Career Landscape

Posted on April 3, 2012 by admin

Our grade 10 and 11 students are eagerly participating in Career Day this week. It’s something we have done for a long time—long enough for the ground to have actually shifted from under our feet. It has always made sense for students to aspire to traditional professions: lawyer, doctor, engineer. However, the concept of career has changed and fragmented a great deal in the past decade. Young people should no longer expect a long career with a single firm or institution. Change and transience are now the norm. We have also learned a lot from university dropouts, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, that has shattered well-entrenched notions of success.

With the development of the Internet, businesses, governments and learning institutions can now communicate directly with potential clients. Ingenuity and new digital tools have essentially redefined the world of work. Yes, there is still a need for traditional professions. However, even those professions are having to adapt.

As we move forward, noted Harvard educator Tony Wagner in his book, The Global Achievement Gap, stresses that it is now less about preparing for a specific profession and more about teaching and refining the following core skills:

Critical Thinking and Problem Solving
Collaboration across Networks
Agility and Adaptability
Initiative and Entrepreneurialism
Effective Oral and Written Communication
Accessing and Analyzing Information
Curiosity and Imagination

—Christopher Shannon, Headmaster

La brigade verte réalise un mur végétal pour le bien-être de tous!

Posted on April 2, 2012 by admin

La brigade verte est un club composé d’élèves du primaire dont le rôle est de contribuer à la promotion et à la qualité de l’environnement. Elle s’occupe entre autres de recyclage et de l’entretien des plantes et animaux de l’école. Cette année, un projet excitant et innovateur voit le jour: ériger un mur végétal. Il s’agit essentiellement de dresser un panneau vertical constitué de plantes vertes. Avec le soutien de la firme montréalaise Planterra, nos jeunes horticulteurs amateurs se sont vite mis à la tâche comme l’illustrent si bien les photos ci-dessous.

Ce mur «vert», en plus de son caractère esthétique certain, améliore la qualité de l’air intérieur. Non seulement il augmente l’apport d’oxygène dans une salle de classe, mais il procure également un filtre naturel contre les toxines volatiles telles que le gaz carbonique. Tout cela ne peut que favoriser la réceptivité des élèves à l’apprentissage!

D’ici la fin avril, la brigade verte espère exécuter les travaux. Si tout se passe comme prévu, elle envisage même d’étendre le projet à de plus vastes espaces. –Serge Melançon, Directeur adjoint – École primaire

My Exchange to Australia

Posted on March 30, 2012 by admin

I am very proud to say that I had the opportunity to spend six weeks in Melbourne, Australia. This was a great experience. I was welcomed into a very hospitable family who took very good care of me. During my stay, I had the chance of visiting many tourist attractions such as Australia’s Great Ocean Road, Eureka Towers and Victoria Market.

School
I absolutely loved my six weeks at Carey Baptist Grammar School. Carey is a school with very accommodating students and professors. During my stay, I was able to attend classes that are not even available at LCC.. Carey is a school where students can choose the courses they want to do starting at 8th grade. Courses that are required are: English, math, physical education, ethics and religion, science, history (only mandatory for 1 semester) and health. The students are to choose a language and three other courses of these choices: food, media, technology, fashion, economics, woodwork, metal work, French, Mandarin, Spanish, German, Indonesian, theatre, music, arts etc. … At this school there are four semesters and at the end of each term, students have the choice to change their course selections. I think the idea ofletting students choose their courses is a great idea. Students will be much more motivated to do well because they will choose courses that they like. Another thing I liked about this school, is that as soon as you leave a class, you are in the fresh air of the outdoors.

Eureka Tower
Eureka Tower is the tallest building in Melbourne and the second largest in Australia, measuring 297.3 meters. This building includes 556 apartments and is 52.000 square meters of windows. A total of 92 floor which is divided into 3680 stairs, a basement, a 9-story parking area, 84 floors of apartments (some are on the same floor as the parking lot) and an observation deck. It weighs a total of 200,000 tons. I had the chance to get to the 88th floor where there is an observation area. There are glass windows that gave me a spectacular view of the city of Melbourne. On this level, there is an area that is entirely outdoors in the open. It was fantastic. I even had the courage to enter a glass cube which is a kind of elevator that brought me three feet outside of the building. All this was worth doing for the spectacular view of Melbourne.

