Bruce Rippon, our Burlington Academy Director, is all about supporting students and helping them build the necessary skills they need to increase their self-belief so that they know that they can conquer anything in life.

Discover more about Bruce, the tutoring services offered at our Burlington Academy and student success stories.

Interview was conducted verbally, so transcript reflects natural, conversational English with conscious light editing versus what might appear in a formal, written piece.

Bruce: My name is Bruce Rippon and I’m the Director of the Academy for Mathematics & English in Burlington, Ontario located in the ActivityPlex Plaza near the intersection of Mainway and Walkers Line.

Bruce: Well, in my professional career, which extends for the past 35 years or so, I’ve always been in the business of supporting students – and in this case, it’s in a retail setting. So, when I had the opportunity to go out on my own I investigated businesses where I could again work with younger people and support them. And I isolated on the Academy for Mathematics & English, strictly speaking because I was impressed with the operation in total and I was impressed with the founders. And they seemed to be interested in my background and suitability to be able to operate a tutoring centre and actually help students succeed, whereas most of the other franchise opportunities, well, all they were concerned about was my financial wherewithal to survive the first year of operation.

Bruce: We support elementary and high school students in the following manner: We support Mathematics from senior kindergarten to the end of Grade 12. We support high school Science – including Grade 9 and 10 General Science – plus Physics and Chemistry 11 and 12. And we support English, or as they now call it, Language, from senior kindergarten to the end of Grade 12.

We also have specialized programs that we run at varying times of the year, including English Essay Writing. And a very popular program is the transition from Grade 8 to Grade 9 because it’s the first year of high school. We also do an introduction to Calculus and do Advanced Functions for the senior high kids.

Bruce: My wife of the last 15 years was a Burlington resident growing up and I was familiar with the area. And it looked like an excellent opportunity with the appropriate age range of students and schools to establish a tutoring centre here.

Bruce: The Academy in Burlington draws primarily from North Burlington and it extends from Burloak to the east, to probably Brant Street to the west. We do draw from South Burlington as well, but most of our students come from North Burlington.

Bruce: Well, I mean again, in terms of the elementary students, we draw a lot of students from Florence Meares, from Charles Beaudoin, from Alton Village and from CH Norton. Our high school tutoring, which has always been very active, the closest school to us is Corpus Christi, but we also draw from Notre Dame, Nelson, Robert Bateman, Lester B. Pearson, and our newest high school, which has only been in existence for three years, Frank J. Hayden.

Bruce: We have been in business in Burlington since 2006. So, we’re celebrating our 10th anniversary this year. And we have had a large number of students who have had great success by attending our tutoring centre.

Bruce: Certainly. I would suggest to you that probably half of the students who attend regular sessions at the Academy in Burlington are what I would call tutorial students. They’re students who have struggled or are struggling with their Math or their Science or their English. And through a process of building a program, we build their skills and confidence to make them better students.

There’s an additional 25% who I would describe as average students. And they’re getting to the point now where they’re having to make choices for post-secondary education so they want to do better than average.

And then, the last 25% are what I would call enrichment students. These are students, be it elementary or high school students, who enjoy Mathematics and they’re not challenged by what they’re doing in their current grade. So, we’re able to put together enrichment programs for them. And just as you would enroll a child for a swimming program or for a soccer program, they come in for our math program to be challenged, and they get enjoyment out of it.

Bruce: I would say that the most popular program or grade at the Burlington Academy, is Grade 9 because it’s the first year of high school and that’s very much a transitionary year for students as they get used to new surroundings, new teachers and a lot more students than they’re used to.

We also have a number of senior high students, Grade 12 students, because it counts. How they do in Grade 12 is going to make the difference in terms of their post-secondary choices, whether it be choice of school, or even in the best-case-scenario, a scholarship.

