Wednesday, November 13, 2024

About Your Comments

First to all of you picky prom-dress pedants, red was close enough for me, but yeah you're right, fuchsia was correct, or the "tertiary red purple" sector on the colour wheel to be ... ahem ... precise. πŸ₯ΈπŸ˜ŽπŸ˜Š


I am but a lowly, male person after all, so please forgive me my colour theory trespasses. πŸ˜‰

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I also thought I would post to all in response to a comment by Prof Pipe Tobacco because it does require a little bit of explication.

He wondered if the prom was for grade 13 grads or for anyone. It is for grads, but read on.

We used to have a grade 13 in Ontario but in no other province. In theory, grade 13 was considered to be roughly equivalent to first year university.

It was most certainly a tough year when I graduated in 1966 for every grade 13 subject required an exam set by the department of education in Toronto — one exam for all students across the province, no matter your teacher or location. This single, end-of-year exam was worth 66% of our final grade if I recall correctly. A year or two previously, the exam had been all of the final grade — 100% of it. Yikes! By the way: not only would your teacher not set the exam, but the person who graded it would be someone doing a 9 to 5, summer job, sitting at a desk in Toronto: presumably a teacher, but not your teacher.

By the time that Shauna was in grade 13, the departmental exams were kaput, and each teacher set their own. I think that was 1991 for her but had already been the case for many years. Our younger daughter, Allyson, six years later, did not officially go through grade 13, but in a sense she really did. They just called those same courses OAC credits: Ontario Academic Credits.

I taught a World Issues course in geography in about my final 10 years of teaching until I retired in 2001. However, by the time I retired, OAC/grade 13 was being phased out. If I had taught for a few more years, the World Issues course would have then been taught in grade 12 or, perhaps, not at all. I will have to ask the kids if it still exists, but I somehow doubt it.

It is worth noting that after this extra year was eliminated in Ontario high schools, Ontario universities also added an extra year to get a general Bachelors degree. Since then it required four years as opposed to three to qualify for a BA or BSc. Up until then, grade 13 had been considered to be the equivalent of a university year.

I took an honours BA, and that had always been a four year degree path, or at least the equivalent 40 credits. I actually completed my course credits in three years: not because I was clever but because my university followed a trimester system back then. I kept going through the summers and finished my BA requirements in three years concluding in 1969. I then took an extra year in a College of Education attached to a different university. I think education streams are now done concurrently with other course work and not as an additional year.

That's another thing to ask Danica after asking about World Issues. Oh, and I do want to know if any Ontario universities use the trimester system? I am not talking about taking summer credits but doing an official third and full-fledged semester in summer.


24 comments:

  1. We did a provincial set exam in Newfoundland at the end of grades 10 and 11. We graduated after Grade 11. I corrected the exams for two years in Biology. I was in university when I was 16 but I did my Science degree in Newfoundland…4 years.

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  2. You are so funny. Colour!
    I attended Jarvis C. I. (early 70s), and it was the first year they allowed girls to wear pants to school. We had the first female principal in Toronto, as well, that year.

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  3. I thought it was cerise! Guess I don't know my colors either.
    I went to prom when I was 16. It was for juniors and seniors only. I was a junior at the time, and my soon to be husband was a senior. I bought my dress at a George Washington's birthday sale--those were big sales back then, like a final winter clearance. I paid $5 for the dress, and my mother's friend altered it. Then I had to but matching shoes. My dress was white, with a ceruse-fushia cummerbund and roses scattered across it, so I bought satin shoes dyed to match. 7.99 for the shoes.

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    1. Wait a minute! What is cerise? My head hurts.

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  4. You're 2 years younger than me. I graduated from UH in 1968 but retired in 2001 like you (but at age 55). Your educational system is different from mine in Hawaii.

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  5. I'd never heard of grade 13 till this but it makes some sense. Loved your color wheel!

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  6. Back in the day, the local community college that I now live 1/4 mile from, gave me a full ride scholarship should I choose to attend their college. But back then they were on a trimester system and still had summer break. Since nearly everything I needed to transfer to the state college, required me to take 2 "trimesters" to equal 1 semester of credit, I opted not to use the scholarship and just paid my way through the state college. I was happy to see that when it was my daughter's time, they had given up on trimesters and had switched to semesters.

