July+2015

July: Summer School!
For three weeks I've had the opportunity to help out a small group of learners who all had an interest in getting better at Grade Nine English. Since I did not have to go to Calgary for my own summer school courses this year, I thought it would be good to get back to teaching summer school after a long hiatus.

People who end up in summer school are a hopeful bunch. They all hope that they'll do better than they did during the school year, or they are hopeful that summer school will help them to get a jump on the required courses that they'd have to take later on. One way or the other, the learners are motivated to do well. Timelines are tight, in our case the course was only three weeks long, and seeing students for a longer period (all morning, or all afternoon) also seems to help them to focus on the tasks they are given. Funny how these scheduling issues (or how to divide up the time) seem to help the learning. I wonder how many students would prefer taking an English course all morning for a month instead of an hour a day for four months. I'm sure someone has done a study on that.

Our English course focused on the basics of reading, writing, listening, speaking, viewing and representing. These are the six English Language Arts defined in the Manitoba English Curriculum, and the Western Canadian Protocol Curricula as well. We looked at current events, I brought in an "old school" newspaper every day to brief students on local events, and we wrote about current events every day. Keeping the course focused on current events helped the students to understand the past/present/future of our three week tour through Grade Nine English.

I'm happy to report that everyone passed the course, and that a few of the students let me know that they had written more in July than they had from September to June. I hope they'll be better prepared for the Grade 10 learning challenges that they'll face soon. I also hope that they won't wait until next July to write some more. Summer school really works well for some folks, and I'm one of them. I took my first summer school course in July, 1985. I rode my bike across town to Fort William Collegiate Institute (FWCI) to take Grade 12 English. It was a good fit for me then, and here I am, thirty years later, still in summer school!