It was a day like any other. I woke up early in the morning and got ready for work. I was in a good mood because an NGO had helped us by donating four classrooms that we had desired for quite a long time. School started at the usual time and the lessons went on […]
Taiwan is not the first place that comes to mind for most South African teachers seeking greener pastures, but adventurous graduates with student loans (or similar financial incentives) are arriving here in increasing numbers. At least, there are enough South Africans here to make it worth the while of one Taipei pub to have added […]
The June 2002 edition of the Teacher ran an article about drug prevention programmes in schools, which contained inaccuracies about an organisation called Narconon. Narconon is a secular organisation licensed to use some of the research discoveries made by L. Ron Hubbard (author and humanitarian) in the field of drugs. Mr Hubbard spent over half […]
I am writing this story in the hope that it will help prevent the same thing happening again at any farm school. It happened in June in the early ’90s, soon after the school’s reopened. There were three teachers at our school then, and we were all excited about our newly appointed principal, thinking of […]
It is that time of year when pupils are writing their final exams. And it is on record that township schools have had low pass rates in past years. Let us wait and see what happens this year. As the old saying goes, you reap what you sow – and this month is harvest time […]
I was highly offended by your editorial in the August edition of the Teacher (‘Ideals get in reality’s way”). You cynically suggest that we accept our lot and reconcile ourselves to the inevitable. As an educator in the Eastern Cape, I will never accept the low standards of work done by our provincial education department. […]
Fiona de Villiers reviewsUSING MEDIA IN TEACHING – LEARNING GUIDE by Carol Bertram, Peter Ranby, Mike Adendorff, Yvonne Reed, Nicky Roberts (Oxford University Press, R250) Published in conjunction with the South African Institute for Distance Education, this book is Oxford University Press’s third module in the Study of Education project series, which was designed to […]
JL Tiley reviews FOOD by Carolyn Reid and Adeline Sejane (Gauteng Department of Agriculture, Conservation, Environment and Land Affairs; Gauteng Department of Education and Gauteng Institute for Educational Development) What a delightful book this is! The artists and authors have succeeded in producing a book that is both a rich resource of information and one […]
As author Peter Ackroyd points out, the most singular defining characteristic of humans has always been our ‘endless and inexhaustible curiosity”. Even as our first ancestors busied themselves with colonising Earth, they gathered around the evening fire and turned their gaze heavenwards, and through myths and stories tried to make sense of the infinite bodies […]
My class mates and I grew up enduring this kind of torture in the form of geography textbooks. They were dense, grey and boring and crammed with facts that seemed completely useless to us – the principal export crop of Bolivia, for example, or the exact length of the Nile river. No-one told us about […]