When I was a just a kid, I could not wait for the day when my parents would trust me enough with the stove to leave me home alone. I couldn’t wait to be able to go places all by myself. I couldn’t wait until the day I would be able drive. I thought that I would have so much more freedom once I was older. That’s probably why I find it so ironic every time I find myself spending a Friday night alone at my desk with nothing but my chemistry textbook for company. As far as I was concerned, nothing about memorizing common chemical formulas at a dimly lit desk in the middle of the night felt free. Curiously enough, the boring Friday nights filled with nothing but schoolwork started almost immediately after I began high school. And I’m willing to bet that I’m not the only one here who has felt cheated by the workload given to us starting in the tenth grade. Frankly, the jump in time and effort required in junior high to the amount required in high school is drastic and rather daunting.
Now this may have not been the same for everyone, but a simple side-by-side of how my year of grade nine social studies began versus my grade ten year reflects this disparity pretty well. In grade nine, our first assignment was to colour a map of Canada. Its difficulty was raised beyond what it had been the year before as we were also asked to label one major city in each province other than their respective capitals. Come grade ten, we were writing a source based analytical essay on our second day of class. Never mind the source analysis aspect, I had written one essay throughout all of junior high and I wasn’t even sure if I had done it in the right format. Oh, how badly I missed pencil crayons and fineliners as I sat staring at the blank word document in front of me. I was completely lost. I didn’t have the knowledge, the tools, or the practice to write an essay.
It’s been a year since then, and now writing source analysis essays are second nature. But, the question that I couldn’t stop wondering is why we didn’t learn how to write it in junior high? I spent three years in junior high social studies and year after year we learned that Cartier discovered Canada. I spent three years in junior high math, and we were still reviewing the multiplication table in grade nine. I spent three years in junior high science learning the stages of the water cycle. Evaporation, condensation, and precipitation; amusingly enough, a stage for each year. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with any of that, they are all things that we should learn. But, it just doesn’t make sense for those three years of junior high to be so underutilized compared to the three years we spend in high school.
It’s in high school that most of us begin to volunteer, work jobs, and become more and more involved in our communities. But, it’s also the time during which we are hit with huge amounts of information and techniques to be learnt in school. A day only has 24 hours, and with so much to do for school, high school students are being limited in their ability to do non-academic activities. This imbalance doesn’t really make anyone a fan of the Canadian system. Around a third of the Alberta public, according to the Alberta Education, is dissatisfied with the current schooling system. It really doesn’t make sense for high school to both be the time when we are beginning to branch out into society, and also the time during which we are first introduced to a heavy workload from school.
This makes even less sense when you realize how much this effect can be mitigated if the curriculum was better spread out through the six years we spend in junior high and high school combined. It is frankly more intuitive to slowly increase the workload progressively over the course of the six years, as opposed to having an extremely low load for the first three years and then trying to make up for that lower load in the final three years. Just take Singapore as an example; they consistently have one of the highest rated educational systems in the world. Interestingly enough, their curriculum is also much more evenly spread over the course of their schooling careers.
Unlike in Canada, their students slowly work towards dealing with larger and larger amounts of work. This more even distribution of the material also means they are afforded greater opportunity to participate in out of school activities, as they are not as heavily swamped in catch-up work in high school. It’s not like the one summer break between grade nine and ten somehow made us all that much smarter, what we learned in grade ten, we probably could have also learned in grade nine. So we should lessen the load in high school and slot some of the curriculum over to junior high. It makes better use of our school time from grades seven to nine, and in turn allows us more free time in high school. That way, not all of our Friday nights has to be spent staring despondently at the never-ending pages of a textbook, and maybe, just maybe, we’ll experience a little bit of the freedom that we all dreamed of as little kids.
