, the study’s lead author and a pediatrician at Hasbro Children’s Hospital in Providence, Rhode Island.
An Archives editorial said the study adds to “a growing body of evidence that changing the start time for high schools is good for adolescents.” The fact that the study was in the exclusive setting of St. George’s School in Middletown, Rhode Island, doesn’t necessarily weaken the results. Owens acknowledged that there might be more hurdles to overcome at poorer, public schools, including busing schedules, parents’ work hours and daycare for younger siblings.
While these issues have killed many proposals elsewhere, some public high schools including those in Minneapolis and West Des Moines have adopted later starting times. Mel Riddile, an associate director at the National Association of Secondary School Principals, favours later class times for teens but said most districts oppose it. “It’s about adult convenience, it’s not about learning,” he said. “With budget cuts, it’s going to make it more difficult to get this done.”
Many parents and teachers at St. George’s were opposed but reluctantly agreed to the study after a presentation by Owens, whose daughter was a junior there. Overall, 201 high school students completed sleep habit surveys before and after the nine-week experiment last year. The results were so impressive that the school made the change permanent, Moss said. Starting times were shifted from 8 to 8:30. All class times were cut 5 to 10 minutes to avoid a longer school day that would interfere with after-school activities. Moss said improvements in student alertness made up for that lost instruction time.
The portion of students reporting at least eight hours of sleep on school nights jumped from about 16 per cent to almost 55 per cent. Reports of daytime sleepiness dropped substantially, from 49 per cent to 20 per cent. First-period tardies fell by almost half, students reported feeling less depressed or irritated during the day, health centre rest visits dropped substantially; and the number of hot breakfasts served more than doubled. Moss said the healthier breakfast probably aided classtime alertness.
Recent graduate Garrett Sider, 18, used the extra time for sleep. He noticed kids took part more often in morning classes with the later start time. “It was a positive thing for the entire school,” he said. The study was designed to look at changes in sleep habits and behaviour and didn’t examine academic performance. It also lacked a control group of students who didn’t experience a change in school start times — another limitation. Still, the researchers said the results show delaying school starting times is worthwhile.
The Canadian Press
Revisiting highschool
A chance to reinvent yourself
I recently attended an open house for my younger brother’s high school. Sitting in the school’s auditorium, along with hundreds of grade eight students and their parents, I could tell David was feeling really excited about starting grade nine next year.
He’ll suddenly have his own locker, instead of just a small cubby hole to share with another student. There will be tons of new classes, from media arts to wood working, and dozens of school clubs and activities. David won’t know anybody at his new school, so he’ll have a chance to reinvent himself and make new friends. He can hardly wait.
Throughout the presentation in the school’s auditorium, one thought kept running through my mind:
Thank God I’m finished high school.
Why a Nova Scotia school strike won’t hurt students
I always feared Nova Scotia English students were not expected to learn anything. Now I have proof.
Support staff for Nova Scotia schools may soon be walking out, and this has raised concerns about, among other things, high school students preparing to write their provincial exams. This led me to wonder what the students might be missing, and so I looked into the exams and what they entail. Since I am an English professor, I decided to look into the English exam.
If the English exams are any indication of what students are expected to learn, they don’t have much to worry about. The exams don’t expect them to have learned anything at all.
The English poetry sample questions provided on the NS Government’s web site give a poem, sample questions about the poem, and sample answers to guide the teachers’ grading. The sample poem in this case features a speaker recalling childhood days, eagerly waiting for a father to come home from work. Not a great poem, but no matter. What about the questions? Half of them are odd multiple choice questions. Odd because, it seems to me they ask for specific answers about broad questions. “How does the boy feel about his father?’ one asks. “Excited” or “Sentimental”? Clearly both, it seems to me. And besides, nothing in the poem says it’s a boy. But that’s not the worst of it. Then come short answer questions.
The first short answer in the guide is wrong. The question asks how long it as been since the events described in the poem, with the correct answer being “about fifty years.” But what the poem actually says, it that it has been more than fifty years — it doesn’t say how much more. But that’s a quibble about a boring question. Were any of the questions good questions? Did any expect answers that required real thought? At first I thought I had found one that was:
Re-read lines 18-20 and explain the meaning of “nail-etched.”
For your information, here are the relevant lines from the poem, in which the speaker describes the father’s lunch bucket, a recurring image in the poem:
he loomed
before me and set down
the metal bucket, his name
nail-etched with pride
in the black enamel
Okay. Now we’re getting somewhere. This question actually asks the student to consider issues of meaning. They have to look at the poem symbolically, pay attention to detail. This is good.
