Tuesday September 2, 2014 – 10am
Posted Sep 2, 2014 02:38:18 PM.
This article is more than 5 years old.
10:00- Peter Shawn Taylor, Editor-at-large at Maclean’s magazine
All schools in the Waterloo Region District School Board now have a locked front door policy in place. Starting this year, schools have a new security system installed and visitors will soon have to stare into a camera and state their purpose for being there before being allowed inside. (Just like prison!) By the end of September, the public board expects al of the 104 elementary schools to be protected in a similar fashion. The local Catholic School Board has had locks, cameras and buzzers on all its elementary schools since last year.
10:30- Homework: valuable learning tool or complete waste of time?
Students at a Quebec elementary school may be some of the happiest in the country as they prepare for another year in the classroom. College de Saint-Ambroise, a school of 339 students in the province’s Saguenay region, has introduced a near-complete ban on homework. Every class from Grade 1 to 6 will take part in the one-year pilot project. Marie-Eve Desrosiers, a spokeswoman with the Jonquiere School Board, said the goal is to ease pressure on parents and even improve student performance. She explained that teachers will still be allowed to assign studying and reading work, but there won’t be, for example, “four pages of math problems.” “It’s based on research that homework time is becoming more and more difficult,” Desrosiers said in an interview. “Often children are away at daycare from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. at night, and a lot of families are finding it increasingly difficult, and so we’ve decided to try this out at a school.”
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