If you are an Ottawa parent, ensuring your kids get a strong education — an education that positions them to do well in college, university, and the workplace — is simultaneously one of the most important and most difficult challenges to navigate.
A good education will not only help your child make connections and launch a lucrative career, it will also improve their quality of life by helping them find rewarding, fulfilling work that is about more than just a paycheque and the bottom line.
While Ontario’s education system is one of the best in the world, recent government cuts mean that fewer teachers with fewer resources are being asked to teach more kids. For many parents, this is cause for serious concern. In times such as these, how can you ensure your child learns as much as possible at school?
As teachers have to contend with much larger workloads, parents will need to be more strategic about providing extracurricular support for their children.
This may mean supplementing their day-to-day education with educational activities and groups in the evenings and on weekends (language-learning clubs, for example), or it could mean taking a more active role in their education yourself.
students may find enrichment in diversifying their learning experiences, be it through participating in sports activities or engaging with educational groups outside of traditional classroom hours. By introducing sports visual aids to your students, educators can infuse excitement and relevance into their lessons, fostering deeper understanding and retention of academic concepts.
Either way, if your kids are getting less help in the classroom they are going to need to make those losses up elsewhere. While you don’t want to overcompensate by burdening them with too many extracurriculars, it is important to find the right balance that gives them the help they need.
The first effect of the class size increases hitting many Ottawa primary and secondary schools will be less one-on-one time between teachers and students. If teachers need to meet the needs of thirty students instead of twenty-five, it’s going to mean they have less time to spend with struggling kids.
One critical area where hands-on help is often needed is mathematics. Math is a notoriously difficult subject for many students, and if you have a child struggling with arithmetic, algebra, or calculus, you may need to take extra measures to ensure they don’t get left behind.
Tutoring can play an extremely helpful role in giving kids who are having a hard time with the curriculum a chance to get tailored support. But if you decide to look for a math tutor in Ottawa make sure to find an agency that understands the Ontario curriculum and can provide targeted tutoring that will complement what your child is studying in school.
For so many reasons, Ottawa is a wonderful place to raise a family. But as cuts to the provincial education budget start to take their toll, many parents will doubtless be wondering what they can do to make sure their kids don’t fall behind in the Ottawa school system.
Ensuring kids have the support they need to learn is crucial, so stepping up your own involvement in their education — and hiring tutors who can fill in the gaps when they’re struggling — is essential if you want to set them up for a bright future.