Here is what I would expect a good high school short answer to look like:
The father’s name scratched into the lunch box suggests confidence in himself. The author says he takes “pride” in it, meaning that he values himself enough to identify his lunch box as his. He also sees himself as not just another worker. The fact that he used something as basic as a nail tells us that he takes simple and direct approach to what he does in life. The name is probably not neatly done (it would be difficult to scratch neatly into enamel) but it doesn’t matter to him or his child. They both value him for who he is.
This is not what I would write, mind you, or even what I would expect my university-level English students to write. I see this as something a reasonably smart high school student with a good understanding of what a poem is could do.
Here is — and I’m not even kidding — the entire suggested sample answer:
Scratched/engraved/drawn with a nail.
I swore when I read that. Out loud. It’s not even a sentence. And all that the students need to say about “nail-etched” is that it means “scratched with a nail?” That’s it? What else could “nail-etched” mean? “Massaged with a balloon?” All it really asks is that the students can figure out what “etched” means which, even if they didn’t know, is plain from context. All the question really asks is, “You want your name on a lunchbox. You have a nail. What do you do?” Should I even mention that this test counts for 30 per cent of a student’s grade?
God forbid a school strike should prevent students from being properly prepared for these exams. They might miss their chance to demonstrate how little they are expected to know.
No holiday for high school students
For many students, applying to get into a university is like applying for a job
The holiday break could prove a busy and stressful time for high school seniors in Ontario facing a Jan. 13 deadline to apply to university and a demand for high grades to enter competitive programs.
While the Ontario Universities’ Application Centre began receiving applications in November, many students will spend the holidays submitting forms before the deadline to ensure they’re guaranteed full consideration, said OUAC director George Granger.
Tyler Carson is among those students competing for a coveted spot next year.
The 17-year-old Toronto student says he did a lot of research over the past two years into which university he should go to next fall. The Sir Wilfrid Laurier Collegiate Institute senior visited four university campuses in the Toronto area and checked out schools and programs online.
Carson applied to the University of Toronto, York University, Wilfrid Laurier University and McGill University to study sexual diversity and human rights. He later hopes to attend law school. Carson, who is student council vice-president, founder of the school’s first gay-straight alliance, and has a 94 per cent average, says he’s not worried about being accepted into a top university.
“I’m pretty confident I’ll get into all the generalized programs. I’m applying to Vic One which is a specialized program at U of T that only accepts around 25 kids from my stream, so that will be competitive,” he said.
For many students, applying to get into a university is like applying for a job.
The guidance counsellor at Carson’s school, Renee Rawlins, advises students to get their applications in early and do research. That includes speaking to recruitment officers, going to campuses, and looking into university programs and requirements, such as prerequisite high school courses and marks needed.
Business and engineering programs are more competitive than Bachelor of Arts programs, and require students to have marks in the mid 80s to 90s to get in, she said. “A student with a 55 per cent average in their six courses — they’re not looking to be very competitive anywhere,” said Rawlins. “If you have 90, we can say, well, you’ll be very competitive anywhere.”
Aboriginal grad rate lags in B.C.
Only 49 per cent of aboriginals complete high school in B.C., compared to 79 per cent for the rest of the population
The B.C. government is promoting a record high school completion rate of 49 per cent for aboriginal students in the Class of 2009, but a First Nations group says that’s nothing to be proud of.
Provincial statistics released Thursday show two per cent more aboriginal students finished high school last spring, compared with 47 per cent in the 2007/08 school year. The figures compared with an overall completion rate in the province of 79 per cent for the 2008/09 school year.
The statistics are well below the province’s target of a 55 per cent completion rate by 2011/12. That compares with an overall target of 82 per cent. “We are pleased with the results and the gains that aboriginal students have made,” Education Minister Moira Stilwell said in a news release.
Stilwell said the increase is due in part to so-called “aboriginal education enhancement agreements,” which integrate aboriginal culture into schools. That includes special First Nations courses. Stilwell also cited work among school boards to “empower” aboriginal students to graduate.
Grand Chief Stewart Phillip, president of the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs, said the province shouldn’t be happy with the results, especially given the huge gap between the overall student completion rate and aboriginals. “It really upsets me,” Philip said. “I am pleased that they are moving in the right direction but we are a long way from home.”
