Category Archives: In The Classroom

What Do We Specialize In?

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Mentor HS principal Mr. Whyte told me that while he was watching our Grade 9/10 boys’ rugby team handily defeat a local public school on Tuesday, he noticed a large banner on the side of the school advertising that it offers a “Specialist High Skills Major” in Sports. This “specialization” is not unique to high schools as it seems now that every elementary school now needs to have a signature programme, whether it is French Immersion, International Business and Technology or the Arts. I understand the lure of making your school stand out and that schools are worried about losing customers to the “other Board” or private schools but I don’t know why a 13-year-old would be interested in specializing in International Business!

When Mr. Whyte and I were noting the following morning that the Grade 11/12 boys also won their rugby game easily, I said to him that we must be a “sports school”, too! This morning, it was announced that Mentor’s Grade 5/6 choir was selected by the Peel Festival adjudicators to advance to the provincial showcase so I suppose we are a “music school” as well! Mentor’s Grade 7/8 students regularly earn an invitation to the provincial and national Science Fair competitions and our senior science students earn top marks in various biology, physics and chemistry contests so we will need a “science school” banner as well. HS business students excel in the provincial DECA competition, Model UN participants always come home with multiple awards and the mock trial programme has a ever-growing pile of trophies so we would have quite a collection of banners on the outside walls!

Let me get back to Mr. Whyte, though. I was following him in the hallways as he was touring a prospective family yesterday and he stopped to show them in the course calendar how we structure our academic programme. He told them that most schools encourage students to specialize starting in Grade 9 and how it ends up being problematic in Grade 11 and 12. Mentor (and TSS) makes the academic programme general enough in Grade 9 and 10 so that the student can make the decision to specialize (arts, science, math, etc.) in Grade 11, Grade 12 or even to be able to wait until post-secondary entrance. I cannot imagine how frustrating it would be for a student to be in Grade 12 and find out that they do not have the pre-requisite courses for the next chapter of their educational career!

Come to think of it, perhaps we only need one banner: “Mentor College and TEAM School: We Specialize In Everything”.

Chris Starkey
Administrative Principal
Mentor College/TEAM School

Choosing The Right Stream To Success

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The education section of the newspaper and its websites has been dominated with the all-too-familiar “Will there be a teachers’ strike?” the past few days but prior to that, there was a report by the advocacy group People For Education that caught my attention. The report is calling on the Ontario government to remove “streaming” in Grade 9 and have all students study and be evaluated at the same level.

High school changed in two profound ways in 1999. The graduation track went from 5 years to 4 years and the three-level system of university, college and workforce courses were condensed into two levels known as academic and applied. Applied courses lead to post-secondary opportunities at college and academic courses are pre-requisites for university entrance.

The report that came out on Monday argues that the applied level courses lead to “lower achievement, lower expectations of the students by teachers and at times a low-quality learning experience.” It also points out that a lack of guidance staff available in Grade 8 is a problem and that once students start studying at one level, they rarely make a change to the other level.

Here at Mentor and TEAM, we are not seeing the problems that People For Education claim and we think there are some very good reasons for this. We are a school that believes streaming is the best way to approach education so when a student enters our school, we match them up with the academic programme (TEAM, Mentor College or Mentor Academy) that will challenge but not frustrate the student. As parents, the last thing we want for our child is to be in a situation where they are so far behind or ahead of their peers that school is a negative experience and for many families, this was the reason you chose our school. Every year after (including the very-important Grade 9 entry year), we suggest the most-appropriate of our three academic streams for your child.

The second reason that we don’t see the problems People For Education do is that our teachers never start with low expectations of their students. When students are in an academic situation where expectations are both high AND realistic, achievement and quality will follow.

When we started TEAM Secondary School, we wanted a high-quality, applied-level high school programme that would lead to success in post-secondary college studies. We achieved this and continue to graduate students who have gone on to great success in college but what we were not expecting was the number of students who started in Grade 9 at TSS and are now successful in university. Sometimes the transition has been TSS to Mentor to university, sometimes it has been TSS to college to university and sometimes from TSS directly to university but in all cases, the students have used the academic skills earned at TEAM/TSS for their post-secondary successes.

We say this all the time but there is way too much emphasis in Ontario on the marks to gain entrance to university; this is why there are so many private high schools who offer mostly Grade 12 courses (usually with inflated marks). Parents who choose our school know what our alumni tell us over and over again…the marks they earn with us to get INTO college and university are way less important in the long run compared to the skills they learned to FINISH a post-secondary degree.

Chris Starkey
Administrative Principal
Mentor College/TEAM School

Speech Night, Study Skills Pay Off

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This is Speech Night season for the elementary students at our schools and for pure pent-up energy and excitement, you cannot match a homeroom of our students in those anxious moments just before the start of the presentations.

