OUR SCHOOL BEING AUCTIONED TODAY

Breaking News:

Just learned that the Blyth School was sold at auction for $210,000. I have no word as to who bought it.
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Today an on site auction is taking place to mark the end of over 150 years of education provided in our community of Blyth, Ontario.

Our school is being sacrificed to help pay for a new monster school which will actually not be completed for the next school year. The new school will be known as the Maitland River Elementary School . Although only a portion of our children will be attending this school; most will be bused south to the tiny village of Londesborough which is in the next municipality. Some classes will apparently be relegated to portables.

The decision to close our only school was taken by the Avon Maitland District School Board on which we have no active representation. School board members tend to support their own community and ignore all the others. The board is best described as a group of money-grubbing leeches.

The whole exercise began several years ago to address the issue of declining enrollment in our schools. The decision to build a monster school (24-rooms) in the midst of a situation which apparently already had too many schools and too few children, seems to defy logic.

Turns out that in this particular adventure, declining enrollments were not the issue at all. Board members from Huron County felt that since Perth County got a new school last year, their county should get a new school this year. Thus a completely unnecessary school is being built in Wingham as a multi-million dollar monument to a handful of school board members who really represent no one but themselves.

The board steals our school grabs the money and leaves the property up to chance as to whether the highest bidder will use the property for the betterment of this community or its degradation.

Remember when we used to refer to school board members as "trustees"?  

Brock Vodden

A Musical Joke

French Horn

I just learned that the French Horn is considered by many musicians to be one of the most difficult instruments to play - especially to play well.


Why is the French Horn known as the Divine Instrument?



Answer: A person blows in one end, and only God knows what sound is going to come out of the other end.

A little wisdom I picked up from the CBC Radio 2. Thank goodness for the CBC radio service giving us real music to listen to in Huron County.

A QUESTION FOR ENGLISH TEACHERS - AND OTHERS

Teaching of English Literature: WHAT ARE THE GOALS?

Many years ago i was a secondary school English teacher. Over a number of summers, I took graduate courses on a variety of education topics towards qualifying for the Master of education degree which I obtained in 1969.

One of the studies I undertook was to answer a question that had bothered me for some time.

"Are the official purposes of the teaching of English Literature in sync with the methodology and achievement measures employed by teachers and schools?"

I gathered what was said about the teaching of English Literature in the curriculum guidelines presented by the Ministry of Education of the time, along with various curriculum overviews prepared by secondary schools, along with a number of other official and semi-official publications available at the time in the mid 1960s. This collection, for the purposes of my study was the apparent objective of English Literature instruction in the secondary schools of Ontario at that time:

The following is my best attempt at remembering  the stated official purposes of English Lit.

The purpose of the English Literature program in our secondary schools is to help people achieve the following: developing in students the ability and the desire to appreciate and understand good literature; the development of good taste in literature; to develop in young people the habit of being lifelong readers who remain aware of all aspects of their world.

I interviewed a number of English Lit teachers to determine their instructional strategies and methods.

I also collected English Lit. curriculum descriptions from several schools, along with the English Lit. examinations, tests, and project assignments from teachers.

I also surveyed a large number of students from Grades 11 to 13 asking them to indicate what they felt were the main purposes behind the teaching of English Literature

What I discovered, in brief, was a very strong relationship between what the official Ministry pronouncements were on the purposes behind English Literature and the general statements by the school and the teachers as to their aims in English Lit.

However, there was a very distinct difference between all of that and the student perceptions of the subject's purposes, There was a similar disconnect between the stated purpose and the apparent objectives behind teaching practices and the examination contents.  The students seemed to draw their clues as to the purpose of  English Lit. from their exposure to examinations in the subject, rather than from general course or curriculum descriptions. They knew that their overall achievement was measured by their recall of teacher's valuation of the material studied, rote memory of content, names, arguments contained in the material studied. In other words, their ability to answer questions based on the opinions expressed by, or approved by, the teacher during the course, was the end goal of these courses.

At that time, I discovered a very inciteful two-volume book entitled "Taxonomy of Educational Objectives".

Volume One deals with the Cognitive Domain. Volume Two deals with the Affective Domain.

