It’s with great pleasure that I also rise today on behalf of the Liberal Party to pay tribute to Education Week. This year’s theme, as mentioned by the minister, is “Many Paths to Learning” and it is a reflection on the different ways that each individual learns.

A one-size-fits-all approach to education never works when it comes to advancing the educational needs of students. There are many skills that a teacher needs to have in order to be successful, but few are more valuable than being able to understand the learning needs of a student. The earlier that a student has a learning plan, the better off the student will be in the long run.

By creating a system around that student, we promote inclusion and we ensure success and we build confidence in the student. By teaching self-worth, however, we enable the student with the ability to learn with a focus. Now I can’t stress that enough. As a math teacher, my curriculum did not identify how to teach self-worth to my students. But if a student or if a school embraces a community approach to developing a whole child, and if the teachers willingly step outside of the confines of their classrooms and their standardized goals, students will benefit by understanding what it means to have self-worth.

I learned early on that in order for a student to succeed, the teacher needs to understand how that student learns. Every student retains information differently. But this year’s slogan, “Many Paths to Learning”, means a lot more to me than that. To me, it means that it takes a whole community to raise a child. A community with many people, from many of life’s pathways engaged in education is a recipe for our next education to have a more enriched life than their parents’ generation.

As I pay tribute today to Education Week, I want to take the opportunity to thank every teacher, every parent and every student who I’ve worked with in my tenure as a teacher for all that they have taught me. I hope that I was able to teach them something as well.

I’ve said it before, Mr. Speaker, and I’ll say it again: We have the best students in Canada here in the Yukon. They deserve the best education in the world.