Of those aboriginal students who do graduate, he said some aren’t able to attend post-secondary school due to cuts to student-aid programs. Phillip said there are many obstacles for aboriginal students, all of which trace back to one issue: “crushing poverty.”
“At the community level it really makes it extremely difficult for our students to reach their full potential,” Philip said. “The vast majority of our people live far below the poverty line. Those conditions aren’t improving, they are getting worse.”
He cited a recent report showing British Columbia has had the highest child poverty rate in Canada for six years in a row and said aboriginal children make up a big portion of that group. “I don’t really believe the province has a lot to be proud of in terms of the aboriginal file,” Phillip said.
Completion rates are determined by tracking the number of students entering Grade 8 who graduate within six years. Over the last six years, the overall student completion rate was 79 per cent, except for 2006/07 when it was 80 per cent.
The completion rate for aboriginal students has swung back and forth between 47 and 48 per cent from the 2003/04 school year to 2007/08. In its service plan update released in September, the province noted the “achievement levels of aboriginal and non-aboriginal students continue to differ significantly.”
In June 2009, the province said there were 2,159 aboriginal students in the Vancouver school district, representing 3.6 per cent of the district’s total enrolment.
It also said it was investing an estimated $52.6 million a year—$1,014 per student—for aboriginal education in 2009/10, based on district-estimated enrolments. It said the money is used to support aboriginal language and culture, education and support service programs.
The Canadian Press
A tug-of-war with my self
University no escape from high-school cliques
The process of self-discovery I long anticipated to occur in first year of university is in full-swing. The first taste of independence, incessant socializing, and unprecedented stress management required are accelerating the infinite process of self-discovery to an extent I apparently failed to appreciate. Not only is my idealism being challenged – I’m being forced daily to explore and question the fundamental ways in which I look at the world and at myself.
The first sphere of influence my beliefs and convictions have run up against is that of College social life. In high school, it took me a long time – about 3 and half years to be precise – to stop trying to be someone I wasn’t in order to fit in with whom I perceived as “cool.” I eventually came to the intuitive understanding that it’s impossible to sustain a personality that isn’t naturally your own, so I embraced who I was, became friends with people I was genuinely interested in and who were genuinely interested in me. I ceased my fruitless and futile pursuit of popularity for it’s own sake.
Here at university, I’m finding the whole process is starting over again, albeit with a few more complicating factors thrown in. There is a clear parallel to my early high-school years in that I am drawn towards certain cliques that have been agreed by some unspoken understanding to be comprised of the most popular kids, while my most meaningful relationships already lie outside of those cliques.
Trinity is a small enough school that I see everyone I know every day, and so at meals I alternate between sitting with the “cool” kids, who I like chatting and partying with; and my much more philosophical, cerebral, “nerdy” friends where dinner is always accompanied by a discussion of the value of rationality over intuition, or whether killing babies is inherently bad (it’s not). While I don’t feel compelled to make a cut-and-dry decision as to what clique I belong in (I do, however, believe that depth is inevitably sacrificed in favor of breadth), the experiences with both groups inevitably shed light on my own personality.
On the one hand, the cool kids don’t seem to read into things very much; they are happy to remain in the realm of small-talk and get annoyed when I attempt to analyze or find meaning in what they say; a habit that I have neither managed to shake, nor particularly want to. Of course, this perception is probably flawed since I remain for the most part an outsider observing only the public behaviors of the group. Even it was an accurate perception, I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with such superficial interactions, but I do think my habit of incessant over-analysis is here to stay. These guys, however, seem to have a hell of a lot of fun without seeking meaning or explanations. They seem to intuitively know what is good, what makes them happy.
On the other hand, the Philosopher Kings spend their days trying to understand what is “good” and trying to figure out if happiness is even worth pursuing as an end in itself over, say, knowledge. I actually quite enjoy thinking about these things, but this is where things get even more complicated. The one course I have really enjoyed and found genuinely challenging so far, Buddhism and Cognitive Science, seeks to explain how people find meaning. Most of the theories we have encountered suggest that this is done pre-supposing logic.
Whether you call it intuition or choose to invoke a fancy Greek word like religio, it seems that people ultimately find meaning and happiness without actually thinking about it. This makes sense when you actually try to define what is meaningful, what is good, using pure reason. It’s very hard. In the thousands of years of philosophical history, no one has managed to objectively define these concepts to the point where everyone agrees; what an individual finds meaningful or good (and which is therefore the basis for his behavior and beliefs) remains very much up to the individual to decide in some pre-logical, subjective way.
