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/ 19 January 2009
Educators are in the business of imparting information. In the case of HIV and Aids, 2009 should be the year when we pull out all the stops.
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/ 10 November 2008
What is it like to live as a child with HIV? How does a child such as this deal with death, the loss of a parent, poverty or medical treatment?
The United Nations Losses Exercise was designed by people living with HIV/Aids to help others personalise and understand the impact of finding out they are HIV positive. It lends itself to classroom use and is appropriate for learners between 14 and 18 years.
There is a part of the brain – just above the eyeballs – that lights up if an image of a baby’s face is flashed on to a screen. This is according to a study released earlier this year. Nothing happens if the picture on the screen is that of an adult.
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/ 5 November 2007
An annual youth programme that tries to offer new perspectives on various issues took place recently at the campus of Monash South Africa in Ruimsig, west of Johannesburg. The event, which started in 2001 and has been sponsored by Monash since 2003, was attended by about 120 grade 11 learners from Soweto and other areas.
Schools may well be feeling helpless in the face of the spiralling rate of HIV infections, especially in the 14- to 25-year-old age group. Learners resist the information that is officially on offer and we don’t seem to be hitting the mark.
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/ 10 November 2006
If you mention HIV/Aids to teenagers, they say they’ve heard it all – they claim to ”know it all”. Consequently many of them still practise unsafe sex, which leads to pregnancy and the spread of the HI virus.
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/ 7 November 2006
Some learners make a bigger impression on you than others. Naledi was one of these. I met her at a secondary school in Soweto in 2002 where I was working on an HIV programme. Naledi was not the kind of person who waited for you to tell her what to do. In no time she had formed a small group of juniors to mentor and brought me an inspired poem one of them had written about the Aids virus.
It is easy to fool yourself that the threat of HIV to teenagers doesn’t need to be addressed in schools with any urgency. There are no visible signs of this ‘silent†epidemic in the classroom. Compare it to the recent meningitis scare at Potchefstroom University: the health authorities sprang into action immediately. A highly contagious […]