Welcome to the Hawthorne II (deux) Bilingual Alternative Primary School website, where the students, staff, and parents get to tell it like it is to the whole wide world (WWW :).
Good news about news! The users who subscribe to this site will get a 2-weeks heads up. From now on, the news feed send notices of articles on the site 2 weeks in the future.
As at this writing, the decision to close the Grade 7 entry point to the TDSB Extended French program (EF) has not been made yet. However, here is a letter from Nadine Segal, System Superintendent, regarding how the potential changes would impact our school.
An inspiring less-than-5-minutes video from Australian schools on a project to “change the world in 5 minutes”. It’s fun, and possibly could cause us to do something like that.
At the School Improvement Meeting in early October 2008, the parents and teachers attending were asked to jot down on post-it notes their responses to the following questions:
A new component was just added to our site. At the bottom right-hand side, there’s a form to enter your email address to receive any new articles posted to the site.
A mind-opening talk about how we can learn from Nature’s ways to evolve sustainable systems. So, instead of trying to invent new technologies with little regard for their long-term impacts, maybe we could copy Nature’s “inventions” so the stuff we build actually lasts longer and doesn’t break our world.
Hawthorne Handbook
· [3 comments]
· 2008-09-01 20:34
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This is the Hawthorne II Bilingual Alternative Handbook’s final draft after the revisions and discussions that occurred during the year 2007-2008. The principles and working points stand as they are and should be respected. And yet, it continues to be a work in progress. Any member of our community who wishes to take issue with aspects of the handbook should bring their ideas to a school council meeting or should write in the comments section of this entry.
When some point warrants it, a committee can be formed to fine-tune it further, as is currently the case with the dialectic around the place of competition and the value of collaboration in our school culture.
Download this page as a PDF file for off-line perusal.
“In most countries, education feels like a car factory. In Finland, the teachers are the entrepreneurs, (…)”
An interesting article about the low-tech, low-stress, highly successful Finnish schooling system.
TED talk by Michael Pollan
· [1 comment]
· 2008-02-12 17:11
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He’s the author of several books on our relationship to the environment and food.