It was a typical Sunday when I was living in Bermuda. I went for a run, Rheanne went to a spinning class (which  apparently involved stationary bikes not looms—who knew?), Quinn went to a birthday party and Morgan and I topped off the day buying groceries. We arrived home after buzzing around all day to find the census taker at our door.

So, with a cold drink tantalizingly just out of reach, we sat down to become part of the Bermuda national numbers. Most of the questions were pretty benign and easy to answer and then came the kicker: “How old were you when you had your first child?” A pause, “Twenty- one”, I said. “And, how old were you when you had your youngest child?” A longer pause, “Fifty-five”, I muttered. 

To be honest, I don’t remember many of the other questions. I got kind of lost in thought wondering about when I made the transition from a “young” parent to an “experienced” one (please note that I didn’t say “old”!)

Parenting is undoubtedly the most important job that most of us will ever have. It is demanding, time consuming, emotionally charged and results oriented. Having said that, we are all hopelessly under qualified to take it on. There is no course, diploma, or degree that trains us to be an effective parent. It is clearly a “seat of the pants” learning experience that is as individual  as our own characters, experiences, partners and children make it.

When I look back on that twenty-one year old kid who stood in the delivery room on a cold November morning, I shudder to think how little he knew about what he was getting into, but I envy him the wonderful, decades long journey that he was about to begin.

A few days after my census encounter I chatted with a young dad who was asking me about the transition from Kindergarten to Grade 1 and how it would play out for his child going from a class and schoolmates that he had known for three years to a new teacher, learning environment and set of friends and classmates. We talked about the growth in experiences and the widening circle of his peer group and the beginnings of building  a more complex life beyond family and I was reminded how frightening those prospects often are for parents. For us, the letting go is often more traumatic than it is for our kids. They are gaining so much—but we feel like we are losing something in the process. And somewhere around 4 or 5 years old, our children begin to spend more of their waking hours without us than with us.

That is where school comes in. All of a sudden, you pass over the teaching of life’s lessons, the reaching of milestones, and the care and feeding of your baby to another group of adults and peers. This is one of the greatest leaps of faith in life, as you put your faith in someone to care for your most precious possessions.

As a school, it is our responsibility to live up to and continually earn the trust that parents put in us. Today is interview day, and as I walk around the school  and listen to the buzz of parents, teachers and tutors talking about the ups and downs of the academic year so far, it is a good  time for us all to reflect on how important that it is to work effectively together to raise all of our children. There are often hiccups, as there are with every parenting partnership. We don’t always agree on what’s “best” in every circumstance, but as long  as we both know that one another has the interests of our children at heart, it will work itself out. I have made plenty of mistakes as a parent (as we all do) but somehow my older children have grown into wonderful adults and parents themselves, and my two darling little boys continue to greet every day with a laugh and a sense of wonder.

And so, parent to parent, thank you for your continued dedication to your children. It can be exasperating, mind-boggling, and down right scary, but it is never dull! 

And, don't ever forget, we’re all in this together!

I had lots of email traffic from across the country last week wondering why I hadn’t commented on the Jeffrey Moore decision. The truth is, for me, the issues were complex enough that I not only wanted to study the Supreme Court decision in detail but also to spend some time speaking with key people about how they viewed it. Over the past ten days I have had the chance to spend time sharing viewpoints with our local MLA and former Chair of the North Vancouver School District (although not at the time in question); two local lawyers (and former KGS parents) who knew the case and understood its implications well; and, the Chair of the Human Rights Tribunal, Heather MacNaughton, whose ruling was, in most part, upheld by the Supreme Court of Canada.

So, what do I think? To begin with, I am thrilled that the original decision that there was an obligation to provide appropriate intensive support to Jeffrey Moore was upheld. There is no question but that the NVDSB made an error in judgment at the time in terms of determining their funding and programme priorities. If I was a parent of a child with learning challenges, who was enrolled in the District at the time, I would feel validated in my beliefs that more could and should have been done.

