Convincing students they can reach for the top

BY MARC LALONDE

marc.lalonde@transcontinental.ca

Manny Pizarro is taking on the granddaddy of ‘em all.

The John Rennie High School integration aide and veteran mountaineer will scale the world’s highest peak in March and these days, he’s showing Lester B. Pearson School Board students exactly how he’s going to do it.

Last Friday, Pizarro spent the morning at Terry Fox elementary school in Pierrefonds with a presentation he has created in partnership with the board called Learning without Limits: Everest 2007. He’s making the rounds with one eye on educating kids and another on the notoriously tough Everest expedition.

“Everest is the big one,” he said. “It’s the tallest mountain in the world and it’s a very spiritual mountain. When I was 12 years old, I did a research project on (legendary mountaineer) Chris Bonington, and that was the very first time I was inspired to climb.”

Since then, Pizarro has dedicated his life to scaling the highest peaks, including monoliths like Tanzania’s Mt. Kilimanjaro and Alaska’s Mt. McKinley (North America’s highest mountain) and the educator, who started at John Rennie in September, will begin his ascent March 10, and hopes to reach the summit of the 29,028-foot mountain May 10- two months later.

“That’s only half the trip, though,” he said. “The other half is the descent. That’s just as hard.”

Statistics culled at the end of the 2004 climbing season showed 2,238 people had reached the summit (1,148 of them since 1998) and 186 people died. Wikipedia reports ‘the conditions on the mountain are so difficult that most of the corpses have been left where they fell; some of them are easily visible from the standard climbing routes.’

Pizarro said the danger is very real, but through safety precautions, said he plans to conquer the mountain, which lies on the border of Tibet and Nepal. “When I set my eye on Everest for the first time, I said to myself, ‘I just have to climb this mountain.’”

Pizarro said he hopes to teach students the value of visualizing and verbalizing their goals in life to keep them on the path to the life they want for themselves. “It’s the formula of choosing your dream and then actualizing it, visualizing it. We are what we think. That’s the message I want to convey,” he said.

The Terry Fox students Pizarro came to enlighten left excited about the presentation.

“It was great. He showed us how he puts the crampons on his hiking boots, and one of the funniest parts was when he explained to us how he goes to the bathroom on the mountain,” said Ile Bizard resident and Grade 5 student Sarah McDonald.

“I’m not sure if it inspired me to climb mountains, but maybe, because it looks really interesting, and I thought it was really cool when (Pizarro) showed us how they save people when they’re falling,” said Grade 5 student Brittanie Romito.

Pearson assistant director of secondary schools Nancy Hain said partnering with Pizarro is a natural for the board in that the Learning Without Limits project drives students’ curiosity in multiple academic subjects

“The project drives inquiry through multiple disciplines, and lesson plans can be prepared for literacy, numeracy and science,” she said. The project is also designed as a fundraiser for the Pearson Educational Foundation and Pizarro is hoping to raise about $100,000.

For more information, visit Pizarro’s website at www.climbhigh.ca.">www.climbhigh.ca.">www.climbhigh.ca.