Dear fellow petitioners, Apparently, Rachel Notley had said that our "concerns about the curriculum are overstated". After hearing Premier Notley’s election victory speech, I now have great faith that she and the NDP party will be different from the PCs. I have faith that the NDP party will put an end to the discovery math and stop the unwanted, costly and detrimental un-Inspiring Education experiment. According to CBC, Premier Notley stated yesterday that the "province now has a government that reflects its citizens." This can only affirm that once Rachel Notley and the new education minister know that nearly 20,000 Albertans have been working hard over the past year-and-a-half against the "new math" and the Inspiring Education initiative, Rachel will stop the IE initiative to reflect the Alberta citizens. We won’t need the Wildrose opposition because Premier Notley will be different. Premier Notley will listen. Premier Notley will be accountable. So please, if you may help: 1. Email/tweet/facebook Premier Notley to come to our May 29th forum at 6pm at the Lister Centre. I believe this is in the Edmonton-Strathcona riding which she represents. If you are her constituents, please send her a message to come so that we know that she knows that our concerns are far from being "overstated". I am sure she would make every effort to come to a meeting to listen and represent her constituents, if you ask her to. Premier Notley will know the most important stakeholders are our children and she will not only protect funding, but also our children’s right to a good education. 2. Email/tweet/facebook the new Education Minister to come to our May 29th forum. He/She needs to be informed of our concerns. I am sure he/she would listen and act accordingly in the best interest of our children because they are the NDP, not the PCs. 3. Resend all the letters you had written to your previous MLAs to your new NDP MLAs. Let them know we have faith they will represent you their constituents and stop un-Inspiring Education because they are the NDP, not the PCs. 4. I now have about 2200 paper petition signatures on hand. More to come! I am so grateful to you for all your time and effort in this. The growing numbers are indeed strengthening our stance against un-Inspiring Education. Now that Albertans are learning what the Inspiring Education initiative is about, I am optimistic that we have more Albertans against IE than the number who even participated in the "consultation" regarding transforming Alberta schools. I hope to submit the paper and online petition in June. 5. The Alberta School Board Association stated the following during election: "Three ministers of education have dedicated countless hours and dollars to consulting Albertans to reimagine transformed schools and education in Alberta. How will you move this initiative forward?" In medicine, this push to move such initiative forward would be considered blatantly unethical. Regardless of how many researchers or millions of dollars are devoted to the development of a drug, if there is evidence of greater harm than benefit when the drug is out on the market, the drug would be immediately pulled. The drug company cannot ethically ask physicians or researchers to push this drug forward. Please email the school boards and ask them why our children's lives and future are not as valued? 6. I understand that the NDP is working on a new budget to restore funding to the education system. Please remind them that they should not continue to waste millions of dollars on the unwanted un-Inspiring Education initiative when the funds can be better used for the special needs programs/hiring more teachers/teaching assistance, etc. I’m sure we’re still in a deficit and the NDP will know that we need to use the money wisely. 7. Please remind the NDP that: We, the parents, academics and professionals, DID NOT give the government consent to: 1. Shift the focus of curriculum from an emphasis on content and knowledge to an emphasis on “21st century competencies/skills.” We do not want them to cut curriculum content. 2. Shift to an Inquiry/Discovery-based/Problem-based approach to teaching when multiple meta-analysis studies have proven how inferior inquiry-based learning is to direct instruction. 3. Continue to push the “new math” (discovery math) when it has failed and resulted in weakened math skills in our children. They need to inform all teachers of the re-emphasis on the basics/standard approaches as agreed upon by former minister Johnson. 4. Direct our teachers to “teach less” to become mere facilitators/guides, while promoting more group-work, which research has shown to be a less effective learning strategy. We want our teachers TO TEACH. 5. Deprive our children of knowledge by replacing our children’s school libraries with Learning Commons. Books and libraries inspire learning. 