 The most important thing with the rigorous and relevant curriculum is for our teachers to look at the curriculum through the eyes of the student. And they have to give those kids those tools and those connections so that it becomes ingrained in them. That it isn't something that they're just going to remember overnight and then lose it the next day. This is something that they have to make meaningful to the kids and relevant so that when they do leave here there's lots of things that they can transfer to make it a part of their everyday life. I think that rigorous and relevant curriculum is when students are engaged at a level that they understand why they're learning what they're learning and they want to learn it. And so they devote a lot more of their energy and their time into doing so. You know, I think if we can build relationships with our students with one another, it's really easy to make the curriculum relevant because we know about their lives and we can actually build specific examples into what we're looking at. As the educational leader of the school, I feel it's my responsibility to make sure that I give our teachers the best opportunity for them to be the best teachers that they can be in their classroom. If they can see the big picture, they can see how classes connect and how skills learned in different classes can be used in different situations. They can apply that to real life, they can apply it to their learning and they can apply it to their future in society. I distinctly remember learning the term positive transfer, which I take to mean being able to take a skill that you learned and apply it in a different but similar scenario between my French studies and my English studies. We started with the Shakespearean masterpiece Hamlet and going through the text I found particular francophone verbs that I was able to recognize and thus take my experience from that and possibly apply it and figure out what the words meant. I get to live in a world in Comtec where I deliver a unique skill set to students in audio and video production and after they've become comfortable with that skill set, they're always anxious to bring it into their other classes, be it a social studies video on the French Revolution or a French weather video. There are also a lot of opportunities that are bigger than us and we need to provide avenues and access to those things for our students by bringing people in. Schooling just doesn't have to happen in a high school. It could happen outside of the walls of a school and that's where the importance of community comes in. We have to rely on our communities and members of stakeholders in our schools to be a part of that educational journey for our students and be able to take advantage of those experts that are outside of the schools. Having outside experts come to the high school as part of the health care program is really beneficial because at the end of every day we had an LPN come and teach us and then also we had the opportunity to do all of our clinical and practicum hours at the hospital and long-term care facilities. It was a great experience to not only have the high school teacher teach us part of the health care program but also have those other resources available to us. For the students I think it's important that they see we are involved in feeling they're important to us, showing them that they have value and that we're excited to be part of their learning and we're excited to be around them and that we can give back to them and help them to grow and hopefully down the road they get back to us and that's how the community works. One thing I found interesting was we had teachers come to our school from all over the province. One of the things they did was they came to our Math 10, Physette 10 class and kind of asked the students what they got out of it and the interesting thing came up over and over again was the community and sometimes you don't realize as a teacher how important that is to students but it really matters. To me it's important for learning to be relevant so that I'm able to use it in my future studies in my everyday life and I feel that if they're not relevant to you then in class no one's going to put their energy into something that's not going to benefit them in the future. When a student enjoys what they're doing they're engaged in their education they're engaged in the projects that they're doing they see a pathway that they're following they see an end result to it they get passionate about it they really enjoy working and learning.