Published in 1956, this book is still regarded by many educators as the most influential book on the field education of all time. It should be read by teachers, instructors, educators of all types. the volumes are still available after more that 50 years. It helps to clarify what is meant by educational objectives by expressing them in terms of the intended  behavioural outcomes of students.

In this instance, it is helpful for English Literature teachers to re-think their goals and objectives as a basis for their curriculum design and as a means ot re-thinking what goals and objectives they are trying to develop or encourage in their students.

Brock Vodden

THE THEFT OF OUR BLYTH SCHOOL

Scene of the Crime

 The closing of Blyth Public School is a tragic affair, but it is the outcome of years of incompetent management by the Avon Maitland School Board, incompetent governance by the Ministry of Education under both the previous PC government and the current Liberal government. Mike Harris started the decline and Dalton McGuinty is working hard to outdo him.

The decline of public education in Huron County has been augmented by the increased involvement of faith-based education systems which have grown as a result of the loss of confidence many families have felt towards the public system as it exists in this county.

Public education, in my view, is the ideal basis for developing a solid, tolerant, fair, and progressive society. The fragmentation of education which has increased dramatically in recent decades, while consistent with legislation, has done a great deal of harm to our education system.

The sign announcing the coming auction.

Part of the problems stem from the progression of amalgamations of school boards from community-based boards to county boards to a two-county board, Avon Maitland District Board of Education, which covers both Huron and Perth counties: covers, but serves poorly. The effect of the enlarged "area of administration" has been that board members have lost all meaningful contact with most of the communities for which they are responsible. And the result of that is that communities like Blyth, Brussels, and Zurich have no representation at all. As that process plays itself out, board members end up representing no one but themselves and most citizens within the two counties have no one tending to their concerns, needs, interests, or welfare. Accountability to the people and community connection are diluted to the point of being undetectable.

At the same time, as elected boards lose touch with their constituencies the entire focus of power and decision-making falls to the senior staff of the school board, the Director of Education, and the various Superintendents and Managers. The system then is controlled by people who are unaccountable to the people of the counties.

Blyth Public School on the market

This situation is a complete denial of the fundamental principles of public education. It could be rendered tolerable if the elected board members have the capacity to value and respond to their entire constituency, and the administrators have the competency, wisdom and the ethical foundation to provide a sound and effective public education system.

Unfortunately, in our case, we have been unlucky on both counts with the quality of most board members and of administrators. The people of Huron County have been short-changed in terms of both governance and operations. We have been routinely misinformed about what it happening and why. Administration officials have become spin doctors as opposed to responsible public servants. Board members have to rely on sound bites provided by their hirelings.

The entire scenario related to school closures and the construction of the Maitland River Elementary School makes absolutely no sense from either an educational or fiscal point of view. The only explanation that makes any sense is that the board's primary and only goal was to build a large new school to serve as a monument to the present and recent board members and to create a symmetry with the new school recently opened in the Perth County side of the area (St. Marys). Several schools, including Blyth and East Wawanosh are being sacrificed to "justify" that multi-million dollar adventure.

A question that is still being asked is why the Blyth school is being closed while the Hullett Central School in Londesborough remains open. Also, why are the schools being closed even though the new school will not be completed for a year or more. The answer is MONEY.

Blyth school is considered to have greater real estate value than the Londesborough location. So Blyth loses because it has a slightly higher real estate value and therefor subject of a cash grab. The rush to close schools is simply a matter of getting the cash as quickly as possible to help pay for the Wingham monument.

The school board and its officials continually trot out the phrase "It's all for the children" to try to explain their bizarre actions and to cover up the unexplainable. That won't work in this case.

The salient actions of Avon Maitland DSB have nothing whatsoever to do with the children or with education quality. It's all about the names that will be on the plaque in the new school.

So Blyth Public School has been stolen from this community. Blyth cannot afford this loss. And the school board does not care because they do not represent us.

Blyth will survive as it always has through times of change.

Perhaps one of the long term benefits of this period of neglect and abuse by AMDSB will be that in the next election of 2014 we will take a lot more care to see that we have responsible candidates for school board positions and our votes will be determined by much more cogent thought than the last time.