1 out of 5 experience; 5 out of 5 affected

This is the latest in a series of #UWCommunity weekly features that highlight Waterloo in the community.

1 in 5 Canadians will experience mental illness in their lifetime, however the majority of Canadians will be affected at some point throughout their lifetimes.  Whether this be through a family member, a friend, a colleague or themselves mental illness touches us all. 

In order to spread awareness about the staggering effect of mental illness, where to find help, as well as provide an opportunity for people to improve their mental health, the Health Services Rec & Leisure Team, in association with Good2Talk, Feds Diversity Education Team, Kappa Kappa Gamma, Party Smart, Counselling Services, and Stand Up to Stigma ran Spin for Mental Health, an event promoting the benefits of physical activity to mental wellbeing.

Through Spin for Mental Health students, staff, faculty, signed up to ride stationary bicycles for a set period of time. According to Victoria Gentile, Team Leader of the Rec & Leisure team, “This event is about bringing awareness to mental health issues and showing visible support. We are using the Student Life Centre, Great Hall and having a lot of success. People are asking how to get involved, dropping in to participate on the bikes, and the event has increased the visible support on campus for Mental Health and Mental Illness.”

The UWaterloo community has celebrated Mental Health Wellness for the past 6 years.  Each year awareness and participation has grown to involve more of the campus and community and it is clear the message is resonating.  The trademark orange T-shirts have either “Good2Talk”, a post-secondary student helpline available to Ontario students, or “1 In 5 Ask me” written on the back and are designed to inspire conversation about mental health and how it affects all Canadians.  

As Fahad Al Zaman, a First Year Economics student talks about his experience, “Counselling Services helped to diagnose me with ADHD, they have been nothing but supportive, friendly and caring. I suggest everyone take part in Mental Health Wellness Day and learn more about themselves.” Registered Dietician Sandy Ace says “So many students come to me and feel ashamed of having a mental illness, and days like today help to show them they are supported.” 

When UWaterloo community members gather together and wear the orange t-shirt, they show solidarity for the friends, family members, and colleagues living with mental illness.   Visit Mental Health Wellness Day to learn more.

Back to top

Report breaks down the concept of a Fall Break

Vice-President, Academic & Provost Ian Orchard provided a report on the consideration of a Fall Break at Waterloo to Senate at its meeting on Monday, The report, commissioned by Orchard's provostial predecessor Geoff McBoyle, was written by the Fall Break Task Force.

"The Task Force was not asked to take a position on whether there would be a Fall Break, but if there was one, what impacts there would be," Orchard told senators on Monday. "

The task force, chaired by Associate Vice-President, Academic Mario Coniglio, includes representation from the Registrar’s Office, the Student Success Office, the Associate Provost, Students’ office, the Federation of Students, the Graduate Students Association, the Faculty Association of the University of Waterloo (FAUW), and the Graduate Studies Office.

The report was crafted in response to the "recently revitalized" discussion of a Fall Break at Waterloo in anticipation of a student referendum (a campaign is currently underway), and Wilfrid Laurier University's recent adoption of a break, which took place following Thanksgiving last week, was highlighted as an influence.

In terms of a rationale for the proposed Fall Break, the report notes that 14 Ontario universities currently have a break of some kind in the fall term, varying in length from 2 to 5 days, and that "promotion of sound mental health is widely claimed as the rationale for installing a Fall Break, although hard data to support this assertion is lacking." At Monday's Senate meeting, Coniglio was quick to point out that "anything we do to relieve stress is a good thing."

The report outlines a number of guiding principles, constraints, and impacts that should be considered as the discussion of a Fall Break continues, noting that there are a number of trade-offs that will have to be made in arranging any potential break.

"The primary challenge to arranging a Fall Break is finding sufficient space to schedule: 60 teaching days, a minimum of 2 pre-exam study days, and a minimum of 12 exam days while finishing by December 22," the report says. "This challenge seems relatively easy to accomplish most years but is complicated by the occasional late Labour Day holiday."

Among the more feasible options would be starting classes two days earlier, revamping Orientation Week so that classes could start on the Thursday and Friday of the first week of school. Move-in days could occur earlier, but the Task Force considered scheduling Orientation Week activities to begin before the Labour Day weekend to be "problematical on several fronts." At the other end of the term, exam time, a Saturday teaching day might have to be scheduled during the last week of classes, or exams might have to be scheduled on the first Sunday of the exam period. Any option that reduced the number of pre-exam study days would "offset any benefit from a Fall Break" and was not considered feasible. Pushing the exam period's end to December 23 was considered feasible, but would impact the university community in a number of ways and was not a "favoured approach." The possibility of Sunday exams is already an option under current exam regulations, but is also not a preferred option.

Among the report's recommendations:

• That the following terms of reference be applied to any mid-term break at the University, including the existing Winter Reading Week:

"A mid-term break (e.g. Winter Reading Week) is intended to act as a pause for on-campus students to reflect upon and catch up on their term's work to date and, as necessary, prepare for any upcoming mid-term assignments and assessments.

During this pause, there are to be no scheduled meetings for students (e.g., classes, labs, tutorials, seminars, exams). While exceptions may exist (e.g., co-operative employment interviews, Pharmacy's clinical rotations, PhD comprehensive exams, graduate thesis defences), the pause applies to meetings involving both undergraduate and graduate students.

Deadlines for student submissions should not be scheduled during the break. Student services, such as Health Services, Counselling Services, the library, residences, etc. are expected to continue working at full capacity."