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    1. I asked Dani about trimesters at my old uni, but she didn't know. She had thought it one of her possible choices, but I think she has been reconsidering.

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  7. I stand corrected on color πŸ˜„ Thank you for explaining what the 13th year is. I didn't understand it and I didn't ask.

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  8. I'm so glad to learn of cerise, a color I never had learned about...and I'm an artist. See, old dogs can still learn! Now where does hot pink fit into this spectrum. I won't ever understand the various changes in university systems. I think we had quarters, which meant 3 quarters and the summer off. Then I went somewhere else and had semesters, including one during the summer. So glad I graduated and have left all that behind me. Someone asked me what my last job was, and didn't I want to do it again (activity director for seniors). I said the idea of retirement meant no more work, even when not being paid for it.

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    1. Yeah, I dunno about cerise. 😊

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  9. That's interesting about the year 13; I'd never heard of that. These days many high schoolers here do Running Start where they take college courses at the community college. They are then able to get an AA degree which means 2 years at a 4 year university if they so choose. Colleges here are on semester or quarter to my knowledge. I've never known of a trimester school. Some high schools have trimesters though.
    Glad the dress was fuchsia. I thought my eyes were failing me like every other part of my body these days.

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  10. It's all double Dutch to me. Our schools and universities all have three terms, with the academic year starting in September/October. Degree courses are 3/4 years depending on the discipline, though medicine takes longer. Increasingly, graduates go on to post-graduate studies, but we also have a lot of Mickey Mouse degrees which take students nowhere.

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    1. You have forms and such, and they are beyond my comprehension.

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  11. Hey this country, thank you for explaining that teacher

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  12. Wow! That is extremely interesting. I had presumed Grade 13 was universal across all Provinces!!!! And, even more surprised that it has been phased out entirely!!!!! I remember many discussions in graduate school where many of us (Yanks) were suggesting the US should adopt a Grade 13 instead of just 12. And then, Marie Smith said that Newfoundland finished at Grade 11!!!!! So interesting!!!!!

    What are the standards in terms of required grade levels for folks in Nunavut and NWT with the very low density populations?

    Back 30 years ago, I had done some exploring when “Faculty Exchange Programs” were becoming a somewhat popular thing…. to see if I could figure out how to wrangle an exchange with me with someone at a Nunavut or NWT college or university for a year (the common exchange length when that was popular). I had thought it would be wonderfully fun to teach and live in NWT or Nunavut for a year. Unfortunately, the very limited number of colleges (and programs similar to my background) in both territories resulted in no viable match with my background that I could discern to see if I could get it to happen. It would have been wonderful, though if I could have figured it out.

    PipeTobacco

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    1. I am pretty sure or somewhat sure that there was no uni up there. I might have heard about something recently.

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  13. I still also find it interesting in terms of language how Canadians use “Grade 8” as the typical way to describe that grade, wheats in the US the typical way we say the same is “8th Grade”.

    PipeTobacco

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    1. I always think the 8th grade sounds so formal, maybe say it in a James Earl Jones voice.

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  14. “Wheats” was meant to be “where as”….. damnable autocorrect.

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  15. grade 13 is foreign to me. As for color I know what I like together.

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  16. I went to a University in Illinois that used Trimesters. I actually loved it. Schools have changed grades since I went. K-6th was grade school. Jr High was 7 & 8. High school was 9 - 12. We could take advanced placement classes to help boost our college credits.
    Anyway. Good explanation. I had no idea there could have been a grade 13!

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  17. When I wrote the Departmentals, they were 100%. As you probably remember, what happened was that most of the year was spent with the teacher teaching for the Departmental, with few side trips involved. I, too, did a four year teaching oriented degree, but my university only ran summer school for those who wanted to repeat a course for a better grade. I did that once, for a philosophy course I got a C on. Got another C and called it a day. Who is this guy, Plato, anyway?
    My ED is a professor at Ottawa U. She was on maternity leave the year they finally canned Grade 13 and had to go back early to cope with the double cohort. Hey, that was 22 years ago. How do I know that? The baby grandkid had her 21st bday last spring.
    How about 'cerise'?

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  18. Actually, fuchsia is my favorite color. I'm not so sure Danica's gown is quite a fuchsia.. but I don't know for sure.

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