For those of you who joined the school later in your child’s schooling, you might not know that Speech Night begins in kindergarten when the students work as a group to sing songs and recite poems for their parents in the gym. When the students start their “all-by-themselves” speeches in Grade 1, the process of researching, writing, memorizing and presenting a speech is consistent for the rest of their days with us. Variables include the length of the speech (increases as the student progresses), the topic (might be theme-related such as The Medieval Era or a topic of the student’s choice) and the quantity and type of research materials used. They get so good at it by the time they are in Grade 12, they actually start to pretend to not even like Speech Night anymore!

Like all of the skills our students gain, however, it is at the post-secondary level when the Mentor experience really pays off. I know that I say this all the time but it is true AND we get messages like this from Mentor and TSS students all the time. So if you do not believe me, please consider this message that was sent this week to Executive Director Mr. Philbrook from one of his HS cricket team players who is now at Queen’s University in Kingston:

I hope everything is going well at Mentor! It feels so weird to be an alumni now! But on a side note, I wanted to tell you that being at Mentor these past 5 years has really made a positive impact on my university career thus far. I don’t think any of us really realize it until we get here, but Mentor played a huge role in helping us do well. I handle the workload much better than a lot of my peers, largely because the enormous amount of work we have here isn’t as drastic a difference from what we had at Mentor, compared to other schools. And it felt so good to walk into my midterms in December, and see all those desks lined up in rows in the gym, and NOT freak out (it’s old hat at this point!), while so many other kids weren’t used to it. So I just wanted to let you know. Mentor played a huge role in my ability to handle university, and even though I never tucked my shirt in or cleaned my paint-smeared tie and kilt, I absolutely appreciate the education I received there. So thanks a bunch sir!

Chris Starkey
Administrative Principal
Mentor College/TEAM School

SK: Where Do They Go From Here?

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I walked past the senior kindergarten classes and their “100 Day” celebrations this week. It doesn’t take a whole lot to get 5-year-olds excited in the first place but celebrating the 100th day of school is a really big event. And while it seems like just a fun day for the students, skills like counting to 100, learning to read and learning to play co-operatively are the building blocks of the rest of a student’s career in education and beyond.

A few minutes after walking past the celebrations, I checked in on Facebook and the school’s alumni page. As I scrolled through the names, I was able to remember many of those same kids (some in their 30s now) when they were in kindergarten and I thought it would be interesting to see what the members in the group are doing now. The following is not a scientific study…I simply went to the first 10 names on the list that had an employment status and came up with the following:

Registered Nurse at Credit Valley Hospital
Relationship Manager at TD Bank
Student at University of Zagreb School of Medicine
Student at University of Alberta School of Dentistry
First Responder at Newfoundland Ambulance Service
Staff Accountant at Walsh and Company
Partner at Fresca Films
Account Manager at Royal Bank of Canada
Software Developer at Soho VFX
Music Teacher at Mentor College (yes, this is Mr. Hoare…he is not an alumnus of the school, but he is in the group!)

The list is actually pretty indicative of what our graduates end up doing in post-secondary studies. The percentages change from year to year but the three most popular academic streams are science (with a tendency towards health sciences), business and the arts.

If you have a senior kindergarten student (or any other age), can you see your child in one or more of those 10 positions listed above?

Chris Starkey
Administrative Principal
Mentor College/TEAM School

Dedicated Teachers

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An article was forwarded to me by one of our teachers on Monday and it was entitled “The Top Five Reasons Parents Choose Private Schools”. The article didn’t tell me anything new but the article did mention an item that reminded me of a recent conversation I had with Mr. Philbrook (Executive Director and Co-Founder) and Mr. Macdonald (Director).

While we were waiting to watch the HS Arts Jam competition on Saturday, the three of us were listing all of the activities that were happening on the weekend. Just on Saturday alone, we estimated that over 30% of our high school population was taking part in one of:

– the Model UN competition at the University of Toronto
– the Arts Jam competition in the O’Brien Hall
– the provincial club wrestling championships in Brampton
– a science symposium at the University of Toronto
– the fashion show rehearsal in the gyms
– the provincial business competition (DECA) in Toronto

So when I saw in the article that “dedicated teachers” was one of the reasons for parents choosing private school, I did some math and realized that we had 17 staff members who were out with the various groups on Saturday. Despite what you may have heard (from their spouses), teachers actually do have lives outside of our school so it was just fantastic that they exhibit such a high level of dedication to their students and their “calling” as educators and that mornings, evenings and weekends are part of that commitment.

Chris Starkey
Administrative Principal
Mentor College/TEAM School