It’s just three small words, yet this simple three-word phrase has a profound effect on everyone who hears it.
For kids who don’t particularly like school, it’s the equivalent of an annual death sentence.
For kids who enjoy school, or spent the past two months in a cabin with their families and a book of show tunes, it’s a welcome change, a fresh start, and a new pair of sneakers.
For parents, "back to school" is a mixed blessing: the kids are out of the house but you’re out the price of a pair of sneakers.
To me, summer began its downward spiral the moment the stores posted Back to School sale signs in the window. My parents would make all kinds of comments about having to start wearing shoes and showering again, and threatened to take my brother and I shopping for some good, i.e. uncomfortable, clothes. The spectre of a new teacher hung over my head, and for the final few weeks until school started up again I never slept as well as I did back in June with nothing to worry about for days at a time.
It was also a time for turning over a new leaf. New wardrobe, new haircut, new book bag, new books, new attitude. Every year was going to be the year I got my act together and "worked to my potential" – according to last year’s report card, I also needed to work on my punctuality.
As many pockets as I had in the new book bag, or how short the haircut was, it never seemed to happen, for whatever reason. I lived less than a block from the school and managed to pull down some good grades when my parents and teachers rode me hard enough, so I really had no excuses.
Of course, this was in the days before the Internet. Kids today have fewer excuses than ever before.
http://www.oise.utoronto.ca/~mpress/eduweb/educators.html
This is definitely the most comprehensive set of education links in Canada, with resources for students and teachers in absolutely every subject, in every grade. There’s almost 150 sites listed here, so chances are you can help find the help you’re looking for.
I went through the list and the Web and picked my favourite tutor sites for your least favourite subjects.
History
http://cbc.ca/history/
This is the Web site of the CBC series Canada: A People’s History, which has over 350 pages of Web content on our history to browse through. The presentation of our story is a little more interesting here than in the average textbook.
http://members.home.net/dneylan/index.html
A history teacher put together this list of history links that allows you to browse through museum and archive collections, read historical documents, and visit content-based history sites.
Math
http://www.awl.ca/school/connections/ or www.pearsoned.ca/school/
Pearson Education Canada, the parent corporation of Prentice Hall publications, Addison Wesley Longman publications, and Ginn publications, is the largest publisher of school books in the country, supplying schools from Newfoundland to the Yukon with text books covering a wide range of subjects. Their math collections are available at the first URL, and the rest are available at the second.
In addition to having match lessons and tutorials online, they also provide hundreds of links to other math sites. Not only can these sites help you to fill in the blanks of your homework assignment, they also explain the mathematical processes involved in greater detail – even if the light doesn’t go on during the classroom demonstration, you’ll never be left behind.
Science
http://www.execulink.com/~ekimmel/index.htm
For biology and general science students, Toronto high school teacher Mr. Kimmel has put a large part of the curriculum online in the form of interactive games, puzzles, and articles.
http://now2000.com/kids/science.shtml
This list of sites covers just about every other aspect of elementary and high school science, with links to general scientific institutions like National Geographic, the Discovery Channel, and NASA, and to specific topics like genetics and electricity.
French
http://french.about.com/mbody.htm
Once again About.com does a more than serviceable job with a propriety overview of French, including lessons and links to other sites for beginner, intermediate and advanced studies. There’s a French-English/English-French dictionary, a thesaurus, plus a lesson plan that allows you to build your vocabulary. There are audio labs to listen and learn, and encyclopedias of verbs and French expressions.
English and Everything Else
http://highschoolhub.org
English curricula and required readings vary from place to place, but not as much as you might think. Grammar is grammar, there are three spellings and uses for "there, their and they’re," and Hamlet dies in Act V Scene ii. High School Hub is great resource for any and every subject, including English.
Other topics covered at the Hub include Biology, Chemistry, Earth Science, Global Studies, Mathematics, Physics, U.S. History, and World Languages. You’ll want to bookmark this site for future reference.
