Author visit inspires great excitement
This afternoon, UCC partnered with Scholastic and bookstore Mabel's Fables to host a special speaking engagement with beloved children's author and illustrator Dav Pilkey.
Laidlaw Hall was abuzz as students from seven GTA schools, including partner schools from Horizons, UCC’s tutoring, mentoring and co-learning program with the TDSB, gathered to welcome the creator of the wildly popular Dog Man and Captain Underpants graphic novels.
Pilkey captured the audience's attention with an engaging video presentation illustrating his classroom struggles after a diagnosis of ADHD and dyslexia, and his inability to sit still, control his impulses, and the stress of reading time. He shared his mother's profound lesson that kept him from feeling discouraged: turn something bad into something good. This simple advice, he said, led him to his four life-changing principles:
- Positivity: Turning time spent in the school hallway into drawing time, leading to his first cartoons.
- Practise: Consistently working to improve his drawings and stories.
- Persistence: Never giving up, even when his second book, Twas the Night Before Thanksgiving, was rejected 23 times before its acceptance.
- Purpose: Asking the crucial question of "why?”
He wrapped up his presentation with a snippet from a new project that shares the message that small things, like his mother’s lesson, can have an immense impact on life’s trajectory.
The event concluded with an interactive character-drawing trivia game with prizes. The hall then erupted with cheers of joy as the students learned they would receive a signed copy of Pilkey’s new book, Dog Man: Big Jim Believes.
© 2025 Upper Canada College. All Rights Reserved.