Head of School

Amazingly, two weeks ago we turned the clocks forward an hour. What used to be an eternal Canadian winter, now seems to be little more than a seasonal blip.

But it remains winter in education for far too many. This isn’t a new theme on this blog, in Ontario education, or in the news. The sad reality is that one of the first things that gets cut in education budgets is special education.

Sometimes these cuts are insidious and under the radar. They take the form of failing to hire or retain staffing levels to meet increased demand. Then sometimes they’re just plain cuts, thick and jagged, right through the flesh of the system. When the damage is done, the system provides for no repair.

The demand for alternatives have never been greater. The demand for our school has never been more intense and I’m sure I don’t need to remind you that time quickly runs out.

If you have a child in high school who has a learning style difference or learning disability, and you feel that their needs aren’t being fully met in their current school, we’re here for you. Please email me at Don.Adams@YMCAGTA.org and come for a visit. Browse through the posts here on our website, watch the school video, talk to friends and neighbours. You’ll see why our school has few peers and how we’ve achieved a sense of community rarely found in a school.

Don’t go into another summer lacking options.

Don Adams, Head of School

Sometimes when people talk about education, they do so in terms of ideals. They measure the status quo against a notion of perfection – what the ideal school, teacher, student, and experience would look like.

Measuring anything against a fictitious perfection always seems futile to me. Sure, we should always measure, with the notion of getting consistently better, but we need to move away from notions of what could probably never be and towards the end product of great ideas.

Ideas have always fueled education. Ideas allow us to separate ourselves from what has stalled or simply never worked and to connect to things that can grow. Ideas grow beautifully in schools while ideals are static things. If we replaced one unattainable ideal in education with three workable ideas, what would this look like in a year, in three, in ten?

I, for one, would like to see much more of this happening day in and day out in our schools, for our kids.

Don Adams, Head of School

When it comes to the world of education, the news industry is reactive. Few daily realities of the world of schools, teaching, and the reality of what it is to be a student are covered in the media. Sometimes a story emerges, becomes quickly popular, then disappears.

When we read about the realities of being a student with a learning disability it grabs our attention because of the added obstacle. The reader appreciates that being a student is difficult enough as it is. When we add hurdles such as being a student with an undiagnosed learning disability in a large public school classroom, it captures our attention — but only for a moment.

We move off stories in education too quickly. The news media are not bad at problem identification (the publishing of a piece that raises an issue worth reading about) but are terrible at follow-up. Look back at the collection of posts on our blog that reference issues covered in the newspaper or on television. None were solved, few remain the topic of any ongoing conversation.

Yet it’s precisely that ongoing conversation in education that gives an issue currency. Parents, teachers, administrators and students have this dialogue. The conversations are long, challenging in nature, and absolutely imperative for forward movement.

You have a standing invitation to visit our school. We want to hear your story, your family’s challenges. We want to help where we can and give you news ideas and perspectives where we can’t. We want you to be a part of our community.

Don Adams, Head of School

Every day, someone somewhere prepares to open a school. In the United States, since the advent of charter schools, each year many schools open and close, for a variety of reasons. The process of opening a school is, in some fundamental ways, easier today than it has ever been.

But I wonder how one could open a great school and serve a population the most in need. Here at The Academy, we worked hard for a decade before becoming what many have described as a great school. I think about what we did throughout the process and offer this as a primer for those looking to do the same.

My advice would begin and end with the notion of community. Building a community is infinitely more challenging than building a school. Community takes infinite ingredients and nonstop attention. Community cares for people. It makes us feel as if we belong. Community, not a sugar-and-taurine-laden energy drink, gives us wings.

How to build community in a school is more art than science. It begins and ends with respect. By creating a safe place where people, their opinions, thoughts, and actions are valued, you’re on the right track. There needs to be balance, focus, constant and consistent improvement.

The construction of a great school is never, ever complete.

Don Adams, Head of School

Over the years, an education system was created for children that took pressure as one of its foundational points. We all remember it from our own education, a snakes and ladders game or preparation, rote memorization, seemingly pointless testing. We remember how we felt when we were on that treadmill and we empathize with stories about students today who have to endure the same and worse.

On Friday, the New York Times published a superb piece on this, which you can read here.

It’s a very humane piece, one that examines why some students seem to deal reasonably well with the pressure of school while others come close to completely falling apart. I highly commend this article to you and ask that you share this blog post among your family and friends – it’s truly a piece that everyone should read.

I get stuck on phrases such as “Never before has the pressure to perform on high-stakes tests been so intense or meant so much for a child’s academic future.” That makes no sense to me, and it actually and fortunately runs counter to the direction we’re heading here in Ontario, Canada. Our Ministry of Education now mandates a form of student assessment that takes into account the totality of a student’s work over a course, including upward trends and more weight being gives to good work (a product of a student’s cumulative learning) late in a term or semester. In other words, a student doesn’t pay too large a price for one of two missteps in a course; rather a holistic perspective is taken whereby, contrary to what we see in the article, the teaching and learning in class is at least as important as a somewhat arbitrary final result.

Intellectually as well as practically, the fact that so many school systems are stuck in the antiquity that is the focus of the article is silly. Few jobs in this world focus only on the final result or see success through a standardized lens. We see success in our labours as an ongoing thing, our achievements as a product of a body of learning. We acquire experience and walk down a longer road of success.

I flash back to the words of David Bowie in his classic song about pressure (and a remarkable collaboration with Queen’s Freddie Mercury) where he sings:

Insanity laughs, under pressure we’re cracking
Can’t we give ourselves one more chance

Yes. I think we should.

Don Adams, Head of School