Week 8

No bog post for week 7 last week, we had the week off! This week we had a great presentation from an organization I hadn’t heard of before, EverFi. EverFi is a free resource of online courses sponsored and brought to schools and colleges for free. They partner with companies and organizations to bring education technology to communities at scale - so far they have reached 9 million students on their platform. Through this presentation I was introduced to the concept of STEM, which they provide courses on/related to in partnership with the NHL. STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) is a more applied push to the four, to encourage students to get interested in them. For example, connecting the math and science used in hockey. It encompasses the idea that one teacher should be the “master” of all these 4 things, instead of the math specialist, physics specialist, etc. I find this interesting, it makes sense to me expect for the technology part. It’s such a vast, ever-changing, and diverse area. I can’t imagine being a specialist in math, science, and engineering and also be able to keep up with technology as well. Since our presenter had worked in New York before coming to Canada, we got to hear an interesting take on the American education system from someone who has actually worked there. With the wake up call that we are trending toward this system, its good to know its failures and successes. It’s hard to imagine the NY school division encompassing ~1700 schools and 1.1 million students. Of these students 800,000 of them are low income and need meals provided for them. And since the schools are graded (based on what? I wondered…), parents can choose which to send students to based on these grades. This school choice makes for an unimaginable complex busing system that is second largest to the London public transport system. Crazy. Coming from the Manitoba school system, all of this is hard to imagine. That schools are rating and competing against each other seems like a major downfall to me. Talk about taking the emphasis away from learning. I really hope we catch ourselves before we trend more towards the U.S. system and aim for our students to learn with deeper understandings and have an enjoyable experience doing so.