The trees in High Park are starting to wear a few rust-coloured leaves. The occasional chilly evening forces us to reach into the back of our closet for a jacket. And whenever you turn on the radio, you’re hit with commercials for back-to-school savings. That’s right – it’s almost September again, the beginning of another traditional school year.

A school should be a community. It should be a place where students can go to feel empowered, intellectually stimulated and supported. It should be a place to share your hopes and aspirations for the future, and then see that future slowly come together as you progress through your studies. It should be a place to share knowledge (and a few jokes) with peers, receive sage advice from advisors, work through problems and develop solutions.

Every student thinks differently, learns differently and experiences their time at high school differently. Some students are happy to drive through high school in the leisurely right-hand lane, savouring every last day of their education, friend groups and semi-structured lives.

Others, meanwhile, are itching to get on with it. Armed with tenacity, eagerness and (some might say) impatience, these students want to fast-track their high school education to level up quicker, graduate quicker, and throw their university applications to the top of the pile.

There’s a common misconception among some students that high school is like a sports match; if you fail to score the first time around, there’s nothing you can do about it. This line of thinking runs contrary to the fundamental goal of education. The aim of a high school education isn’t to label you with a mark – it is to nurture you with the opportunities you require to retain information, hone essential skills and envision your personal success for the future.

“Survival” might be a strong word for working your way through summer school. Yes, there are uphill challenges with attending high school courses over the traditional summer break. (How are you expected to study when the weather’s this nice!?). But summer school also carries its fair share of advantages. It allows students to work ahead in their courses for an easier upcoming academic year, retake courses for a better grade on their transcript, and develop an effective hedge against summer learning loss.

For students, the “peak-end effect” kicks in around this time of year. These final, waning moments of the traditional school year influence how you view your past accomplishments – and set the stage for your future motivation.
Our goal in this article is to ensure that you view the past school year positively. We want you to practice constructive self-reflection. We want you to practice effective present strategies for navigating the end of the school year. And lastly, we encourage you to look bravely toward the future as you complete graduation requirements in Ontario.

As you might have gathered in your physics or chemistry courses, energy is governed by laws of thermodynamics. And the first of those laws states that energy cannot be created or destroyed – only transferred.
The same principle applies (albeit with some creative license) to your studies. You are an isolated system, possessing a finite amount of energy in the form of academic focus and stamina. You can transfer that energy to your schoolwork, and indeed you should! But you have to give yourself the time and space to regain your energy elsewhere: with friends, family, quiet time, mindful practices, sleep and extracurricular hobbies. Or else you run the risk of depleting your energy. You run the risk of burning out.

In this article, we explore what CEGEP is, how it poses a challenge to some Quebec students, and what OES can do to help students circumvent the non-standardized system and enter university sooner.

Summer is so close you can practically taste the ice cream dripping down your wrist. But before we hit the beaches, cottages, outdoor concerts and family trips, there’s just one pressing item on the docket: finishing the school year.
Sometimes, it’s a cruel by-product of circumstance that the last few weeks of a course are the hardest. You have massive final exams to study for, final assignments to turn in and heavily weighted group projects to execute. At the same time, you feel like you’re running on fumes.

It’s sort of a cliched rite of passage to warn outgoing high school students about how challenging university is. “Buckle up, because university math might as well be taught in Greek,” some might say. And while that’s clearly an over-exaggeration meant to scare incoming frosh, there’s some grain of truth in it.