Few students have a grasp of how the world really works around a table – fewer get to try it out themselves. Queen Margaret’s School student Katelyn Eslinger reflects on her experience with her first Model United Nations Conference in Vancouver.
Making Earth Hour Count: Instilling Year-Round Change
Carly Maga
Earth Day’s biggest criticism is how it only draws attention to climate change at one point in the year, and doesn’t affect long-term behaviour. So this year, it launched a Beyond the Hour platform to encourage participants to take the message of Earth Hour and extend it year-round. With this in mind, here are our top 10 tips on how your family can turn Earth Hour into and Earth Lifestyle.
From Tunisia to B.C.: A Canadian Student’s Mideast Awakening
Guest Author
Although the dust has far from settled from the revolutions in the Middle East, a few things are clear: The Internet revolution together with mobilized youth have made history, and it’s important for us to be attuned to the history that’s unfolding beyond our borders, writes Gabrielle Tang, 16.
From Community Service to Global Capability
George Briggs
Today I would like to report on Havergal College’s Forum for Change, part of The Havergal Institute, which very successfully works toward making service an integral part of their students’ lives. To quote from the Institute’s literature “The Institute was conceived as a way to enable the evolution of Havergal’s mission from community service to self-efficacy and global capability. Making a difference is to live an effective life in the 21st Century.”
The Relevance of International Standardized Testing
Guest Author
When it comes to educating children, it seems like the governments of the world have only one thing on their collective mind: how high do they score on tests? Since the “no child left behind” policy was enacted by the Bush administration, testing that was largely used to chart trends in education has now become a benchmark to see which schools are worthy to receive federal funds (and which are apparently failing to pull their weight). Internationally, the problem is even worse. The Organization for Co-operation and Development (OECD), a group that promotes economic development in democratic countries and a growth in world trade, conducts a survey every three years known as PISA (the Programme for International Student Assessment) that tests up to 10,000 students in participating countries in subjects such as math, reading, and the regular standardized topics. They then publish the results, ranking the level at which each country performs.
Crossing Borders and Cultures: Hosting International Exchange Students
Guest Author
Although the Internet and various technologies have enabled us to globalize, there is much that cannot be learned from across a television or computer screen. At the end of the day, we need human interaction, and we learn best through immersion and human contact. This idea is the greatest promoter of international exchange programs.
