Teacher’s Voice

Some Lessons Learnt from Mentoring Newcomers

By MINA WONG - August 24 2024

Through helping internationally trained teachers with employment, Mina’s learned a bit more about newcomers’ challenges with jobs, career plans, and stressors such as culture shock. She thinks new Canadians should be encouraged to share these difficulties with mentors, so that they can build strategies together toward better integration. Furthermore, she believes mentoring programs for immigrant jobseekers should be supported, because these relationships foster trust, respect, collaboration, discovery, success, and prosperity – in every community wherever new Canadians are found.

Finding Serenity in Toronto

By MINA WONG - July 27 2024

When COVID restrictions were lifting a year ago, my 2 AM arrival at Toronto’s airport was both confusing and exhilarating: Pearson was an enormous transport base where rules

The Months of Summer

By MINA WONG - July 14 2024

Most people identify summer as school holidays. While many students and teachers take the warmest months off, here are three teachers’ anecdotes of their breaks before September.

What Troy Van Learned from His Mother’s Legacy

By MINA WONG - June 20 2024

Troy Van always had questions about his mother’s past, partly because of Delia’s reticence about it. When she passed away two years ago, new details about her emerged from different sources that totally surprised Troy. A history teacher, he’d built his success on honesty and credibility. In the end, if contradictions in Delia’s life taught Troy a lot about himself, he also learned to accept her choices for survival in a turbulent world.

Thinking about Exams

By MINA WONG - May 17 2024

Some colleagues and I find exams to be stressful experiences for college students who usually cram for them. Given viable options to traditional midterm and final exams, we want to try other learning components for the same marks. We’ve shared with each other reasons for choosing learning over testing. Over time, we’ve also seen administration’s interest in making exams optional.

“Do no harm” and “Don’t make things worse”

By MINA WONG - April 22 2024

Over time, more college students (now adults) have involved parents, guardians, and even legal counsel when resolving academic concerns with their teachers. Many colleagues and I find these encounters contrary to adult autonomy, but while we uphold self-advocacy and self-direction, some colleagues and I also feel that instead of rejecting third parties, we should do no harm, and not make things worse even in ambiguous situations.

The story of Ho-lap Sam, lifelong learner

By MINA WONG - March 21 2024

A lifelong learner’s granddaughter tells the colorful story of his love of learning, every day of his life, everywhere he lived.