Indigenous high-school students get hands-on experience in skilled trades with school course

When Simon McKay’s high-school guidance counsellor told him about a new class where students learn skilled trades by building a house from the ground up, which is then donated to a member of a nearby First Nation, the teenager was eager to enroll.By his own admission, sitting at a desk while a teacher lectures from the blackboard has never been the way the 18-year-old learns best, and so the new class had an instant appeal.