Book Review: Our Canadian Love Story by Linnie von Rekowsky

Our Canadian Love Story. An Immigration Tale. Well, Sort Of. I first heard about Linnie von Rekowsky (now calling herself Linnie von Sky) and her picture books in a store. It wasn’t a book store, so I was intrigued. The store representative heard that I owned an educational business and thought that Rekowsky’s books would…

Paul Romani

Lazy Teaching: An Example

Should Lazy Teaching be Tolerated?! As part of Pear Tree’s ESL classes, we offer homework help to our students to help them understand questions and ideas, and to prepare for an important test. Here’s an example of some homework that one of our students was set by his grade 6 teacher. For me, this is a…

Paul Romani

Children and Careers

Children and Careers Think ‘Passion / Talent’ not ‘Traditional Profession’ Are children too young to think about careers? No! However much you may feel that your child is too young to think about their future career, there is nothing worse than having no aspirations, no idea what you want to study at university (or even…

Paul Romani

Getting Good Marks: How to Memorise Vocabulary

How to Memorise Vocabulary Unfortunately, the majority of tests – from elementary school all the way to university – are about memorisation. Fortunately, using the following study strategy, it’s easy to memorise, and therefore relatively easy to get good marks! As an example, let’s use French as a subject in which we have to memorise some vocabulary…

Paul Romani

How NOT to get a Salary Increase!

There are effective and ineffective ways of getting a salary increase. Unfortunately, for a Wells Fargo worker employee, Tyrel Oates, he has likely chosen the wrong way. Oates emailed both Wells Fargo company head, John Stumpf, and 200,000 of his colleagues, to propose spending $3bn per year of Wells Fargo’s money on giving every employee a $10,000…

Paul Romani

Fed Up (2014) – Wrong About Childhood Obesity

(Childhood) Obesity = Problem with Education. Period. Watching people say and do things that are bad for them throughout a 1.5-hour video is really, really tough. That’s the experience of watching the 2014 documentary, ‘Fed Up’ about childhood obesity. The movie sets about to defend the victims of (childhood) obesity by saying it isn’t their…

Paul Romani

Qualities of a Great Teacher Mentor

In Kimberly Long’s article about ‘Eight Qualities of a Great Teacher Mentor’ (Education Week Teacher), she provides some sensible ideas for being a great teacher mentor. We’ve taken her ideas one step further, though. As someone that’s been fortunate to have had two great mentors, I believe it’s important for mentor teachers to be inspirational. In…

Paul Romani

Advice For Student Teachers & Their Supervisors

Here’s our response to Education Week Teacher magazine’s question about the topic of advice for student teachers and their supervisors. “For both, I would say to set higher expectations. The basic standard of teaching programs and the level of training provided simply isn’t good enough (I know of several supervisors that are very despondent about…

Paul Romani

When a good teaching book falls short

I’m currently reading a book called Five Perspectives on Teaching in Adult and Higher Education (by Daniel D. Pratt). The book was written to enlighten educators to the bias that exists in our way of thinking and, consequently, our teaching approach/philosophy. Pratt’s arguments ring true in so many ways, as really he’s describing sociological norms…

Paul Romani

Video: What is 21st century education?

Pear Tree Education presents its view on what 21st century education should consist of: integrated subjects (through theme-based learning), technology, hands-on learning, collaboration, student-centered learning, creativity / innovation, and entrepreneurship. This is the first in a series of videos discussing these different elements of 21st century education, as well as the problems of implementation such…

Paul Romani