6. Deprive our children of textbooks from which they can effectively study. Our children deserve quality textbooks. 7. Push the overuse of, addiction to, and dependency on technology on our children throughout the school day. Our teachers cannot be replaced with technology. 8. Replace a quantifiable measure of our children’s progress (PATs, percentage/letter grade) with vague qualitative measures (consistently, frequently,etc). 9. Constantly harp at our children that “memorization is at the expense of understanding” when memorization is one of the most useful tools needed for understanding. 10. Deprive our children of adequate practice needed to master fundamental skills and knowledge. Please RSVP me at mrgranthd@yahoo.ca if you can join me at this forum on May 29th, 1800h at Lister Centre (UofA): The Alberta Math and Education Forum: Restoring Excellence and Evidence-Based Teaching in the K-12 Curriculum Guest speakers: Dr. Robert Craigen, Dr. Vladimir Troitsky, Stuart Wachowicz Kindest regards: Dr. Nhung Tran-Davies Here are reported harms from the Inspiring Education Initiative: From a student: http://www.edmontonjournal.com/Saturday+Letters+flipped+classrooms/10962172/story.html From another student: "During grades 4 and 5, I went to Mount Pleasant School in Edmonton. At the time, I didn't realize how good the school was, or why it was such a good school. When I moved to different schools though, I saw a dramatic change. In Mount Pleasant School, we learned 10 times as much as the rest of the kids in the province. We did 10 times as much work during the school day, and did a lot of repetitive, consistent work like spelling and vocabulary every week. When I moved schools though, I saw that the pace was much slower and that we covered much less content and we did much less work, and the teachers didn't teach as much. Kids in Mount Pleasant did a lot of homework, but it was homework that could be done easily because the teachers worked very hard to explain and teach us the concepts. Over the years, I kept remembering this great school, but I didn't know what made it good, until I found this article... Mount Pleasant School was from a group of "Cogito" schools that used the traditional methods of teaching and learning. I prefer these methods, because students can learn so much more from a teacher than trying to research alone on the internet at this age. Furthermore, when a teacher works hard to teach concepts to students, it builds a strong foundation for their future. Inspiring Education is a system that goes against everything I believe. Also, it robs students of their future, especially those who's parents have worked so hard to bring to Canada." From parents: http://metronews.ca/news/calgary/1338215/its-baffling-calgary-parents-not-pleased-as-some-schools-skip-textbooks/ From a mother, Caroline: As parents, we are constantly admonished to limit the time we allow our children to play video games, watch videos, and stare at computer screens, to under 2 hours per day. In the meantime, our schools are gamifying every lesson and having our children stare at screens, whether they be personal tablets or a large smartboard, for much of the 7 hour school day. I am not against technology, and I am certainly not against using technology to expand access to more knowledge and information than we have ever previously been able to, but all the readily-available information in the world is useless if one has not first formed a stable foundation of basic knowledge with which to evaluate it. That is the struggle I consistently see with my children and others. The push to gamify every lesson robs them of the chance to learn how to work through problems and acquire information that isn't necessarily always interesting or fun, even if it's necessary. The push to remove the memorization of facts, whether they be math, grammar, or biology, robs our children of the chance to build a decent framework from which to evaluate new information. The push to remove personal responsibility from each student and instead have every project and lesson be a collaboration robs them of the chance to test their own abilities, to have their own strengths be recognized, and have their own weaknesses identified and addressed in a timely manner. The push to pass all children through the grades whether or not they have mastered the material, and to slather them in praise in the hopes of bolstering self-esteem and confidence, is in reality failing them in every sense of the word. Dousing children in praise they haven't earned and don't deserve breeds arrogance, not confidence. By doing this, we are robbing them of developing true self-esteem, which is something one earns for oneself, rather than being handed to them. Those who don't deserve the praise and are aware of it grow up terrified of failure or feeling patronized. Those who don't deserve the praise and are not aware of it grow up insufferable.