If you teach in a groundbreaking way and can demonstrate that learning has improved as a result of your creative approach, you may be one of two South African educators making your way to Helsinki in Finland to participate in the global Innovative Teachers’ Awards ceremony at the end of the year.
Golf has been undergoing a quiet transformation. It is shedding its tag as an elitist sport, overwhelmingly played by affluent white folks. Indications are that in years to come there will be more black faces at local and major international golf tournaments. This will be thanks to the South African Golf Development Board, which runs a programme that aims to make the sport accessible to more young black children from disadvantaged communities.
Everywhere you turn these days the buzz is about computers and the part they should play in schooling: parents want IT, learners are calling for IT and the department of education’s White Paper encourages schools to use more IT. It seems every vendor out there is trying to push a “package” at you and your school.
There’s an air of expectation in the Johannesburg City Hall as the audience settles down prior to the arrival of the evening’s star attraction, Sergei Nakariakov. An attractive dark-haired young man in trendy clothes, Nakariakov looks as if he could be a contestant in Idols. But he is no short-term pop sensation. The young Russian trumpeter has been hailed as a musical genius in the class of Paganini and Caruso.
Most higher education institutions currently make use of a points score to summarise performance in the grade 12 or “matric” examination. A points score helps institutions to make admission decisions based on school performance in an efficient, transparent way.
When I was a teenager in the Fifties, very few young girls were sexually active or fell pregnant and, of those who did, suicide was a common “solution”. I fell pregnant at the age of 19 and the reaction from my family pushed me to the point where suicide was something I considered as a means of escape, writes Joan Dommisse.
Girls thrive in single-sex schools, but boys do not. It is a common assumption and new research from London’s Institute of Education (IoE) suggests, to a certain extent, that it is true. Researchers have found that girls who go to girls’ schools will later earn more than those from mixed schools — partly because they are less likely to make gendered decisions about their studies and are, therefore, more likely to take maths and science subjects.
The National Credit Act came into affect on June 1. The Act is aimed at curtailing reckless lending and encourages debt counselling for people who find themselves in a debt trap. Owing to changes brought about by the Act, consumers will now have to be far more aware of their credit risk, because this will determine the rate at which they can borrow.
True freedom will come the day the aphorism “talk is cheap” becomes literally true. With that in mind I checked out the various pre-paid cellphone packages to see who offers the best deal. Virgin Mobile is a recent addition to the cellphone family. It shook up the market last year when it based all its offerings on per-second billing.
Universities, which now supply about 98% of all new teachers for the schooling system, have in the past few years qualified fewer than a third of the teachers needed to replace those leaving the profession. We know that teacher shortage is acute in some learning areas (such as literacy, mathematics, science and technology) and in some geographical regions (particularly in rural schools).