Bruce: Well, it’s interesting in terms of when I went into the business 10 years ago, I went into it thinking that I would enjoy it. And now, looking back on the 10 years, which seems more like about three years, it’s gone by so quickly, and I’ve enjoyed it even more than I anticipated! I love running my Academy – it’s a great pleasure every day. It’s all about building skills and confidence and when you see students go from very little confidence and very little success in let’s say, for argument’s sake, Mathematics, and through a process, they gain skills and they gain confidence and go on and do great things in school – that’s tremendously rewarding.

Bruce: I think the biggest plus in enrolling at the Academy for Mathematics in Burlington is the fact that we deal with students individually. We don’t do anything in groups except for English Essay Writing a couple of times a year. And because we deal with students individually, the student feels more comfortable conversing with their tutor and admitting if they don’t understand something, whereas some of the other operations, they work in groups. And peer pressure, being what it is, be it elementary or high school, it can impede progress with the students.

Bruce: Well, I mean, again, it’s something that I’ve learned over the time that I’ve been here. The tutors go out and report on every student that they tutor over the course of their day and they talk about what was covered in the hour as well as how the student did with the material. I transcribe those reports and email them to the parents the next day. So, they get consistent feedback from us in terms of how their student is doing – and the next steps.

Bruce: Well, it’s proven to be very effective at generating strong recommendations and referrals from existing parents and from existing students. Parents love getting these reports.

Bruce: Yes.

Bruce: Well, I’ve got two actually. I’m just thinking about it. The first happened in my first four years of operation, the school year of 2006-2007. I was approached by a family who had a student going into Grade 9 and she had been failing miserably in Mathematics for the last several years. They enrolled with us for a year and we spent the first semester, which is September to January, filling in gaps to her understanding because she was doing Math in second semester. So we worked through the first semester. And then, when she started her Grade 9 in February, we continued to support her. She got her mid-term report card for her Grade 9 Math and she was sitting at 85%. That’s a pretty large transformation – quickly.

Bruce: Well, she started asking us — I knew something was up because she started asking us for extra practice questions after her sessions because for the first time in her scholastic career, she had a mark that she wanted to protect. Anyway, long story short, when the father came in at the end of the semester to say goodbye, he broke down into tears. And the reason he broke down into tears is because as far as he was concerned, not only did we affect her confidence with respect to Math, we actually affected her confidence with everything to do with her school. In other words, she improved in other subjects that we didn’t help her with simply because she now had the confidence to know that she could do it.

Bruce: Now, the other thing I was going to mention, and I don’t want to take too much of your time, but I got visited two weeks ago by a student. She looked to be in high school. She looked to be about Grade 9 and she had long, purple hair. And she said, “You probably don’t remember me but my name is Arianna.” And I looked at her and said, “Arianna, who was here for Grade 3 and Grade 4 and Grade 5?” And she said, “That’s me.” And I said, “My goodness. You’ve changed.” She came in because she was in Grade 9 and she got 100% in her first Math test in high school. And she wanted to come back to tell me what an impact we had had on her, even four years after the fact.

Bruce: We’ve been very fortunate in terms of I’ve now been in business long enough that I have had students that have started with me in elementary school and continued with me right through high school. One of the toughest months for me is June because I’m invariably saying goodbye to students that I watched grow up. And it’s like, “Have a nice life.” Because they have no reason to come back to me after they’ve graduated.

Bruce: Well, I believe very strongly in what I call the self-fulfilling prophecy. What I mean by that is that students tend to perform in keeping with what they believe about themselves. If they believe that they’re not good with something, they’ll avoid it. And if they believe they can do something, then they’re not afraid anymore and they’ll take on any challenge that can be presented to them – and they’ll excel. At the Academy for Mathematics in Burlington, we build skills and, as we’re building skills, we’re building self-belief, which then becomes a self fulfilling prophecy for our students – who know thereafter that they can conquer anything. And it’s great to see the students progress and go on with the rest of their lives after having positive experiences here.