Author: Don Adams

I read a great piece recently in the New York Times. It tells the story of an 80-year-old man, Robert Titus, who just graduated with his bachelor’s degree.

Why did Mr. Titus return to school after all these years?

“I promised my mother many, many years ago that I would get my degree,” said Mr. Titus, a former salesman who lives in Houston. “To me, it was a major, big, big, huge accomplishment.”

Education is almost never a solo endeavour. At The Academy, we are a community school. Our students haven’t fit elsewhere – our school is the first home that they and their families have had in an education system that has perhaps never served their needs.

Making a commitment to yourself and those who believe in you is essential to success in school. Many studies over the years have shown that it’s never too late for families to commit to a level of positive support and nurturing in the education of a child. There’s also no shortage of studies, and common sense, to show that people who feel that more than just they have a stake in their education tend to fare better.

Re-enter Mr. Titus. Keeping an education promise brought him back to formal schooling after almost an entire lifetime. In fulfilling education promises, everyone wins.

Don Adams, Head of School

I was pretty certain that I wouldn’t be commuting to work in 2013 by jet pack, though I was eternally optimistic and hopeful. This mirrors my position on schools, yet I have found myself equally un-surprised.

At least in my mind, each year the school system should get better. We should end the year, look back as a society, be genuinely pleased at what we have accomplished, then resolve to achieve even more in the new year. I can absolutely assure you that this is how we approach each year at the YMCA Academy.

I ask myself today – honestly – if families of students with learning style differences and learning disabilities in the public school system here in Toronto are better or worse off today than they were one year ago. The answer is obvious and beyond disappointing. It’s also not limited to Toronto, Ontario, or to Canada. Not by any means.

If each of us takes a little more time in 2013 to become an advocate for education we will have a better chance at seeing and experiencing change. There will always be a need for schools such as ours but we should work towards a point of equilibrium between the demand for our schools and their supply. As it stands today, there are far more families who need a YMCA Academy in their community than the availability of these schools that are equipped to help.

From all of us in our community, we wish you the best year yet.

Don Adams, Head of School

This holiday season has brought into focus how very lucky we are as a school community. Our home is in Toronto, an amazing and, by global standards, safe city.

It has been a trying semester for schools and teachers, here and away. Sometimes we lost track of that which is the most important – creating and nurturing safe communities for learning.

To wish for anything less than world peace on this holiday would be to dramatically under-wish. We wish that teachers and students everyone had the resources that our teachers and students do. We wish they could live and work every day in a place that nurtures them, and we wish perhaps most of all that next year is a year defined by stories of hope in education, not fear.

For ourselves, we wish we could help more students and families. We wish that everyone who needed to know about our school did. We wish that every student who needed help could get that help in a timely way. And we wish that the new year is one of positive change and forward motion.

We wish you everything good.

Don Adams, Head of School

E.L. Doctorow wrote many things, among them, this superb analysis on what writing is:

“Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader–not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.”

I am never content with the content of our blog. It’s not that I don’t feel that we write enough or that what we’re writing isn’t meaningful, it’s that a school – OUR school – is a remarkably dynamic place. We use this blog to let all of our stakeholders (and I count anyone reading this piece to be among them) know about what defines our school: our values, attitudes, activities, perspective, how we process the world.

A great school blog evokes sensation. I’m not sure that ours is always there, but we always try to convey meaning. We use Twitter to communicate that meaning to a larger audience, to let a world far outside of our school feel the rain that we feel, but also the daily sun that literally and figuratively shines through on our students, teachers, classrooms.

As always, we would like to share with you the feeling of what it’s like to go to school within our inclusive walls. Please email me at Don.Adams@YMCGTA.org and we would be happy to show you around. And please remember that no mission-appropriate student is ever turned away from The Academy for financial reasons.

Don Adams, Head of School

This has been one of those weeks that even passive news consumption has been too much. Teaching students about world affairs has always been a complicated thing, that much more so when the events of the day revolve around potential war.

I have long advocated that schools need to not only teach peace, but to be places of peace as well. If we can make every school a better, more humane place, we are well on our way to making every city, region, nation a better place. It’s a cumulative effect throughout the world – cumulatively good when we do the right things, cumulatively bad when we don’t take the time to teach what needs to be taught.

I wonder what our students think when they consume news on their own. I worry that they sometimes assume that what they see on TV is the only version of reality, the reality actually being that reality comes in different sizes, shapes and colors. I can imagine that news weeks such as this past one make a lot of young people’s heads hurt. As it does mine.

Don Adams, Head of School