Rich Seeley. Staff photo
A massive development for secondary students and teachers across the province as the grade nine math course gets changed for the first time since 2005.
In every school district, students entering high school will have a math experience that contrasts anything the province has ever seen.
Rich Seeley is a local representative with the the Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation and believes the new curriculum evens the playing field in a way.
“It’s an inequitable approach to teaching students who are from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds and racialized communities,” Seeley said. “They have inordinately high failure rates in those communities and this is one way schools can start to address this inequity and start closing the gap, so in principal we support this notion.”
The announcement comes with about three months until the new school year.
Seeley mentioned that while school boards have been expecting these changes for some time, the curriculum itself was a mystery until the announcement.
“As far as the rollout goes, to announce in mid-June that the curriculum, which no one has seen at this point that is supposed to be up and running by the fall, it’s going to be challenging for my members to get trained in and actually put it into place by September because they haven’t seen it yet.” Seeley remarked. “Certainly, is it the best time to put a new curriculum in when we’ve been remote for the past 12 months? We have some questions about that, but it is what it is and it’s going to come. We’ll probably have some bumps in the rollout but I think in the end, a year from now we’ll be looking at it in a more positive light.”
There have been many concerns raised by parents, educators, and students about transitioning into the next school year after the pandemic forced online learning onto the education system.
Some fear students will not be ready for their courses in the fall, math being one of the subjects brought up as the biggest concern.
Seeley added: “It might be a curriculum that naturally brings students who have had some trouble over the past year and a half back into the fold in terms of their math skills, or it might exacerbate those problems, it remains to be seen.”
While Seeley believes this is tight timing, he went on to say this change to the course could be highly beneficial for students entering grade nine.
