Full Time Classes - Sept 2020
The Oxford School, like so many others in the province, did a wonderful job of outreach during the coronavirus closure; but our teachers went above and beyond. They were available throughout the entire teaching day to their students and parents, in the form of direct on-line teaching and personal conferencing. Packages of work and popcorn for movie nights were hand delivered in equal measure.
Now school is going back in September in person.
What have we learned, what does that mean?
First, we know that on-line instruction does not replace the live contact of teachers and students working and learning together. Our school is already capped at 15 - in accordance with the provincial regulations for opening school in the fall. The square footage of both classrooms and common spaces already exceeds most schools, both public and independent, and that by a wide margin. Add a nine-acre campus with green space galore, and the Oxford School is poised to pick up right where it stopped when everything shut down this past March.
September will be a time of mirth and new beginnings as we see our families again and welcome back a record number of new ones. And once we get down to work, we will take measure of where children are in their studies. They will catch up quickly, given plasticity of young minds and a superb cohort of caring and capable teachers.
Yet education is a gradual, cumulative process, and students who cannot attend school full time (or even at all) will lose ground after several weeks. We see this already in Ontario, which with 185 days of instruction, falls well short of higher performing jurisdictions like Germany (240-266), Japan (243) and South Korea (220) Amortize that over twelve years and your girl in Stuttgart or boy in Berlin has been in school for two more years than their Ontario counterparts.
Two years. Think about it.
For an interesting discussion on this subject, access the following link to the Atlantic Monthly; published in 1990, (The Case for More School Days - Call it Huck Finn's law: The authentic American flourishes in spite of schooling, not because of it...) the numbers have hardly changed at all, and are exactly the same where Ontario is concerned. We don't seek to change the length of the school year or school day, but we are attuned to what this data tells us.
And that is, at the end of the day, the best place to be is at school.
And that is where we will be on September 8th, ready and rarin' to go for your wonderful children.
Adam de Pencier
Head of School