Students launch petition against Quadmester Model adopted by Toronto District School Board

BY PAUL JUNOR

It was reported that the TDSB sent a letter home to parents indicating that secondary students will be following a quadmester model for the 2021-22 school year. The TDSB asserts that the adoption of two courses per quad was based on direction from the Ministry of Education.

Students would take two credit courses from September to mid-November, mid-November to January, February to mid-April and mid-April to June. On the other hand, students who will be adopting adult day schools will maintain the same schedule as they did for the 2021-21 school year.

The letter from TDSB states, “We will need to remain flexible and nimble and responsive to the direction provided by the Ministry of Education and Toronto Public Health. At the current time, TDSB schools are planning the adaptive model in September, pending the Ministry of Education and Toronto Public Health direction.”

There has been much opposition to this quadmester model as was revealed in a report by Sabrina Jonas. Two Grade 11 students: Jason Wong and Hannah Cohen of Earl Haig spoke about the challenges they faced trying to learn their course material in a compressed six weeks schedule. Wong states, “Let’s assume we have two academic subjects at once-math and biology. That’s a lot of work and time spent on those subjects. When we’re working on that, we are working around the clock memorizing that material.”

He recalled that many students have resorted to cramming to ensure that they learn the content well enough and the pressure of this impacts students’ sleep schedules and their mental health. Jason notes, “We are not robots; we want our lives back.”

Ryan Bird, TDSB spokesperson, sympathizes with what students have to deal with. “We realize for some, the quadmester model is not great, we know that. However, we’re taking direction from the Ministry of Education. It is done to ensure that the safety and security of students remains a priority. We continue to explore ways to improve it. Our hope, however, is that with vaccinations over the summer and those numbers hopefully going up, that we are going to be as close as possible come September.”

Cohen is not happy with the quadmester model because it has had a major impact on the balance that students should be maintaining between their social life and education that would normally occur in regular semesters.  She states, “I hate this quadmester model because I love learning and this model strips us students of that.”

She has launched a petition titled “TDSB Families Fight Back Against Quads” and by the end of Friday, May 14^th she had garnered 1,800 signatures. The petition requests that the TDSB resort back to a semester model for the 2021-22 school year. It states, “We are not able to properly learn and digest the information provided in our courses in such a brief period of time…Students are not learning; we are just memorizing information.”

Monika Frenzy, who works in education as a consultant in Ottawa agrees because it is “Learning at warp speed, because it really puts an enormous amount of pressure on the students to absorb a lot of content very quickly.”