Category Archives: In The Classroom

Coming Soon: Edsby!

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edsby-horizontal (1)Mentor College and TEAM School have made a change in our online portal for students and parents. We are pleased to present Edsby to our students and parents and will provide login information in the next few weeks.

Students will receive their login code at school, and parents will receive their login to Edsby using the email addresses we have on file. Edsby provides course, class, and school information. By the end of September, everyone will have access to Edsby as a replacement to our previous service, Edline.

Both teachers and administrators have been enthusiastic about the many possibilities available in Edsby and we know you will enjoy the information that is available to you as you access information about everything from course work, club and sport activities, to current news and events happening at Mentor College and TEAM School.

Chuck Macdonald
Director
Mentor College/TEAM School

A Tale of Two Siblings

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I was having a nice chat the other day with a group of five parents and during the conversation, the talk turned to the “preparedness of Mentor’s high school students for university”. One of the parents has been a longtime Mentor Dad with three children who have graduated from Grade 8 in the Intermediate Division. Each child was given the choice to go to any high school with the first two choosing Mentor and the youngest opting for a local public school. The stories of the first and third children were particularly interesting.

Dad reported that the eldest was in a residence apartment of four roommates in first year university with similar (eg: excellent) entrance averages but at the end of the year, two were asked to leave the school because of their poor academic efforts. Two of the roommates were Mentor grads and the other two were not.

The youngest is doing very well at the public high school and has an excellent average. Dad is not surprised (genetics!) because of the solid academic skill set acquired at Mentor but he is really surprised at the student’s request to return to Mentor next year. Why would a teenager getting 90s (“and doing nothing!”) ask to return to a place where we ask more of our students (and get it)?

Based on the experience of the eldest sibling, the youngest has reasoned that having a high average and loads of free time is just a short-term gain. The Mentor grads couldn’t figure our why university roommates wouldn’t work harder but the other two must have felt that their 90% Grade 12 marks would be enough to get them through. We have said for years that “it’s not the marks to get you INTO university that are important, it’s the skills to get you THROUGH university that count.” If you want a 95% grade in math, we have a growing list of schools who will give that mark to you with little to no effort. But if you want a solid academic base and real skills like time-management, homework completion, communication and studying, our list of schools is pretty small…

Chris Starkey
Administrative Principal
Mentor College / TEAM School

Being The New Kid

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Being “the new kid” at a school is both scary and exciting but starting a new school in the middle of the year can multiply those feelings even more. When I was in Grade 6, my family moved from the city of Windsor to the townships surrounding Goderich. To make matters worse, there were almost never any new kids at this school and I was starting at Thanksgiving after all the classroom routines had been set. It was clear from my first day that this “city boy” was not welcome.

Fast forward to this week at TEAM School when principal Mrs. Sawtschuk told me that five new students have joined since March Break. I visited their classrooms on Tuesday and when I asked them the biggest difference between TEAM and their old school, they said (predictably) “the uniform” but they also mentioned things like:

  • “I have a homework book now instead of a bunch of pieces of paper that had my homework on them.”
  • “My old teacher gave us homework but she never checked if we did it.”
  • “This is the first time I have a grammar and a spelling book.”

I visited with Mrs. Sawtschuk and vice-principal Ms. McDonald afterwards and told them that in each class, I couldn’t tell who the new students were until I was introduced to them! When I asked why, they smiled and said that TEAM teachers are accustomed to having students joining during the school year because of the individualized academic programmes. They then got very serious and whispered to me that their real secret weapons when it came to welcoming students are the classmates of the new pupils. These students all remember their first day at TEAM…both how nervous they were and then how amazing they felt at the end of the day. They want to make that same experience come true for others. Case in point? During gym class, one of the new students was the first to do an activity in front of the rest of the class. When the student finished, there was an unrehearsed “high five” from the next student (and very quietly after the drill began, phys. ed. teacher Ms. Sweeney went over and gave the student a congratulatory hand slap as well!). The smile on the new student’s face continued for the rest of the class! It’s just too bad that TEAM School wasn’t around back when I was in Grade 6…

Chris Starkey
Administrative Principal
Mentor College / TEAM School

What We Are All About

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Just prior to the graduation ceremony for the Mentor/TSS Grade 12 Class of 2015 last Thursday, one of our high school teachers was putting on his gown and hood and made the (paraphrased, and I say that because it doesn’t sound like proper English) comment, “This is the day that we are all about”.

Indeed, Grade 12 graduation is the day we are all about as a school that prepares its students for post-secondary success. The students were brimming with excitement about their first month of school and told their teachers that they had so much confidence in their own abilities after seeing what their skill level was in comparison to many of their classmates.

On Tuesday, we christened the new field at the Main Campus with a rugby match against a school from Scotland. Kevin Vertkas was the first Mentor player out onto the field and he went to the centre logo, sat down, ran his hands across the turf and looked up into the sky as if to say “Finally!”. Kevin was a student at the Primary Campus when the idea of an artificial turf field was first proposed to Mr. Philbrook, Mr. Macdonald and I so watching that little scene made me think that after all the issues with permits and delays, this is the day we are all about.

Chris Starkey
Administrative Principal
Mentor College / TEAM School

Ms. Weinkauf, Mastery, and Mental Math

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Weinkauf C.I began working when I was 16 years old. In-between then and my first teaching job, I worked at a fast food restaurant, a clothes store, a movie theatre, a snack shop, and a home decorating shop. When I remember these jobs, I think of two commonalities. First, they all went out of business when I left their employ (just saying, Mr. Macdonald!). Second, I had to take a math test to demonstrate that I had the necessary skills to work on the cash. And I will tell you, I still take secret joy at calculating my change before the cash register does.

In my own education, a calculator wasn’t put into my hands until my upper year mathematics when I had to calculate cosine and derivatives. I was never very good at proofs, but I knew my facts. I couldn’t always explain why, but I could calculate it. It wasn’t until I began teaching that I started to understand why. Why fractions must have a common denominator when you add or subtract. Why the answer is larger than the dividend when you divide by a number that is less than one, and why it is smaller when you divide by a number greater than one.

We hear a lot today about new math vs. old math, and has the pendulum swung too far. To me, it is really a question about math literacy. In our Intermediate Division, knowing the multiplication table up to factors of twelve and being able to mentally subtract sixty seven from one hundred are as important as knowing how to read and write. We want our students to be able to explain the why of math, and explore truths, but without the basic facts under their belts, their knowledge will never be complete. How can we expect them to “explore” the value of fractions when they don’t recognize that the numerator and denominator of 6/21 have a common factor of three!

That is why we don’t allow our students the use of calculators until the upper years, and that is why we have school wide mental math drills. We strongly believe that we need to create opportunity to practice, and yes, drill math facts, so that when they have mastered the how, they can understand the why.

Kris Weinkauf
Vice-Principal
Intermediate Division