Well, there’s the easy way and the hard way. 

We have students in our buildings now that have ‘worked’ their way through to Grade 9 by working the system, not by working their minds.  Consequently, they quickly find out they are years behind the rest of the class in terms of knowledge and practice.  Despite the extra help and Spec Ed, they begin skipping classes.  After all, why be there when you have no clue about any of the topics under discussion?

A couple of years ago when I started teaching Grade 9 Applied math, one of the certified math teachers gave me some advice: “Use one day a week as a movie day, it can be a reward for the students to keep them coming to class.  I generally use Friday.”  Seemed the easy way out to me, but I tried it.  He loaned me movies like “Transformers” and so on.  I began noticing that I wouldn’t see certain students, except on Friday when they knew there wouldn’t be any work to do.  So, I tried mixing it up and showing movies on random days - then those students stopped showing up.  The rest of the class became bored with movies, so I stopped.

From that point on, I have never shown another movie in my math classes.  Oddly enough, students will work 5 days / week if they have to.  It also gave some students who needed it greater access to Spec Ed.  It is much more difficult keeping them focussed, on track and working, but seeing them succeed is more rewarding than babysitting.

Wayne, I;m curious to understand how the system works.
Can a high school student choose any of Grade 9 applied math and Grade 9 academic math?
Is there any testing of pre-requisites before a student can choose a Grade 9 academic math?

Where I’m coming from is that in grade 6 only about 60% of the students are at level 3 and 4.
Level 3 in my opinion is not a high level.
However, the number of students enrolled in academic streams seems to be 70-80%.
Since I don’t believe in magic the only explanation possible is that even in the academic math the teachers must be spending a lot of time re-teaching supposedly known elementary math notions.

What has been your experience?

Europe,

The answer to all of your questions and points raised, except for testing, is Yes.

Students (really parents for Grade 9 students) can choose the level for Grade 9.  There are no tests, but Grade 8 teachers do make recommendations based on where they feel the students will succeed.  I agree with you, the provincial standards are not high enough.  Schools do vary, ours has more shops, so the split is more like 60/30/10 (Academic/Applied/LD).  Yes, we are going over a lot of material that should be well ingrained before Grade 8 graduation.

Looked at one way - this is nothing new.  Under the old OSIS system, we always had more Advanced (Academic) than General (Applied) students.  Even back then, way too many students were pushed into academic courses than should have been.  Pushed by parents, relatives, guidance counselors and peers to try no to ‘close off a career path’.  However, they soon experienced frustration and failure.  Many dropped out of school.

Under the new system, students can ‘challenge’ for a course under the PLAR process.  Now it makes even less sense than it did back then.  Today, students could start off in the Applied stream and switch to Academic if they are successful.  I always thought we were priming kids for failure, I’d rather we prime them for success.

Very low expectations, and no accountability is setting so many children up for failure.  Looking at the system from the outside, it appears that most of the educrats are there for themselves to make their jobs as easy for as possible.  This is hurting our kids badly.

I can confirmed what Wayne has pointed out. The present system, does not really help students on the basics that are essential to sail through the courses.  What I would like to see, is the high school to addressed the lack of the foundation basics. For example, having two english courses, one for academic, one for applied, where there is intensive grammar, spelling, writing and other language concerns, but still follow the regular curriculum, at a reduce number of outcomes,  of the current grade. The classes will be filled with students, and perhaps students will come to class,

I have observed over the years, and with my youngest, a common saying. “Why did the teacher not tell me? Why did we not learn this a long time ago?”  Often it is the lack of basics, confounding the students, or missing key pieces of knowledge to make sense of it.  Most students really want to learn, but without a sound foundation on the basics, it is difficult for students to learn. Difficult to learn, when students at various levels stopped actively learning, at the moment when they no longer understand the material in front of them. For some, it could be the first 5 minutes, for others half way through, but how many students at the end of the class actually learned the material to the point, where homework is of no problem to complete? 

Movies at school do not work, in my opinion. Using movies in today’s world, is no longer novel especially when we are exposed to movies in multiple formats, different ways of viewing them and by the time a child is 10, their exposure to movies, is no longer a novelty. In my corner of the world, the movie bribe was tried. The students who did good academically, got to see the movie, and the student who did not do good, got another tutoring class. My youngest usually did not get to see the movie, but I pulled my child out for the afternoon. I saw it as being unfair, among my various reasons. Other parents followed suit, and than the parents whose kids could see the movie, pull their kids out for the afternoon. After a couple of years of this, the practice was stopped. I believe children need to be motivated by internal factors, rather than external factors such as movies. The only thing that effectively work for my child, was to find out the factors that turned on her internal motivation to learn. And one of them is to learn the basics, so she could participate in class and do her work, without looking foolish in front of her peers.

Film is a form of text. And the ability to read and write text is considered literacy. Therefore…

I do admit that there is much, too much, of “movie as reward” going on. At the same time, there is a great deal of text that our children encounter that goes unchallenged and unexamined. This is a new form of illiteracy…and a new horizon for education—and perhaps even schools!