Talked with a parent the other day and she described how her daughter ended up job shadowing a professional in a profession she was interested in. She, the student in grade 12) was shown all aspects of the job over a few months time. It greatly influenced her decision to pursue a career in the direction of the professional she job shadowed, as she had been undecided as to what career to pursue until then.

High schools do allow job experience time. I think that job-shadowing would be as valuable, if not more so, as job experience.

Good learning...

Cheers - Mike

This is a really interesting talk with video, showing just how smart and resilient children are when learning - anything.

From a TED sponsored talk by Sugata Mitra, "Sugata Mitra gave kids self-supervised access to the web and saw results that could revolutionize how we think about teaching."

Bear in mind that during these experiments, the kids had no instructor/teacher to ask questions of, or to learn from. The kids were given the tools, so to speak, and learned by doing and trial and error.

Good listening...Good teaching,,,Good learning

Cheers - Mike

StatsCan reports 25% of Alberta teens are not pursuing education.

This article in the Calgary Herald explains it a bit more.

I would like to see this broken down by ethnicity and demographics.

Interesting to note that many city high schools have great completion rates. What happened after high school? What happened at other high schools?

I'm sure Alberta Education knows.

Good Learning... stay in school...

Cheers - Mike

Ah - the start of the school year again! It should be an exciting time. A time to renew friendships and begin new ones.

In Alberta, there is something new to think about for students and parents. The last provision of Bill 44 kicked in as of September 1st.

Essentially, parents must be notified if certain subjects/formal class discussions, etc. are to take place in school. The Act states: "The Alberta Human Rights Act requires boards to provide parents with notice where courses of study, educational programs or instructional materials include subject matter that deals primarily and explicitly with religion, human sexuality or sexual orientation.".

Edmonton Public Schools has a brief explanation on this page, ALBERTA HUMAN RIGHTS ACT.

The Guide to Education, incorporating the changes, may be found here, Guide to Education 2010–2011.

The parent has the option of pulling their child from that particular class.

Other than that, teachers are back and all systems are go.

* * *

Inspiring Education is still going, albeit with a good deal less momentum than last year.

* * *

My hope for students this year is that they enjoy school and give their teachers enough room to teach. If the teacher seems a little preoccupied, maybe they are having a bad day.

If a student seems a little preoccupied, maybe they are having a bad day.

Give each other the benefit of good. Good days, good teaching, good listening, good learning. Teachers can learn from students as well as the students learning from the teachers.

Every teacher has their own style of presentation. If that style doesn't agree with the student, the student should try and get the learning part and ignore the style. If there is a conflict, ask admin to allow you to switch classes.

Remember teachers are human too - I know, sometimes they don't seem like it But they have their ups and downs just as much as you, the student.

If we just try and understand that our good day might be their bad day and cut each other some slack, perhaps we can all get along better - and actually get some learnin' done (and feel good about it!).

That's all for now.

Good learning... Good listening...

Cheers - Mike