Still, the cynic in me continues to distrust that which cannot be explained logically, and so these questions remain unanswered in my mind. It’s a tug-of-war between logic and intuition, with no clear winner in sight. Juggling this existential angst while struggling through the incredibly annoying process of memorization and regurgitation known as mid-terms, I’m surprisingly glad to be going home in 2 weeks for some much-needed relaxation.
Making friends
How the worst loss has made for a small gain. It’s not worth it.
Carnage is a sweet thing to watch. It’s something you can bond over, maybe with a beer and greasy pub food. Watching two men fight is primal and hideous but it can make you friends, simply for the fact that you might be rooting for the same guy to bleed. I was spending my Saturday night doing just that with my friend Matt at Ryerson’s pub. We had just ordered and were settling down to watch a UFC Fight Night. Tito Ortiz vs. Forest Griffin – I had been anticipating this fight for a week. I just wanted to see Griffin lose and run away like a little girl. I had money on this fight.
During one of the welterweight divisions, my friend Rachel called me from her room on U of T’s campus. I didn’t want to pick up the phone because the fight was so rough, so enticing, but I decided to make the sacrifice. I walked outside so I could hear her.
“Do you remember Cayley Chapman, Joi Edgar and Emma Ransom? From high school?” she asked. Certainly I remembered them; we had only graduated a year and a half ago. They were fine girls, I guess, but I didn’t have much communication with them. Rachel knew them much better.
“Sure I do. What about them?”
“They’re dead.”
Rachel went on to explain that the three girls were driving to Calgary from Lethbridge on a weekend trip when their car spun out of control and drove over the median into oncoming traffic. They hit another car straight-on. There was a woman and her baby in the other car. Everyone was found dead on the scene except for the baby, saved by the car seat.
I explained to Matt that I had to leave, paid my bill and rushed over to Rachel’s. We sat in her dark residence room, browsing Facebook until 3 a.m. as the details of the accident slowly leaked via a shallow social networking website. “RIP Cayley, Joilinn, Emma” was the Facebook status theme du jour, and it seemed that everyone we went to high school with knew. Rachel was getting messages left, right and centre. “Rachel, did you hear?” “Oh my god, it’s so awful.” “I’m shocked. I’m just shocked, I can’t even believe it.” For this brief speck in time, everyone was friends and we were all in high school and we were all holding hands, no matter how far we were. I made a few phone calls to Calgary and Victoria, where I knew some of my friends were. They knew the girls, they’d be upset.
“I’m fine, I’ve had my cry,” said Molly. “I can’t believe it. But, thanks for calling, Scaachi, that was nice.”
When you realize someone that you didn’t know well is dead, there are a few choice things that happen: you think of how your friends would react if it were you, you think how you’d react if it were your friends, and you consider every regret you’ve held with you your entire life. After all, I feel like I just saw these girls in Mentorship class, annoying the hell out of me because they were pretty and popular and I couldn’t find a real reason to dislike any of them.
Over the weekend, more information was released. Finally, names and pictures of the girls came out and the rest of the country knew what Dr. E.P. Scarlett’s class of 2008 already knew. Memorial groups popped up, funeral arrangements were being made and families were making statements. And everyone was thinking, “poor Hannah.” Hannah was best friends with the three girls, and everyone who discussed their untimely death with me would wind the conversation down with, “Hannah, oh my god, she lost all her friends.”
Rachel thought that maybe them going all together was merciful. “Like they couldn’t live without each other, you know? They went as friends.” We all dig for explanations in time of grief, I suppose.
In this same time, Rachel and I figured out who the woman in the other car was, who the mother of the baby was. I feel uncomfortable revealing a name or any identity since the family has withheld the name for a reason, but the woman is related to another grad in the same year. The connection makes this accident more of a freak show than it was in the first place. Road and weather conditions were fine, they weren’t speeding and they weren’t drinking. How do you go like this?
This morning, I read a first-hand account by a woman who found the crash moments after it happened. She detailed finding one body in the middle of the road, broken bone poking out of her leg. Their cosmetics were strewn across the road and in the ditch. She found ballet flats and blush brushes and then the other two girls in the car. It was so ugly. And the photos of the car with the top ripped straight off and the front bumper destroyed. It’s lying in a ditch, with yellow and grey grass and a dusty sky. It’s so ugly.
