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 […]
I read with disgust last month’s ‘A day in my life” (A nasty lesson in intimidation). In this column, teacher Sikheto Kubayi seems to think that a student — by disagreeing with him — made his life unbearable, when in fact Kubayi himself was at fault. Firstly, Kubayi ignored a student who had his hand […]
Speak to any educator today about the challenges of teaching and they’re bound to relate a story of a child defying authority and then smugly asserting ‘I have my rights”. Classroom discipline has become increasingly difficult because of this self-righteous attitude among our children. Don’t get me wrong: there is nothing amiss in the basic […]
Teaching at a farmschool without running water and electricity is not always a walk in the park. Travelling on a dirt road that looks like a footpath is not easy either. But every day I see thirsty, eager, happy faces awaiting me at Middelwater Primary in the Somerset East area of the Western Cape. I […]
My son passed matric at the end of last year and started looking for a job. He was lucky — he found a job in a clothing shop after looking for only three weeks. But then in March, he was retrenched. The shop wasn’t doing too well so they let him go and just kept […]
Since I started schooling, I learned history from primary school level. I was taught about people like Jan van Riebeeck, Vasco Da Gama, Jan Smuts, the Voortrekkers, and so on. These are people who my parents and sisters and brothers never knew about. At tertiary level I also took history as my major. The same […]
Many small children think that teachers are not ordinary human beings and they could be right. In truth, teachers may have similar feelings about certain children they teach, too. One thing children notice is a teacher’s appearance. No detail escapes them and they are not slow to comment. For some years I taught the lower […]
It was during the apartheid years when I started teaching at Moduopo Senior Primary in Tembisa on the East Rand. To my surprise, I found that Afrikaans was the language that all school circulars were written in. I was okay at writing Afrikaans but in speech I was poor. Although I started in early February, […]
Thank God it’s Friday. I need the weekend to rejuvenate – but with old age steadily creeping up, a four day weekend is a serious consideration. I could take Monday off and that old excuse comes to mind: ‘So dronk soos ‘n kleurling onderwyser.” But then again, ‘You’re the captain of the ship”, they say. […]
American student Amy Biehl’s death in 1993 at the hand of youth activists attending a political rally in the township of Guguletu had a profound impact on my teaching career. At the time I was a young, newly married teacher employed in a temporary capacity hoping to land a permanent position. The students charged with […]