In School: Our Kids, Our Teachers, Our Classrooms - Tapa dura

ks about our schools. Newspaper editorials worry about slipping educational standards. Business complains about poor training for the work force. Television programs talk about violence in school halls. Educational reports study problems and issue strategic documents. Parents attend parent-teacher interviews twice a year. Yet nobody – except for the teachers and the kids – seems to know what really goes on there.

Ken Dryden decided to find out. From September 1993 until June 1994, he attended a high school, folding his 6'4" frame as inconspicuously as possible into a seat at the back of the room, moving from class to class when the bell rang. He watched, while everyone got used to his presence, and he took notes.

The result is a documentary about the life of a typical Canadian school – in this case a Mississauga, Ontario, high school with a wide range of students drawn from sixty countries. We follow a number of these students, getting to know a dozen o

Ken Dryden is a former NHL hockey player and lawyer who is now a full-time writer. His books include The Game (nominated for a Governor General’s Award), Home Game (with Roy MacGregor), and The Moved and the Shaken. In the 1980s he was Youth Commissioner for Ontario. He lives in Toronto.