School

DURHAM, N.H. – Living in an area where amenities of daily life – groceries, playgrounds, post offices, libraries and restaurants – are within walking distance promotes healthy lifestyles and has positive implications for the environment, research has established. Now, new research from the University of New Hampshire has linked walkable neighborhoods with an increase in social benefits as well.

"We found that neighborhoods that are more walkable had higher levels of social capital such as trust among neighbors and participation in community events," says Shannon Rogers, lead author of the study and a Ph.D. candidate in UNH's Natural Resources and Earth System Science (NRESS) program. She adds that those who have higher levels of positive social capital have been shown to have a higher quality of life through better health and economic opportunities, among other things.

We just spent 2 days driving from Ottawa to Nova Scotia. We've been doing the annual trip since moving to Ottawa 12 years ago, but normally have been doing it in 1 day. It is a brutal 16 hour drive doing it that way, but in exchange you get 2 extra days of vacation - so it is a toss up. But we've recently decided that we are better off taking our time to smell the roses, as it were. Rather than a grueling day beginning at 5am, we can casually get up at 7 and be on the road by 8, then retire for the day around supper time. And in the process, spend more time with the boys turning it into a wonderful educational experience.

We have always been big proponents of home-schooling, even if we did end up sending our kids to Public School. There is a really excellent Public School around the corner from our house, with an extremely diverse ethnic mix, so we decided in the end that it was most important to expose our kids to that. Besides, home-schooling can still be done even when the kids are in Public School, and learning should not end when the bell rings at the end of the day. We've always taken every opportunity to turn what we are doing into an educational experience for the boys, and that is no different on a long 2 day road trip. Here are some of the things they learned ...

Our kids are now 5 and 7 years old, and given that kids start school at age 4 in Ontario have been in the system now for a few years. Here in a Ontario we have a very different system from where I grew up - small town Nova Scotia. I am (very proudly) from a small town of 5000 to 6000 people, and we had 3 schools in town : Elementary, Middle, and High. There was no choice - you went to each one in turn when you were the appropriate age. Everyone knew all the other kids their age, and at the end of it all our grad class was about 70 students.

It is quite different here in Ontario, and honestly, I like it better when there was no choice. It bothers me when I see people here so (overly) concerned about which school is the "best", and trying to get their kids into it. In my former work place I used to see it quite often - it was almost a frenzy. People checking out school ratings and going through some truly heroic scheduling-acrobatics to get their kids into the "right" school. I see it as one of those circumstances where more choice is not necessarily a good thing.