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Joshua Tusin
Web Page: http://www.ourkids.net |
| Profile: Joshua is a freelance writer and editor, hobby photographer and father to Max (as of April 6, 2009). He has studied and practiced biology and technical communication but now finds himself doing a lot of writing for the web. He's the black sheep of his family - everybody else is in education! And so are his mother- and sister-in-law. Part of the reason Joshua spends most of his time writing is that one of his great passions is communicating complex or technical information to a wide audience. And when he used to do research in a lab, he got more excited telling people about what he did (and why it was important) than actually doing the work. That's kind of like education, right? | |
Posts by the author:
Fewer Students, Fewer Schools in Ontario
The parent-led group People for Education has released their analysis of school closures and declining enrollment in Ontario schools. The full report, a 14 page PDF, finds that nearly 200 schools are slated for closing and another 163 are under review.
A recent Globe and Mail article looks at the effect low birth rates have had on school availability while CTV looks at People for Education’s desire to see the closing schools repurposed.
The report also looks into the funding structure, finding that school funding is based on 1997 enrollments, which have dramatically changed, with many districts seeing a 20% drop in enrollment in the last 5-7 years.
Cheryl Jackson on Full Day Kindergarten
I’ve written before about the prospect of full day kindergarten in Ontario, and now we know that the province plans to offer the new program to 35,000 children by next fall, with all children able to head to school all day in five years. Cheryl Jackson, over at TVO Parents, juxtaposed Ontario’s decision to increase education funding and school days through full day kindergarten with Hawaii’s move to cut 17 days from the school year by having 4 day school weeks (see Maclean’s article).
Naturally this also ties into recent interviews with Charles Pascal and Kathleen Wynne on Jackson’s Your Voice program.
To Vaccinate or Not: The Great H1N1 Debate
I was thinking about the next topic to cover in this space and realized that I haven’t yet brought up the H1N1 vaccine and whether or not parents should choose to have their children immunized. It’s a decision I’ve personally struggled with and one, based on my conversations with other parents and teachers, that a lot of people are struggling with.
Then I cruised over to PhD in Parenting and found the post asking if parents who don’t get their children vaccinated are idiots. It was based on an exchange she had with Chad Skelton, who writes the Curious Dad blog at The Vancouver Sun, and had posted on this topic. To be fair, he’s really the one who opened up the ‘idiot’ can of worms.
Anyway, with the latest evidence suggesting that the short-term effects of the H1N1 vaccine are negligible and that the virus can wreck havoc on the body – even in mild cases – it’s easy to understand the position that parents should absolutely vaccinate their children.
But then there’s also the flip side, what about long-term effects? There are components of the H1N1 vaccine that have been taken out of childhood vaccines over concerns about their safety. And generally speaking, even though people are getting sick with H1N1, not that many are dying.
But of course that latter point isn’t all that satisfying when the possibility still exists. So we’re left back where we started: what are your thoughts on the H1N1 vaccine?
Aviva Community Fund and Stairway To Reading
The Society for Quality Education (SQE), self-described as “a charitable organization dedicated to the significant improvement of student learning in Canada,” offers a free remedial reading resource, to be used by parents and teachers with their children and students. The program, Stairway to Reading (or sign up to help SQE assess program effectiveness), is a free download for anybody who wants it, but of course costs SQE money to sustain the website, etc.
And that’s where the Aviva Community Fund comes in. The $500,000 fund aims to support positive change in our communities across Canada and works by having people submit ideas to support lasting change in their community. Then, people vote on these ideas, in a sort of round-robin affair. There are three preliminary rounds, out of which the top 20 vote-getting ideas advance to the semi-finals.
SQE has submitted Stairway to Reading as an idea in the Aviva Community Fund, which means that if it garners enough support – votes – the reading program may find itself with up to $50,000 to sustain the website and “provide ongoing support and training for parents and teachers both online and by live telephone support.” The Aviva page has a forum to discuss the idea and, of course, to vote.
We’d love to hear your thoughts on the program or this idea in the comments.
Trick or Treat: $5,000 for African Village Well
Most kids embark on Halloween intent on getting as much loot – candy – as possible, with high hopes and lofty dreams for sugar highs and the largest piles of candy. For Logan and Mary Jones, trick or treating began in early October, knocking on doors as part of Trick or Treat for UNICEF, the program that replaced the Halloween boxes trick or treaters used to carry. For the Jones siblings, their pile of candy, so far, is $5,000, or enough to build a well in an African village.
The desire to help an African village stems from Logan and Mary’s visit to South Africa two years ago. When asked about their efforts, this is what the siblings had to say (in part):
What is your life like compared to the kids you met in Africa?
Mary: We are very lucky and have a lot of money and are able to run our tap until the water gets cold.
Logan: We have houses with walls and beds and toilets.
Why are you raising money for UNICEF’s Halloween campaign?
Mary: Because of all the people in Africa who have to walk like 15 miles to get water and they have to use that water for all their dishes and bathing and drinking and cooking and all they can carry is one bucket and it takes like two people to carry that. And the buckets are pretty small.
Logan: I chose the clean water option because it seemed like the most important one to me.
More photos below; the rest of the story is on canada.com.
Public Boys-Only School Coming to Toronto?
Schools for boys is not a new concept, but the recommendation for an all-boys public school is going to face rough waters on its path to implementation. Toronto’s public school board’s director of education, Chris Spence, is proposing “hundreds of boys-only classes and an all-boys elementary school,” a move that may prove to be very controversial.
This is on the heels of yet another controversial move by the board to open an Africentric school in Toronto, and on top of a system that offers numerous specialty schools and programs, focusing on science, arts and alternative teachings.
But with the effectiveness of single-sex schools in question, and questions about the responsibility of separating the sexes, it may be hard for a public board to go down the single sex route.
Of course, there have been private and independent single sex schools for a long time (although the last all-boys school in Ottawa just went co-ed), and many parents feel that an all-boys setting is just what their sons need.
Tags: all-boys, Private SchoolsLearning to Read
We all learned how to read, but how many of us actually remember how that happened? I can’t say I can think of specific reading instruction early on in life, although I do remember lessons about how to write. And of course parents are instrumental in the process, and I know I read many books at home, but again, I’d be grasping at stories to come up with any clear sense of exactly how I learned to read.
Cheryl Jackson has similar memories, and, like me, attributes her love of reading to her parents. I also had a library card from an early age and both of my parents certainly read enough that I often saw them with a book in their hands. It makes sense that I secretly would read to all hours of the night with book after book, then.
Jackson, of course, did a show on “How Do Kids Learn to Read,” which provides some insight into how to facilitate raising an avid and passionate reader. She also urges us all to go read a book… where our kids will see us doing so.
But I turn it over: What do you do to encourage your children to read?
Tags: learning, parenting, ParentsThe Future Virtual Classroom?
Second Life from Linden Labs has provided an engrossing virtual world for years, but lately educators have been involved in creating a virtual academic world. That lead ReadWriteWeb to wonder why schools haven’t embraced Second Life by now (h/t Brad).
Educators are not totally on board with a virtual classroom and learning environment, sometimes arguing that teleconferencing and instant messaging have made the virtual world unnecessary. And, of course, we know that, at least for now, the best learning environment is the good ol’ face-to-face variety.
But isn’t there value to an online, virtual-world learning environment, in some capacity?
Tags: Education, learning, Technology