AFL Match
The Australian Football League is a crucial part of Australian culture. Every Australian boy or girl has a favorite team in this league. Australian football is the most important sport in the opinion of most Australians. This sport is similar to rugby, though they still have their differences. At every football game, there are about 36,000 people attending. Australian football is played in an oval of 171m by 146 m, including 18 players from each team are on the ground at once. I saw a pre-season game between : The Kangaroos North Melbourne, Hawthorn Hawks and the Richmond Tigers. The Kangaroos defeated the Tigers, Hawks beat the Kangaroos and the Tigers beat the Hawks. Each team finished the evening with a victory, which made my experience very interesting.

Melbourne Aquarium
The Melbourne Aquarium is home to over 10,000 animals. And there are many different creatures in the water such as: sharks, penguins, shrimps and even octopus. I really enjoyed seeing all sorts of creatures that I did not even know existed. One can find sea snakes, sea spiders, crabs and all kinds of fish at the aquarium. One part of it that I loved the most was a water tank of 2.2 million liters which had: sharks, jellyfish, crabs and all kinds of rare fish. This is the largest water tank in an aquarium in the world. I literally saw the creatures swimming around me. It was an unforgettable experience.

Melbourne Zoo
The Melbourne Zoo is where I finally saw a kangaroo, a koala and many other animals. The Melbourne Zoo is one of the finest zoos in Australia. It contains over 320 species and about 5,120 animals from Australia and all around the world. I especially liked my visit to the zoo because everything was very well decorated. The scenery was so realistic that you would thing that you were in the jungle by visiting the animals. When I was younger, I used to watch “Phineas and Ferb.” In the show, Phineas had a pet platypus. When I watched this show, I did not even know that a platypus is a real animal. Some years ago I realized that the platypus existed, so I really enjoyed seeing one for the first time in my life.

Vic Market
The Victoria Market is a major attraction in the city of Melbourne. It is also the largest open market in the southern hemisphere measuring a total of 17 acres. This market is named after Queen Victoria who ordered the British Empire from 1837 to 1901. This market is one of the three major markets of Melbourne which is still in place. The other two, the east market and the west market were open before the Victoria market, but closed in the 1960s. At the Victoria market almost anything can be bought: fruits, vegetables, meat, fish, clothing, jewelry, candy, etc.. I can honestly say that being in this market was one of my favorite moments of my trip. First, the atmosphere was incredible, there were many vendors shouting words such as: $3 watermelon, come buy jewelery, best quality clothing, etc. .. Secondly I really appreciated the fact that you could buy everything and at good prices. For this reason, this is where I bought most of the gifts for my family!

Great Ocean Road
The Great Ocean Road is an Australian national heritage that is 243 km long, in southern Australia between the towns of Torquay and Warnambool. This road was built between 1919 and 1932 by soldiers of WWI. This is the largest memorial of WWI. I had the chance to spend three nights and four days there. During my stay, I surfed, I visited a lighthouse and saw the Erskine falls. I liked surfing the most, of all things I did during my stay. Lorne is known for its excellent surfing conditions and I can tell you first hand that the surfing conditions really are great. The Great Ocean Road is by the Indian Ocean, which is very very cold. Therefore, we had to wear wetsuits. My exchange student and I were able to get up several times on the board. Having finished surfing, we jumped in the car and headed for the Erskine falls. The Erskine falls is a 30 m waterfall, in the woods. The falls and the surrounding landscape was really spectacular. When I learned that it had fresh water, I immediately tasted the water. The water was cold and tasted like bottled water, it was quite refreshing. At the end of the day, we were completely exhausted, but most certainly had fun. –Matthew Kaspy ’14

Peru Exchange: New is Cool!

Posted on March 28, 2012 by admin

Ever since arriving in Peru, things are very different—and it all started with the airport. When I arrived, I got a little lost because I couldn’t really understand the Spanish signs telling me where to go. But the airport is definitely not an interesting thing about Peru; there are much better things.

My first day of school was awesome. I met so many new people and wandered around getting lost looking for the classes. Even though people would tell me where to go, I still got lost. It was kind of scary when we drove up to the school. There are huge fences that have wires on the top with certain entrances with security guards watching. It was kind of scary but after a while I got used to it. The school itself is very different from what I’m used to. Everything is outside; only the classrooms are inside. The lockers are like you see in movies, with the locks built into the lockers and set up outdoors. On my first day for some reason the benches around the school intrigued me. The benches are made out of big pieces of wood with a straw cover on top of them. It looks really cool.

