What the youth are saying about sex should make us sit up and listen YOUTH are speaking out candidly — perhaps for the first time — about what sex means to them. ‘I have watched S’cumto and it’s quite cool. We were given sex education at school where we learnt a lot of things we […]
How and when to assess outcomes-based education 1. Why assess There are different purposes for assessing: to identify the needs of learners to plan learning/decide where to start to track learner progress to diagnose problems to help learners to improve their work to adjust focus and pace to provide evidence of learners’ level of achievement […]
The low status of teaching has caused student enrolments to plummet. THE status of teaching is at its lowest point in years. Redeployment and the confusion around Curriculum 2005 have done little to attract potential teachers. Instead, many suitable teaching candidates have been lured away by the private sector. Further tarnishing the image of teaching […]
Dyslexia is a serious reading problem which can stunt learners’ progress EDUCATIONAL psychologists estimate that 15% of learners have serious reading problems. Dyslexics are among them. Dyslexic children will reverse words, write letters back to front, get the letter sequences of words wrong and continually lose their place when reading aloud. In spelling tests they […]
LIKE a bolt out of the blue, what was once a stable, happening school in the affluent area of Bryanston in Gauteng suddenly became a hotbed of racial violence and controversy. Or was it so out of the blue? Some would argue the signs that all was not well at Bryanston High school had been […]
A CHILD is caught smoking dagga during break. How should the school respond? All too often it’s by suspending, sometimes expelling, the offender. In one Western Cape school a first-time dagga user was expelled. The school merely moved the problem on. National guidelines leave the details of drug policy to provincial departments or individual governing […]
New measures help schools in the Western Cape deal with drug problems NO doubt about it, Jake definitely has a nose for narcotics. In fact the very scent of cocaine, dagga or mandrax sends him into a frenzy. But Jake is no junkie. He belongs to Detector Dogs – a security company using sniffer dogs […]
”THE best thing that’s ever happened to schooling was the banning of corporal punishment,” says Graham Bailey, headmaster of Pinetown Boys High. ”Under the old system a kid could misbehave or not do his homework and he’d get a couple of whacks. Come the end of the year when he failed, his parents would jump […]
The Constitutional Court upholds the ban against corporal punishment THERE’S no more getting around it: corporal punishment has no more place in our schools, and educators are going to have to get serious about finding alternatives. This follows the Constitutional Court’s dismissal of an appeal by Christian Education of South Africa (Cesa) to have corporal […]
The youth run amok intent on dealing out their form of own justice. RECENT events once again demonstrate the youth’s conviction that mob action is the best way to express grievances and demand ”justice”. The past lives on: Numerous incidents of students running riot in the name of ”justice” suggest that this generation has more […]