There’s something horrific about watching a grotesque news story unravel itself before you when you already have the answers to the questions. It’s like watching the car crash in question in slow motion – you know where it’s going to go and you know it’s not ending anywhere good. The journalists must have been pariahs to the grieving families – looking for a lede, a picture, a detail on the girls that no other paper or network had. I watched interviews and read statements from girls I knew and I just hoped that the people talking to them were talking to them right.
Is this the career I’m picking? Is this the kind of work I want to do with myself? Digging into the ended lives of others, going after their family members for a quote or a close-up shot of them crying for what’s lost? I have to wonder if neglecting to report on something no longer makes it true. I don’t if reporters didn’t speak to the families, they would feel less grief. Nothing can fix this, you can only try to give them a platform.
Carnage is a sweet thing to know. It’s something you can bond over and feel with other people, because maybe you all hate that it happened to the same person or people. Knowing the premature death of a group of people is primal and hideous but it pulls people together for a disgusting and almost unwanted bond. I missed watching two guys beat the life out of each other because life had already been sucked away from four women. And everyone was friends, and I was part of it without even trying.
I don’t think I’m alone when I say I’d rather that we didn’t have to bond like this.
An open letter to some girl I don’t know
Hey Jaclyn (?) Lee (?), How are you? I am well. I hope all these years after our graduation have treated you kindly. First of all, I’m not exactly sure that your name is, in fact, Jaclyn . I’ve been told through the grapevine that you have a bone to pick with me, but I [...]
Hey Jaclyn (?) Lee (?),
How are you? I am well. I hope all these years after our graduation have treated you kindly.
First of all, I’m not exactly sure that your name is, in fact, Jaclyn . I’ve been told through the grapevine that you have a bone to pick with me, but I don’t remember you in the slightest. What I do know, however, is that you’re really upset that I won’t add you on Facebook. Now I make no pretense of being popular, so it’s not like I spend my days ignoring friend requests, but certainly I say no to more people than I say yes to.
But I genuinely cannot remember who you are. I usually only identify people by a distinct character flaw, so you must be really perfect because nowhere in my half-decent memory can I find you or your name. I will go ahead and assume you are a blond/brunette white female between the ages of 17 and 20.
What I can’t understand, however, is why you would be so wound up over the fact that I won’t add you. Clearly we had little contact, nevermind a full conversation.
Please show yourself. I feel like I may owe you an apology.
Or maybe I don’t. Maybe I’ll find out who you are and it’ll just increase me ire for you and people like you, who require the popularity contest that is Facebook friending. And to be so irked by the fact that I just won’t say yes, to be so personally offended by it that you tell one person who tells another who tells me and then you become this joke, this extravagant joke about this broad that is hurt because I will not add them – well that’s so sad for you.
Or maybe you’re not like that, who knows?
In my defense, the purpose of Facebook is to keep in touch with people that you want to keep in touch with, however, if there is no need found on the part of either parties to keep in touch, what’s the purpose behind it? The way I see it, some people drift away, some people don’t. I have no desire to keep talking to that girl that sat in the back row of my Math class and cut Simple Plan lyrics into her wrists.
For all I know, Jaclyn (?) Lee (?) could have been that girl. In reality, what would we have to catch up on if we’ve never been caught up int he first place?
So please, if I hurt you – or any of you, for that matter! – please expose yourselves to me. As some do when I delete them, confront me. I’ll give my reasons and you give yours. It’s Facebook. It’s not even as serious as Twitter – IT’S FACEBOOK.
Anyway, I hope there’s no bad blood. Or maybe I do? Depends on who you actually are.
Hope you’re well, Jaclyn (?) Lee (?)!
- Scaachi
The best advice I have (is a bit depressing)
Treat your high school years like a failed relationship — forget about it and move on
At this time of year, people frequently turn to me and ask what a student just entering university should know. Actually, they don’t ask, and I’m glad they don’t because the answer is probably not what they want to hear. What one thing should you, the new student, know if you are just starting university? With a high degree of certainty, I can say the following:
Your high school betrayed you.
If you are like most, and as far as preparing you for university goes, about half of what you learned in high school was probably useless. The rest was probably wrong.
Take my discipline, English, for instance. In a typical first year class of forty-five students or so, there is maybe one — maybe one — who actually knows how to write an essay. Many of the rest have done no formal writing at all, and those that have done papers might have called them “essays,” but they were really just reports or personal commentaries. This last group has a particularly tough time, because no matter how much I explain it to them, they assume that what passed muster in high school will pass in my course. It doesn’t.