The question in 2012 however, is what ramification this decision really has for us today. It would be nice to think that the Moore decision was going to open up floodgates of individual and school district funding. That is not going to happen. It would be equally nice to think that, having been slapped on the collective wrists, all school districts were going to ramp up their level of service. That is also, highly unlikely. The reality is that most school districts and probably the Ministry will take a “that was then, this is now” approach and assert that the quality of programmes and services have improved significantly in the last fifteen years. Two key issues that will frame this response will be the fact that the Supreme Court did not find “systemic” discrimination – in other words, funding cuts by the province were not deemed to be automatically responsible for what was perceived to be uneven and discriminatory service reductions at the school district level; and, the ruling really zeroed in on “quantitative” issues not qualitative ones. The range or “intensity” of service was the core issue, not its quality or effectiveness. If the benchmark was set on how well the programme met the needs of each child then we could expect class action suits on behalf of every student in the mainstream who ever failed a course or dropped out without graduating. This decision was about inputs, not outcomes.

So what does that mean for students, parents and schools today? To begin with, the decision should create a higher sensitivity to the responsibility to provide programmes that address (but not necessarily meet) the needs of all learners. It might also lead to school districts looking for creative approaches to providing services that are currently needed but under-delivered. It should be understood, that no school district is going to willingly admit that it is not doing enough for all of the learners in its care. An aggressive or confrontational approach is not likely to open many doors in that regard. On the other hand, there may be some political will to look at contracting out services to schools such as ours or considering a voucher system that would allow parents to “spend” additional provincial funding on the approved programme or service of their choice. In an election year, it is difficult to know whether either of these two options would be palatable to any political party.

There is not much to be gained at this point in trumpeting the “problem” from the rooftops. Our goal should be to position ourselves, as members of the KGMS school community, to be part of the solution.

As a long-time teacher of high school history, and the father of five children (the oldest of whom turned 40 this week!), I have probably heard the phrase "this is boring" more times than anyone else on the planet. I have taken students across Checkpoint Charlie from West to East Berlin ("this is boring, it is taking so long just to go through this gate"); to the Tut exhibit ("can I skip the audio tour and go right to the snack bar?"); and to the steps of the Parthenon ("you mean we can't even go inside? What was the point of climbing all the way up here?"). I have listened to my own children complain about boring car rides, airplane flights, visits to the Louvre, symphony concerts, and baseball games (okay, may the last example is legit!) and I have heard countless times how boring I am because I would rather watch the news than subject myself to back to back episodes of "SpongeBob Squarepants".

For my students, and even my own children, "this is boring" has typically been their first salvo in any negotiation about taking on a task that is difficult, cumbersome, or requires them to apply themselves without any apparent hope of instant gratification. Oh, I am sure that there are children out there (I hear about them at cocktail parties) who relish a challenge, throw themselves into the dreariest tasks, and will one day be on the covers of magazines that my own kids will be borrowing money from me to buy. I just haven't met too many of them! Most children and adolescents, while wonderful people to chat and play with, take on a new persona when the prospect of grunt work is laid before them. Even those of us adults who love their jobs, and parenting, and who would prefer to spend more time on their favourite leisure activities have come to understand that hard and sometimes tedious work is often a necessary means to an end. Young people, on the other hand, still live in that lovely world of believing that they only have to do those things which they find inherently interesting and enjoyable. And then, there is school....

As we work our way through the second decade of the 21st century, teaching has never been so challenging. How do you engage students who are used to being entertained rather than enlightened? How do you challenge children to stretch themselves beyond their perceived limits when the process might involve some tough sledding before the "fun" stuff begins? What implication does this have for the classroom? We all know that teaching and learning have changed. From the teacher-centred classrooms of the fifties and sixties, through the laissez-faire approach of the seventies and eighties, and following the data-driven decade at the end of the last century, the fourth era in modern pedagogy has emerged. The last ten years have seen the growth of outcomes-based, collaborative strategies that require hard work and commitment from both teacher and student.

Consequently, at the risk of being boring myself, the only real barrier to learning is the level of engagement of students and staff in the process. You see, to work effectively, this approach requires a lot of "boring" work! To be effective there must be time consuming planning and preparation by the teacher and tutor and serious application by the student. At Kenneth Gordon, we know that not every minute is going to be taken up by cool exercises with the SmartBoard, surfing the web on a laptop, or watching an engaging video on YouTube. There are actually going to be some minutes, hours, and days that are devoted to plan, old, boring work! Reading, researching, working through math problems, practicing songs, - you name it, it all takes time and effort.

