Everyone knows that Canada is in trouble. Like other countries, this country has been racked by various waves of COVID-19 for almost two years. But COVID-19 is not the most troubling issue. Let me explain. Remember at the beginning of the pandemic, we didn’t expect...
As you read the title of this article, your mind probably flashes to a few negative media stories. Perhaps you think of a young Indigenous woman’s bad experience with a Winnipeg taxi driver. Or you think of Joyce Echaquan’s suffering and death in a Quebec hospital and...
BILL 64 is dead. There is little doubt that many Manitobans were delighted when interim Premier Kelvin Goertzen tolled its death knell. Instead of dancing around the bill’s funeral pyre, government members need to seriously review the Manness/MacKinnon commission...
Was there a cultural genocide in Canada as claimed in the Truth and Reconciliation Report? Mass graves at residential schools? An interview with Professor Rodney Clifton, co-editor of “From Truth Comes Reconciliation: Assessing the Truth and Reconciliation...
The Canadian Dream is increasingly being realized in smaller areas For decades, Canadians moved to the larger cities (census metropolitan areas, or CMAs) with their economic opportunities. The latest estimates indicate that CMAs have 72 per cent of the nation’s...
When the Premiers were first called to a sit-down lunch to talk about healthcare with Prime Minister Trudeau, there was plenty of talk about the potential for systemic change, innovation and accountability. It seemed that Canadians and their leaders were finally on...
While the consumer price index increased between 2001 and 2009 17.82%, on average in this same period, full professors increased their salary by 42.8%, college presidents increased their salary by 62.9% and university presidents increased their salary by 64.8%.
A Manitoba man believes a boy is behind in school because of a no-fail policy. But, some experts said failing a student can have drastic consequences.
Congratulations to Gary Mason for a fine piece in today's Globe, correctly asserting that the elected government of British Columbia rather than the B.C. Teachers' Federation should run the province's education system. The union and the government are currently in a...
The most significant hurdle facing students, Mr. Zwaagstra argues, is a pervasive anti-knowledge bias that resists the teaching of specific, common content. The “child-centred learning” philosophy expects teachers to tailor instruction to the individual needs of each student while making the experience “fun,” instead of teaching facts–the building blocks he believes should be in place before higher-level concepts can be taught.
On December 4, 2010 Michael Zwaagstra delivered his key points as to why public schools are failing to properly prepare today’s students for the real world to the attendees of the Society for Quality Education‘s (SQE) annual general meeting in downtown Toronto, mostly because, he argues, that schools refuse to fail students.
In an attempt to get away from “unfair” grading, too many teachers are now forced to engage in complex calculations that are no improvement on more straightforward marking.
Music students need to practice scales and continually repeat songs until they play them correctly—so why do many teachers think rote learning has no place in the classroom?
Teachers who use direct instruction assume that students are not experts and if their misinterpretations are not corrected, then the students will have an inadequate understanding of the subject matter.
Forget child-centered classrooms. How about teacher-centered classrooms for a change?