Prime Minister's Awards for teaching Excellence

Bruce Tate

Year: 2010-2011 – Province: British Columbia

Certificate of Achievement Recipient

Brentwood College School
2735 Mt. Baker Road
Mill Bay BC V0R 2P1

Principal: Andrea Pennells
School Tel.: 250-743-5521
School Fax: 250-743-2911
School Email: mike.flynn@brentwood.bc.ca
School Website: www.brentwood.bc.ca

Subjects and grades taught: Science and Physics for grades 9 to 12

Teaching Approach

Spaghetti bridges, egg catapults, hovercrafts and candle-powered hot air balloons … it's like being taught physics by Einstein himself. But it's not all just fun and games in Bruce Tate's classrooM. Confronted with questions like "What if …?" and "Why is that?", students in Mr. Tate's Creative Science program emerge curious, wanting to know more about the universe and why things happen.

Outstanding Achievements

  • Mr. Tate pioneered a unique program for hands-on science at Brentwood. With the Creative Science program, students are submerged in exciting projects and interactive experiments.
  • Mr. Tate spearheaded an initiative with the University of Victoria to put a data gathering instrument package on the school dock, which would sample factors such as temperature, oxygen levels and chlorophyll. Data will be available on the web for students worldwide. Mr. Tate is coordinating a group of teachers to create course content when the instrumentation is deployed.
  • Mr. Tate is also the brains behind a graphing program for his colleagues which enables them to view student marks and compare them to their exam marks. The program allows them to bring greater fairness and consistency to their assessments.

Rave Reviews

"Mr. Tate was like our very own Einstein. He has a sharp sense of humour, an uncanny knack for answering your question before you had even asked it and a true passion for what he taught. He would bring physics to life for us (…) and made sure that in his class, physics was not something we simply read about in our textbooks but it was something that we could experience as well."

Former student

"Bruce Tate is an extraordinary educator who has had an inordinate impact on the lives of hundreds of young people. (…) Some teachers are able to make the complex lucid and other to make the mundane interesting. Bruce can do both and has been doing so for over twenty highly successful years at this school."

Colleague