• Consult openly and thoroughly with all stakeholder groups, as a Fall Break would impact much of the university community. Groups to be engaged include undergraduate students, graduate students, faculty and staff associations, administrative officers, student support services, other institutions that Waterloo partners with, and faculty councils.
• If a Fall Break is adopted, the following are recommended:
  • That the break be two days in length
  • That a change to the start date of classes be considered
  • That the Fall Break be adopted on a trial basis for a period of 2 or 3 years
  • That wellness education and awareness-building initiatives be further developed.

Any next steps to be taken are largely dependent on the outcome of the upcoming student referendum on a proposed Fall Break, which is set to take place from November 4 to 6. If the referendum results are binding, the Fall Break Task Force will determine the sorts of questions needed before broad campus-wide consultations are to begin. According to Coniglio, this will happen in a timely fashion.

Back to top

Latest LITE grant winners announced

"In collaboration with the Office of the Associate Vice President, Academic, the Centre for Teaching Excellence is pleased to announce that nine new LITE Seed Grant projects have begun this fall," writes the Centre for Teaching Excellence's Julie Timmermans. "Congratulations to the recipients!"

The funded projects are:

• Enhancing cultural awareness skills to provide best practices for Environment and Business course instructors and support staff, Joanne Adair and Jennifer Lynes, School of Environment, Enterprise and Development
• Does introducing more user-friendly software produce more integrated learning in climate modelling? Chris Fletcher, Geography and Environmental Management
• ePortfolios for Career, Reflection, and Competency Integration, Jill Tomasson Goodwin, Drama and Speech Communication; Katherine Lithgow, Centre for Teaching Excellence
• The Military Project: Mapping Canada’s World War Experience, Geoffrey Hayes, History; Heather Moran, Environment; Eva Dodsworth, Geospatial Centre
• Unifying Experiences: Learner and instructor approaches and reactions to ePortfolio usage in higher education, Katherine Lithgow, Kyle Scholz, and Crystal Tse; Centre for Teaching Excellence
• Leveling the Playing Field for Vulnerable Students: A Test of the Effectiveness of Skills Tutorials, Christine Logel; Renison, Social Development Studies
• Breaking Down Barriers: A Student-Led Conference in Interdisciplinary Collaboration, Kathryn S. Plaisance, Georgia Lamarre, Akanksha Madan, and Shane Morganstein; Knowledge Integration
• Improving Students' Deep Learning through Interpolated Testing and Distributed Practice in Waterloo's Online Learning Environment, Evan Risko, Jonathan Fugelsang, Jennifer A. Stolz, and Nathaniel Barr; Psychology
• Geroline-Students' learning trajectories in language courses on campus and online, Mathias Schulze, Germanic and Slavic Studies; Kyle Scholz, Centre for Teaching Excellence; Sara Marsh, Germanic and Slavic Studies

The LITE Grants are intended to provide support for experimenting with and investigating innovative approaches to enhancing teaching that aim to foster deep student learning at the university.

Two kinds of grants are available: LITE Seed Grants for projects up to $5,000, and LITE Full Grants for projects up to $30,000. Both grant formats emphasize the contribution of the projects to Waterloo's learning community.  The next LITE Seed Grant deadline is February 1^st. 

For more information about the Grants and to browse descriptions of completed and current projects, please visit the LITE Grant website .

Anyone considering applying for a grant is invited to contact Dr. Julie Timmermans at the Centre for Teaching Excellence via email or by calling extension 32940.

Back to top

Wednesday's notes

Fore! The Waterloo Warriors golf teams continued their winning ways at the OUA Championships in Oshawa yesterday with both teams claiming medals. The men's team won individual and team gold while the women's side finished 2nd overall as a team. On the men's side, Gajan Sivabalasingham came first and won gold, and on the women's side the team claimed the OUA silver, with Devon Rizzo coming in fourth.

In addition to this success on the fairway, the men's baseball team had their best finish ever by claiming the OUA silver medal on Sunday.

The Federation of Students is hosting its Annual General Meeting today at 2:00 p.m. in the SLC Great Hall. The agenda is online. Students will be asked to vote on significant motions such as changes to bylaws, accessibility issues, and the use of the space in the SLC Marketplace.

Friends and colleagues of Ray Butterworth in the Math Faculty Computing Facility (MFCF) are invited to a retirement open house in his honour on Monday, November 3 from 3:30 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. in DC1301. Ray is retiring after more than 35 years with MFCF. Please RSVP to Patricia Robinson-Angel by Monday, October 27 via email or by calling extension 35472.

Waterloo student social startup Hydrated World is in the midst of a Kickstarter campaign, having beat its funding threshold of $10,000 by over $1,000 with less than two days remaining. Hydrated World is an apparel company founded by mechanical engineering and enterprise co-op students Aleks Poldma and Spencer Kelly that that donates money to the Safe Water Project in Africa for every fifth item sold. The team has won a Norman Esch Enterprise Co-op Award and the Nicol Entrepreneurial award. Backers can pledge money in return for bracelets, shirts, hats, sweatshirts, and water project "sustainability credits."

The physicist who successfully demonstrated quantum entanglement, a defining moment in modern physics, will give a free public lecture at the Institute for Quantum Computing at the University of Waterloo on Thursday.

Professor Alain Aspect from Institut d'Optique in France is internationally recognized for performing a series of experiments in 1982 that demonstrated that one of the strangest predictions of quantum mechanics— quantum entanglement—was true. This discovery sparked the second quantum revolution and directly led to the birth of quantum information processing.

The Quantum Frontiers Distinguished Lecture will take place from 4:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. in QNC 0101.

Here are today's Get Up And Go Passport Challenge Clues:

• You have to visit here when you are hired
• They work hard to protect your working environment

Remember to register your team, download your passport and head out to the two sites you think the clues match. Get a date/time/signature by someone from that area on your passport, and follow the same procedure each working day until the contest ends on October 31.

Back to top