As a child, I always wanted to be a teacher. I think a lot of influence came from my parents, who are both teachers themselves. As I grew up, I went through phases where I would have a new career path in mind almost on a weekly basis. This led to working various jobs and even trying post-secondary school out a couple times. Every job I had and both attempts at post-secondary ended quicker than I thought it would have and with me feeling frustrated. Turns out the answer I had to “what do you want to be when you grow up?” as a child was the right answer all along, I just needed to take a few detours to figure that out for my grown-up self.

Looking back, I regret absolutely nothing about my journey up to this point. I know that if things were different, I would not be the person I am today, and I most certainly wouldn’t be the teacher I will be soon. However, that does not stop me from thinking about what would have happened if I had kept my original goal in mind all the way through elementary school, middle school, high school and beyond?

One thought that did cross my mind was, where would I be now if I hadn’t taken all those detours? If I had graduated from high school and went straight into an education program. My first thought was that I would never have met the amazing people in my cohort, and I would have never had the opportunity to be part of a NITEP Field Centre. This made me very happy that I did take those detours. My second thought was that I would have been a teacher with five years of experience. That particular thought upset me, and I wondered why I had to take those detours. After all, my first post-secondary experience happened right after high school, and it was an education program why didn’t I just continue? There were personal reasons, however I believe the main reason was that I was more than a little disappointed in myself. First, because the school I was attending was not the school that I had hoped to. Second, because I did not do as well in my courses as I expected to.

Several years after I realized that the biggest reason why I was not admitted into my university of choice (UBC if you are wondering) was math. Math 10 to be more specific. I was in a year where the high school math program was changing, I suppose my class was a test run. Instead of just one basic math program with pre-calculus on the side, math was split into three levels: Principles of Math, Applications of Math, and Essentials of Math.

Since I did very well in Math 9, I was recommended for and placed in Principles of Math 10. This along with my decision to take Spanish 10 and 11 in one year, my schedule changed from a Day 1, Day 2 schedule to a semester schedule. This meant that I went from having specific classes every other day, to having all classes every single day for a semester. Such a simple format change ended up being my downfall in Math 10. I ended up failing Math 10, which meant that I was a year behind in math, which is not only a graduation requirement, but a requirement for admission to many universities.

The struggle that I went through led me to my inquiry question:

The Big Question

There are major transitions between elementary, high school, and post-secondary school. Each transition is more drastic and for many students, more difficult.

• In what ways can educators help students make the transition easier?
• What can we add or take away from the curriculum to help with the transitions?
• Can British Columbia/Canada take ideas from educational systems from around the world and add them into our own system?