The first weekend, Eloise, Camila (her exchange student), Matias (my exchange student) and I went to a friend’s beach house, which was also like the movies. We drove on a dirt road overlooking a big cliff and then arrived at this garage. We walked down stairs for five minutes and then we got to this amazing house, which was completely built into the rocks and looked awesome! The house had an amazing view of the bay with really awesome boats anchored in the middle with the desert in the background. I didn’t really understand why there was a desert behind but it was just huge mountains of sand. Spending the weekend at this home was a real luxury.

During the first real week at school I learned how to get around and made many friends. The kids are really nice here. The school day is a little different from my usual routine. I wake up at 6:00 am to make it to school by 7:00 am. Classes start at 7:30. We have 40 minutes for lunch and a 25-minute break at 9:30. School ends at 2:40 pm. It makes our daily schedule at LCC look so much better. The one thing I am excited for is to getting back to waking up late, or at least 7:00 am at home.

The fruit here is probably my favourite thing. They have awesome smoothies and I have one or a glass of fresh squeezed orange juice every morning. Sometimes I go to Wong’s, which you can’t compare to any grocery store because it is too awesome. They sell 1 litre of fresh squeezed orange juice for 6.50 solos, which is about $2.30 (CDN). I love just eating fruit, and the mango is awesome! The school sells food too. The price is reasonable and it’s great! Their juice boxes are better than our Tropicana!

The two other weekends that I have been here, I’ve gone to the host family’s beach house. It is also amazing and very relaxing. I tried windsurfing at the beach. One weekend the wind was very strong so I didn’t have much success and the second weekend there was not enough wind. On the way to the beach there is a shop that sells small little breads (I’m not really sure how to describe them). They are very good and cost 2 solos for 10; not even $1 (CDN). They’re made in wood burning pizza ovens and smell amazing. There are long lines for the bread because everyone stops even though it is in the middle of nowhere. The only thing they sell is the bread, Coca Cola, and Inca Kola. In my opinion, Inca Kola really isn’t that good. To me, it tastes a lot like very bad bubble gum.

Yesterday, I went on a community service activity after school to this building that I think Markham owns. They are going to send students there to teach the young kids after school and tutor them. The students are still painting the building. I went yesterday to help out and we ended up tutoring a 9-year-old child. I was with a friend from school and she was teaching him, but because I don’t really speak Spanish well, I couldn’t really talk with him. He was a very fun little kid though who loved playing soccer, or this game where you catch the ball and try to throw it at someone (very silly game).

Tomorrow all of the exchanges and some S5s (grade 11s) and also the P6s (grade 6s) are going to Lunahuana. It is a four-day trip that’s a lot like the LCC grade 7 Nominingue trip. I am going as a counselor, which will be fun. I am very excited to meet the kids. We will be going rafting, Incateering, climbing, horseback riding, and hiking. It should be great.

My Spanish has improved but I still can’t understand everything and can’t speak very well. I know a few important things to make sure I can get home or get food. It’s coming along slowly. Most of the time at the beach everyone speaks Spanish so I try my best to understand but they speak very fast so it’s a challenge.

About a week ago one of my friends from Canada, Kristen, was in Peru visiting friends and family because she used to go to school here. She took me to her old school which was an American international school called Roosevelt. I was surprised to find out that even the social life was in English. It was nice to have a break from all the Spanish and hear some American accents. It is very tough to not understand anything that most people are saying, I remember the first week; by the end of the day I needed a break and wanted to go to bed early because I was looking forward to dreaming in English.

I made some friends from the American school and hopefully before I leave I can get together with them. It was very nice to see Kristen because she gave me a great tour of the city and also took me to some places I never would have seen.

So far Peru has been one of the coolest trips of my life and I’m excited to see what happens next, or what happens at Lunahuana. –Malich Altman ’14

An Electrifying Outing for Science Students

Posted on March 23, 2012 by admin

On Friday, March 2, 2012, the grade 10 classes visited the Électrium, Hydro-Québec’s Electricity Interpretation Centre, where we applied what we had been studying in class to the real world. This experience was not only interesting and thought provoking but entertaining and interactive as well. The visit was very rewarding because it allowed us to take our class work to the next step and visualize the concepts of our studies. –Katrina Borodenko ’13