And it’s not just English. A colleague of mine in biology once told me that she prefers it if her students haven’t taken high school biology at all because then she doesn’t have to spend time at the beginning of the year unwinding the misconceptions and falsehoods with which previous teachers have tangled her students’ brains.
This is not entirely the fault of high school teachers. Little was probably expected of them in the first place, and from the young teachers I know, most attempts at holding high school students to tougher standards are doomed to failure. Principals won’t allow it. Parents won’t stand for it.
Which brings me back to the advice. Your university professors don’t have a principal telling them they can’t fail you. And we don’t care how special or misunderstood your mother thinks you are. So forget about what you think you learned in high school. If you’re lucky, you had some great teachers who actually taught you something valuable, and if you did, you’ll be that much further ahead. But, in general, anytime your professor says something that seems to contradict what they told you in high school, believe your professor. Especially if the sentence begins with “You will not receive a passing grade if…”.
No longer a newbie
It’s official. I’m now a Yellow Shirt
The first time I ever set foot on the University of Waterloo’s campus was last July, when I attended Student Life 101.Thanks to campus tours, informational seminars, and ASK-ME booths with current students, the day long event gave me a snapshot of what my life was going to be like for the next four years.
Every student who volunteered that day was wearing a yellow T-shirt. I couldn’t help staring. Not at the shirts. At them.
They were university students. Upper year university students. When my parents and I pulled into the parking lot, I saw some Yellow Shirts handing out maps and talking to other high school kids and their families. They’re a completely different species in the student genus. I was a post high school student. And yes, I was completely intimidated by them. I remember wondering how to approach and talk to them. As peers? As wise university mentors?
This year I changed species. I got my own yellow shirt.
I knew I was going to like my placement for the day. Not the garbage bin moving part. I had an out-of-body experience during those two very long hours. My team got to be in the parking lot when the new students first arrived. I was thrilled. I got to be part of the group that first welcomed them to Waterloo.
I’m not really one of those spontaneous people who like greeting strangers. I freeze and sound like a goat trying to talk. But this was different. I really care about my school and I wanted to show them what a great home Waterloo can be. I was happy and proud to greet these new students.
Until I had an internal nervous breakdown and got performance anxiety. I had no idea what I was going to say to these new kids.
“Uh, hi. Um, Welcome?”
I tried to think of warm and engaging sentences of welcome that I could bestow upon these new students. But every great idea went goat. I was still chanting sentences in my head when I heard someone say, “Come on Andy.” I turned and was facing a new student and his parents.
I took the scene in. The parents were staring at South Campus Hall, a huge building on the hill behind me, looking a little afraid. ‘Andy’ was four feet behind and to the right of them, looking at the ground, then at the sky, anywhere but at us Yellow Shirts. I was standing in front of them with a map of the campus in one hand, and a name tag on my shirt with “Hi, I’m Jenny” stamped on it.
I was frozen. Then I made eye contact with Andy and lost any chance of passing them off to someone else. I resigned myself to knowing that I was going to sound like an idiot.
I think I smiled, maybe too much, because he looked kind of scared of me.
“HI! Uh, hi. You’re in Parking Lot A. Yeah. Oh, here’s a map of the campus. If you follow the red line, on the map there, you’ll get to the Student Life Center for the opening presentation. Um, have fun?!”
As Andy and his parents walked away, I barely had enough time to agonizingly re-live my terrible greeting 1000 times when someone tapped my shoulder.
“I’m sorry, where is the Bookstore?”
After I took the map from the lost student and turned it the right side up, I told them to cross the street, go up the steps, and take the first door on the right.
“Oh! Oh, okay, thanks!”
I think it was 40 minutes later, when I had to go refill my stack of maps, that I realized what I was doing. Maybe it’s part of my first born bossy complex. Or maybe our Yellow Shirts made us more extroverted. But by the end of the day, I was actually comfortable walking up to a complete stranger and saying “Hi, can I help you find anything?”
And I was pretty sure I was enjoying it.
Even university doesn’t earn me cool points
But being older and taller should.
I’ve realized something this summer. My younger brother David is cooler than me. Way cooler.
Actually, it’s not even a matter of David being cooler than me. He’s cool. I’m not.
David’s on his school’s wrestling team. When he throws a football, it travels more than four feet. When he kicks a soccer ball, he can control which direction it goes.
Back in high school, I was in the chess club. And part of Envirothon.
David has dozens of friends on Facebook. I have two. And one of them is David.
