Hello
My name is Shawna Dyer, and I am in grade eleven at Burnaby South Secondary School. The requirements for the province-wide Graduation Transitions have recently been brought to my attention. I have attended the two classes for Transitions so far this year, but I didn’t fully understand what it was until last week when I started to ask questions.
As of next year, students have to complete one hundred and fifty minutes of physical activity a week. This year’s grade twelve students only have to complete “at least eighty hours of physical activity”. Students are being asked to produce some means of proof (in addition to an activity log) such as pictures, wrist bands, receipts from physical activity classes and attendance records from those classes. We are also being asked to do at least thirty hours (or eighty, which is optional) of work experience. This is meant to put students in a working situation that will introduce them to the environment that they are directing their careers towards. The third prerequisite is to complete worksheets about career goals, nutrition knowledge and their plan for post-secondary education. In grade twelve, interviews take place with a teacher where the student explains what their career path is. This gives students four credits and is required for high school graduation.
The examples of “proof” of physical activity that were given confuse me. We are being asked to produce receipts for classes that we have paid for. The Transition teacher at Burnaby South recommended that I take a yoga class, or something similar. Does this meet the Ministries guidelines regarding payment for education? I asked the teacher in charge of Transitions at my school if walking home from school counts as physical activity. She told me that for grade twelve’s this year she is allowing that to count for half of the eighty hours required, and the other forty must come from something else. School fees are supposed to be optional, but this isn’t being presented as an option to me. There are a lot of students who are very focused on their academic studies and many have jobs. Chances are that they don’t have two and a half hours to spare every week for the required physical activity. This is easy for students who are already participating in extracurricular sports like soccer, but it’s much more difficult for everyone else. Are extracurricular activities required for graduation? My parents weren’t too pleased when I decided that I might have to run around the school track at lunchtime in order to meet the requirements; but then I would miss eating my lunch and that contradicts what I learned in my nutrition class.
During the actual Transition classes we have to do what is called a “Focus Area Assignment”. This, done during three classes in the year, is a series of worksheets about a student’s career goals, financial plan for post-secondary education and health and nutrition. These worksheets are very similar to the booklets we filled out in CAPP (Career and Personal Planning) in grade eight and nine. We also covered these topics in more detail in the now required grade ten course, “Planning 10”. In this course we created a financial plan, learned about eating healthily, learned about emotional stress, what courses we needed for our chosen career and more. What happened to all of that work and effort? I thought that the point of having that class all year in grade ten was so that we wouldn’t have to do it again. I have no idea what career I want to have when I’m older which is quite common for people my age. We are young, and (hopefully) only a small fraction of the way into our lives. Why must we be forced to decide what we want to do for the rest of our lives right now?
The third part of Graduation Transitions is Work Experience. Students are required to do at least thirty hours of it, and have the option of doing eighty hours which earns us four credits and a spare block in grade twelve. The idea of this is to put students in the environment of their career path and give them an idea of what the job actually is. The sad reality is that most students end up filing papers and running small errands instead of helping with the actual job. Companies don’t have the time to train us in the short time that we are there to help out, and so we get stuck doing small menial tasks that don’t teach what the job is about. A lot of students already have jobs but the teachers who run this try to get us to go somewhere else for different opportunities. I understand the whole “experience the environment” thing, but I know that I wouldn’t want to miss school or study time for this. I used hours from my part time job, but other students who are academically oriented or do other extracurricular activities don’t have time for work experience.
After all of that work, students have to present their career plans to a teacher in an interview. This is done in grade twelve during the Transition classes for grade eleven. Graduation Transitions takes a lot of time and effort. I feel that our time would be better spent studying and preparing for our provincial exams at the end of the year. As it is, high school graduation has so many requirements without Transitions; it just adds unnecessarily to the workload. Students should not be required to pay for physical activity classes in order to graduate, and I don’t feel that it’s reasonable to ask for proof of this. We have already completed all of the worksheets in Planning 10, which was a class that I thought was created for the purpose of planning out our career path and transitioning into post secondary school. I find doing it all again repetitive. Students often have busy lives filled with study time and extracurricular activities, and Transitions takes up a lot of time. Grade eleven and twelve are stressful years and Graduation Transitions just add to that stress. It is not recognized in post secondary institutions so I don’t understand why it is required to graduate. I believe that Graduation Transitions should be an optional course.
Sincerely,
Shawna Dyer