New Curriculium

By: Trisha Petrosoniak © 2002

Our learning is getting pushed to the limit but at a cost. With the new demands of the new curriculum, to learn everything effectively, our social and extra curricular time is now being squeezed or eliminated and for what? Just because of a decision to eliminate grade 13?

Why does the provincial government put us through this stressful situation, when it’s not even necessary? Since the new curriculum was brought in, the amount of homework necessary to ‘cover’ a year of learning has risen and has created not only frustrated students, but parents as well. This is when we need to ask ourselves if these students the government is producing are going to be effective enough to be the key to Ontario’s future.

Recent times have caused a dramatic increase in homework and means that weekday fun for kids such as playing outside, learning and interacting with one another, are now times that are becoming endangered. This is because there is pressure and new time constraints to retain all of the information necessary to be successful. Added to this problem is the difficulty of the material we are being forced to retain. Our parents are continuously telling us that they did our grade eight work when they were well into high school. With this kind of pressure, how can these interpersonal skills be sufficiently developed in our future adults? Experts out there are making the prediction that we might not get along very well together and that we may have trouble working with one another.

Teachers of all grades, as well as students and parents, are very stressed since this change. Not only is the curriculum too hard for our age, but we are being bombarded with too many things at once. There is not enough time to reflect on our learning and to understand what we’re getting told. In some schools, students do not have the advantage to review notes and lessons with teachers, through remedial, making it extremely difficult for those students to keep up. If our learning is not effectively paced and ‘spread out’ enough, when we all grow up and become adults, we may not remember as much as we were capable of.

The government has to think about us a bit harder before making such a drastic change. “It’s like we’re being used as guinea pigs to see what will happen when one grade is eliminated”, says Ashleen Hawco, a 16-year-old student from Sarnia.

Jacob Speijer thinks that they are pushing the kids too hard, and specifies that “there are a lot of indications that they are”. Sadly, the frustration from parents and students becomes apparent when the government does not understand and cannot adequately explain why these students are failing.

If the government plans for a successful future for everyone, then they must back up what they claim to be doing. If our provincial government claims it’s “putting kids first”, then they need to re-think their curriculum change and fast, before our students get so far behind, they’ll be “last” on the list in becoming successful adults.