David’s coolness has also made me realize something fascinating: certain laws of physics don’t apply to cool people. If I wear a hat for more than 30 seconds, when I take it off, my hair looks like a dead squirrel. When David takes a hat off, it’s like he was never wearing one. His hair instantly springs back to vibrant and shiny life.
I’m the older brother. He’s in grade eight, I’m in university. I’m taller. But none of that seems to matter. His coolness is a direct violation of Sibling Hierarchy Rule #467. Which states that older, taller brothers are automatically cooler. It’s practically my birthright to be cooler than David.
But I’m not.
Last November, I tripped over a wet pile of leaves and broke my arm. When David broke his arm a few weeks ago, it was while playing soccer.
Yeah, even the way he breaks his bones is cooler.
Being yourself is important… and maybe impossible
Important – and extremely challenging – advice for Freshman (and everyone else)
I gave a speech last week to the graduating class of my elementary school. Along with their teachers and principal, I imparted to them the best advice I could as they enter high school, a big, scary place full of countless insecure kids trying to fit in and be “cool.” Don’t conform, I said, be yourself: it’s the only option anyway. Get involved in something you’re interested in, I encouraged; you’ll meet interesting people and enjoy good experiences!
Afterwards, I realized that this advice is actually just as pertinent for graduating high school students entering university. I think this realization probably came about as my entire family gives me pretty much the same suggestions. And the more I think about it, the more important these suggestions seem. I like to consider myself pretty independent and therefore largely free from the influence of peer pressure, but it turns out that such pressure is often subconscious and therefore beyond our control.
In the 1950’s, a psychologist named Solomon Asch conducted an experiment in which he asked a group of 6 people to pick one of three lines displayed on a screen that was the same length as a line on a card they were given. Obviously an easy task, everyone quickly agreed on the correct answer – every time. But when 5 of the people were secretly told to intentionally choose the wrong answer, the last person went along with their obviously incorrect response nearly one-third of the time!*
This experiment illustrates how willing people are to conform to a group – even when they can obviously see that the group is wrong. There is even recent research suggesting that in these instances people are using the perceptual part of their brain, indicating that if other people appear to see things one way, we might actually see them that way too and not just be saying we do.
That’s a bit of a scary thought for anyone, especially those entering a new, unfamiliar phase of life, be it high school, university or a new job. It should encourage all of us to stay keenly aware of how our behavior is affected by others. The implications are greater than you might expect…
To be continued!
__________________________________________________
*From Nudge by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein (2008).
N.B. gov’t reverses cuts to education program funding
Minister restores $2.9m, saves jobs of hundreds of library and teaching staff
The New Brunswick government is reversing a $2.9 million cut to school districts and will reinstate services to school libraries and intervention programs.
Education Minister Roland Hache says the money will come from the $5 million Innovative Learning Fund – a program heralded by former minister Kelly Lamrock to provide grants for specialized education projects.
Hache says the fund will get $1 million, and projects already announced will be honoured.
The initial cuts to the school districts meant the loss of about 300 library assistants, teachers assistants, and behavioural intervention workers, while close to 300 more would have seen their hours reduced.
Sandy Harding of the Canadian Union of Public Employees says she’s working with government to ensure all the job cuts will be reversed.
Brent Shaw, president of the New Brunswick Teachers Association, says having a new minister in the job made the difference in getting the funding issue resolved.
- The Canadian Press
At 84, US man gets high school diploma
Japanese man gets diploma after teacher digs up his old report cards
There’s at least one guy with a new high school diploma who’s not worrying about getting into college or finding a job.
After all, Takeshi Murata is 84.
He left University High School in Greeley, Colorado, in 1944 when he was drafted to fight in World War II, according to the Greeley Daily Tribune newspaper. The son of Japanese immigrants, Murata was trained as an interpreter in case of an invasion.
Murata says he barely spoke Japanese but was sent to Tokyo after the war ended. He married in Japan and returned to northeast Colorado in 1947, where he farmed and raised five children.
The high school finally granted Murata’s diploma Wednesday after a teacher heard his story and found his old report cards.
- The Associated Press
Why it’s so hard to fire bad teachers
Most principals would rather hide or transfer incompetent teachers than try to oust them
What it took for one Ontario principal to rid her school of an incompetent teacher is a process she’s not fond of revisiting. It began in September 2007, when she inherited a teacher whose performance was already under review. Despite a file thick with evidence of inadequacy, the principal helped draft an “improvement plan”—a requirement in the provincial Education Act—and dipped into school funds to pay for substitutes while the struggling teacher attended workshops.