If we want students to be capable, self-directed learners then we have to give them not only the tools to be successful, but to foster the attitudes that lead to success. Time dedicated to Social/Emotional Learning at our school is at least as well spent as hours on Language Arts and Mathematics. Students need to develop the confidence that they can learn, and that they can succeed in both school and in the larger world; and, they need to develop the ethic that, although some things don't come easily, they will come eventually, with hard work and parental and school support. If the outcomes are worthwhile, the attainment of them should be intrinsically exciting. 

As for me, I always subscribe to the philosophy that "boring is in the eye of the beholder". The task in front of us is always neutral. How we perceive it, is entirely up to us!

When I was in high school, I attended a military tattoo in Fort George, an old colonial fort in Niagara-on-the-Lake that had stood since the 1780s. Before the performance began, a lone veteran of the Boer War stood up and received the appreciative applause of the crowd. To be honest, it meant little or nothing to me. I was sitting with my own grandfather who was a veteran of World War I. A master-sergeant in the Canadian Expeditionary force, he had fought in the trenches, been gassed and wounded and had somehow survived to return to Canada. His was a generation that was called and served. One hundred years ago, he was a young man looking forward to having a family and a career. Two years later, he was up to his neck in the mud of Flanders.

My parents’ generation was the same. My Dad was an army trainer; one uncle was in the corps of engineers who installed the artificial harbours that landed the invasion forces after D-Day; another uncle was a bomber pilot fighting in Burma and China; and my third uncle was a fighter pilot who had been shot down over the Mediterranean twice during his six year stint in the air force. Growing up in the 50s and 60s, those wars were still very much with us and there was an understanding of what had been at stake, and why people had put their lives on hold, or sacrificed them, to make the world a better place. Like television, our world was black and white.

By the time I was at university, things were a lot murkier. There had been a series of brief, but violent wars in the Middle East, the United States was mired in a questionable conflict in Viet Nam, and Canadians began more and more to see their role as peace-keepers with less of an appetite for the wholesale conflicts of our parents’ and grandparents’ youths. My classes were full of American draft-dodgers and even some deserters. There is no question but that my generation looked upon military service with disdain.

In the late seventies, my view of the world changed somewhat. I took a posting with the Canadian Armed Forces in Lahr, West Germany. A teacher, I spent my days looking at the roots of conflict with my history students, and two evenings a week, I worked with combat troops who were trying to finish their high school diplomas between military assignments. Many times my adult students would miss classes as they mobilized for training or to go to global hot spots where the calming influence of Canadian troops was required.

Over the ensuing decades, I saw my former students posted to Bosnia, Rwanda, and Afghanistan. To them it was a necessary job. To me, deliberately putting themselves in harm’s way for an ideal seemed almost beyond my ability to comprehend.

I am not a person who glorifies or idealizes warfare. I found this year’s “celebration” of the War of 1812 to be distasteful and missing the point. I was glad that we stayed out of Iraq and I wish that we had taken a different role in Afghanistan. I read in the papers about billions of dollars to be spent on jets, while, at the same time, our veterans are being nickeled and dimed on their pensions and even their funeral expenses. Our focus has become blurred by thinking about warfare as some grand human endeavour, while we forget about its human costs. To some extent it could be said of us that, like Robespierre, we “love mankind but care not for the lives of men.”

Having said that, I have been privileged during my life to have known some real heroes; in my family, among my friends, and in my students. They were, and are, people who were willing put themselves on the line to make a real difference in the world. They stood up to absolutism, to Nazism, and genocide. They fought for human rights, the environment, and racial and gender equality. They stood up against the bullies of the world and said “enough is enough”.

This week when we observe Remembrance Day, our students and even many of our staff will be asked to take a minute to remember people whom they never knew, people who sacrificed themselves in conflicts that our students may not have even heard of. They will be told stories about wars that have the same currency to them as the Civil War or the Battle of Hastings.

Let’s face it, these big stories are lost on all of us and lose relevance with the passage of time. But not the little stories – the individual sacrifices, the families who suffered loss, the necessity – especially in our cynical age – to stand up for your beliefs; to support your comrades; to put others before self - they should never be forgotten.

These are the timeless attributes of true heroism and they are well worth remembering.