Articles Tagged with “school”

Accepting arbitration now is not the way forward, not when OSSTF should be standing up with the labour movement across North America.

I’ve had a long and interesting week, so let’s get started.

As some background, my school has two sites (North and South) as an artifact of combining two schools. North site is undergoing extensive renovation, with an entire new building being added, so South site is being phased out. I’m teaching entirely in one room on South site. Aside from having a Promethean board instead of a SMART board, I’m OK with this. Firstly, South…

Last Thursday I wrote my final exam as an undergraduate university student. This marks the end of my formal schooling (for now). I have this week off, which is a welcome break and short vacation, and then I begin my second five-week practicum. Come the last full week of April, I will be finished completely. No more assignments. No more tests. I’ll be a transcript and some bureaucratic processing away from being a certified teacher.

…

So I’m knitting now.

Katie, a friend I have made among my class of teacher candidates, is an avid knitter. (Her teachables also happen to be the same as mine—math and English—how cool is that?) Eventually our conversations about her knitting culminated in an offer to teach me how to knit. I was not digging for this—the thought had honestly never crossed my mind. I used to do some very basic cross-stitching, but my…

It is snowing outside. This is both wonderful and terrifying. Wonderful because snow is awesome. I love living in a country, and a part of the country, that experiences all four seasons in vibrant technicolour and Dolby Digital surround sound. Winter here means minus forty below, winds, snow in the air and on the ground, and plenty of shovelling. Terrifying because this means I may have to shovel in the future--I like shovelling; I hate…

Hello September. I have missed you. You might be my favourite among all months, but don't tell the others. And no, it's not because my birthday is in September (although that helps). Nor is it because September signals the start of fall television, with new episodes of Castle, Chuck, House, Stargate Universe, etc. More than any other month, even that notorious January, September is a month of changes and new beginnings.…

Tonight Stargate Universe premiered, and I wanted to share my thoughts on it. However, I feel guilty blogging about a television show when I haven't blogged about arguably more important matters, such as life.

With a month behind me, I feel good about the school year so far. I only have four courses this year: Introductory Analysis, Partial Differential Equations (PDEs), Introduction to Mathematical Probability, and Speculative Fiction. Three math courses and an English course.…

Sometime between November and ... now ... it became now. I'm not quite sure when this happened, or how it happened((If you know, please do explain it to me.)) ... but it happened. Now that it's now and no longer then, that which was must become what was going to be when then became now--which is now.

In that same spirit, the university felt it right and proper to commence a second term of classes…

So I was going to write this entry in French, but I discovered along the way that I've forgotten my simple past tense. This disturbs me.

I took French from grade 1 until grade 11 in school (this was before the provincial government postponed mandatory French until grade 4). It's only compulsory until grade 9, but I liked my teachers, and the courses were interesting and academic. Plus, being able to speak another language is…

After a weekend of work, Mondays are refreshing. I don't work on Mondays, and I get to go back to school and learn.

I've been back for over a week now, and I'm enjoying it. This is my easy term; I only have five courses: Foundations and Issues in Education, Educational Technology in the Classroom, Differential Equations, Linear Algebra I, and Ring Theory with Applications. Yes, two education courses and three maths. I love math.…

The back to school ads have landed.

Going back to university is different from going back to high school. For one thing, I'm not in school all day, so it feels like I have more free time. In general my schedule is more flexible. Since I'm in a fairly academic program, my school supplies are limited to notebooks, pens, and pencils. I can otherwise ignore the exhortations of sneakers, markers, pencil crayons, and whatnot.…

Tuesday had my last two exams. I'm officially finished my first year of university: no more homework, no more studying. :hyper: I have four months to relax. Or, you know, not.

I leave for Ohio in 15 days and have a ton of stuff I need to finish before then. I really want to finish VSNS Lemon before that happens, even though I'm not optimistic enough to think I'll have time to complete the redesign…

This is mostly for my dad, who has been bugging me about how I'm doing in school but doesn't understand that I feel more comfortable writing about such matters in front of several million strangers instead of actually talking out loud about it to a parent. :r Curse you, modern society!

I have one more day to go, and then we've got Reading Week. It's our version of "spring break" for universities. I don't have…

Tomorrow is my first day of my first year of university. I'm both excited and nervous. Today I went shopping for school supplies. Notebooks, pens, that sort of thing.

I have two math classes, so I'll be doing a lot of pencil work. I love wooden pencils and have eschewed their mechanical counterparts up until now. However, since the spacial organization of lecture-style seating makes pencil sharpening more of an Olympic sport than useful utility,…

School is not over yet; exams have yet to come, but tonight I went through the complicated tribulation of the graduation ceremony and emerged (although somewhat tired) unscathed. The ceremony was long, and at times dull, but it was an interesting experience nonetheless. I cried when our teachers sang, because not only did they sing well, but I thought about all they've done for us during our schooling. It's part of the reason I'm going…

I got to miss the entire day of school for a math competition at the university. ^_^

The individual competition was in the morning, so I sat in the lecture theatre with a hundred or so other kids and answered 15 multiple choice and 5 full solution questions (or attempted to answer, I guess). It was pretty hard, but not as bad as last year. I did well on the multiple choice, I think, although…

Note that f(x) must be the same over this interval. Silly me. :D

(My only consolation is that not only did my two classmates fail to spot this, but the student teacher was the one who tried to do this with different functions and led us into the incorrect solution. :r)

I'm nearing the end of the first week back (-ish). So far it feels ... the same, yet different. The same in the sense that I'm used to it; there aren't many surprises. However, being a grade 12 feels different. I've been doing this for three years. I can look around and see the grade 9s and wonder if I was ever like that. The friends I have beside me I've known for three or…

Here's just a random distillation of the thoughts swirling around in my head today (happy Labour Day, everyone). Maybe after doing this I can actually get some writing done before I go to bed.

Speaking of which, I have school tomorrow. Yes, grade 12, my last year of high school. For those who would like to pretend to be interested in my course schedule:

First semester: Geometry/Discrete Math, AP Physics, AP Calculus, and Drama Second…

One more exam to go. My French exam today was very easy, and I found out that I did quite well on both Math and Chemistry! Just Computer Science is left.

On the last day of classes, I asked Mr. Dubyk, my math/Computer Science teacher, where he got the nifty cover bag for his laptop. It's essentially a cover into which you slide the laptop and then velcro the top closed with two straps. I…