But, says the junior school principal, it soon emerged that there was “a serious, basic problem of not understanding”—which continued even after the teacher knew she was under review. Students shuffled through reading levels without proof of assessment. Parents complained about spelling test words that weren’t sent home. And the teacher submitted grades for computer class when, in fact, her “inability to use technology” meant the monitors “were rarely turned on,” says the principal. Still, it took months of paperwork and meetings with union representatives before she was able to inch even one step closer to dismissal.
“It was very upsetting,” she says. “I wouldn’t choose to do it again unless I absolutely had to.”
Inadequate teaching has been shown to contribute to dropout rates, low test scores and a dislike for school. So severe are the implications, says Brendan Menuey, an assistant principal in Virginia, that poor teaching is tantamount to “educational malpractice.” Yet in Canada, teacher incompetence prompts so few administrators to pursue termination that the Ontario principal insisted that not even the name of her school board be published, because it would almost certainly identify her.
According to Barrie Bennett, a professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, the dismissal process is so onerous, the risk of reprisal from teachers’ unions so great, that “most principals find it’s not worth the effort.” Instead, they approve transfers, or hide struggling teachers where their deficiencies can go unnoticed. The result however, is this: a system that keeps incompetent teachers in the classroom.
The fact that more bad teachers aren’t being fired is “a problem that nobody wants to talk about,” says Menuey, who authored a 2007 study on the subject. Despite research indicating that about five per cent of every workforce is incompetent, he uncovered a truth about his district he describes as “scandalous”: less than one-tenth of one per cent of tenured teachers were being dismissed annually for poor performance.
When viewed through this lens, the Canadian numbers are even more damning. Of the roughly 200,000 educators licensed by the Ontario College of Teachers to teach, only 27 have been terminated due to poor performance since 2004—an annual average of just 0.002 per cent. In the past five years, not a single permanent teacher has been dismissed for incompetence in the largest school boards in Montreal and Winnipeg; Saskatoon Public Schools has terminated just one; and in Edmonton Public Schools, says a spokeswoman, “very few if any” have been let go.
Getting old sucks: University means becoming an old fart
Now I walk uphill both ways
Ever since I finished high school I’ve been slowly transforming into an old person.
I’ve been out of the public school system for just over a year now. Suddenly I’m hearing myself saying things to my brothers that my parents used to say to me.
“Don’t put your shoes on like that. You’ll ruin the heel.”
“Put a hat on. Do you want to have a heat stroke?”
“Stop crossing your eyes or you’ll weaken the muscles.”
I can’t sleep in past 8:00. When I catch Michael or David watching TV, I tell them to go outside and enjoy the sunshine. I can no longer pronounce words like ‘Bionicle.’ I notice birds when they chirp outside my bedroom window. I sometimes even watch them for a few seconds.
And I have to resist the urge to tuck my shirt into my pants.
I’ve developed a taste for weird foods. Like cold boiled eggs. And when I eat pancakes, I use chunky garlic syrup.
I swear, even my eyesight has diminished. I can’t make complete eye contact with people. I have a soft, wandering focus.
And I’ve started listening to the CBC.
-photo courtesy of JonDissed
Are you getting your money’s worth?
Canadians concerned about the value of an education, finds poll
As young people prepare to don caps and gowns this month and take the stage to grab their diplomas, Canadians confess a certain skepticism about the value of an education in this country.
Nearly half of the Canadians polled in a recent Harris-Decima survey said they feel Canada’s educational system does not adequately prepare young people for work in the modern economy.
Albertans are most pessimistic about the system – 52 per cent say they find it inadequate.
Younger Canadians, between the ages of 18-34, are more likely to say it is up to snuff than older respondents.
Nathan Seebaran, a student at Edmonton’s Ross Sheppard High School, says he feels optimistic about the training he’s getting through a registered apprentice program.
He’s studying to become a cabinetmaker and will be doing projects at the University of Alberta as part of his training.
“I was thinking of dropping out of high school because I didn’t really think I needed it, but I’m glad I stayed to do this,” Seebaran said.
Confidence is the hallmark of the so-called “Generation Y,” which is now hitting graduation age, says Harris-Decima vice-president Jeff Walker.
“Part of that self-awareness and self belief of that generation of people is the feeling that they work extremely hard and that the system has been beneficial to them,” said Walker.
When asked to grade different levels of education, Canadians gave high school the lowest marks.
Only 37 per cent felt high school did “very well” or well at preparing young people for the workforce.
