Dear fellow petitioners, First off, I wish I was brilliant enough to invent words like "Invitating"... but alas, it was just a typo I made in my haste to edit "invitation" to the intended "inviting" :) Thanks to all my friendly fellow petitioners for kindly pointing out that little embarrassing err on my recent "Back to Basics" update! Unfortunately, once posted, I couldn't re-edit...c'est la vie! :) Perhaps you can come up with a definition for invitating :) Just wanted to again extend an invitation to you to a forum that I am organizing. All are welcomed. It's free, so you can just show up at the forum, but if you can let me know ahead of time (mrgranthd@yahoo.ca) that you're coming, that would be great. You can certainly bring your children, teacher friends or anyone you like: Alberta Math and Education Forum: Restoring Excellence and Evidence-Based Teaching in the K-12 Curriculum May 29th, 6pm at Lister Centre (11613 87 Ave), Edmonton, Alberta Free of charge. Open mic for parents. Goals: 1. To bring education officials, educators and parents together to discuss concerns regarding the direction of education in Alberta under the Inspiring Education "21st century learning"/inquiry-based initiative. 2. To review evidence-based teaching practices that have helped generations of students achieve excellence in school and in life. 3. To develop a clear course of action to stop unwanted, unproven and detrimental initiatives in Alberta education by September 2015. Guest speakers: Dr. Robert Craigen - University of Manitoba mathematician, leading the advocacy to re-establish standards of practice in mathematics teaching across Canada. Dr. Vladimir Troitsky - University of Alberta mathematician, leading the advocacy to re-establish excellence in math education in Alberta. Mr. Stuart Wachowicz - Educator, former director of Alberta Curriculum design. I have so far confirmed that Wildrose Education Critic Mark Smith and Liberal Leader Dr. David Swann will be in attendance. So far, I've only received run-arounds from various NDPs (Premier Notley is out of town?). I hope that with 53 candidates, one them would be interested enough in protecting the quality of our children's education to attend the forum. We had voted for them because we had faith that they would be different. I am guessing Deron Bilous would be the new education minister, but he has not responded to my messages. I am also waiting to hear if the ATA and Alberta School board are interested in enough to come. I believe coming to hear us parents out is the least they can do to show that they care about our children. We had achieved some changes last June (after meeting with former Education Minister Jeff Johnson) to re-emphasize the basics in school. It should be time to go all-the way to end this debate once and for all because every year lost to this Inspiring Education experiment is another graduating class with doors closed to them. Kindest regards, Dr. Nhung Tran-Davies