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/ 25 April 2005

Admit it, you’ve been had

”There truly is a sucker born every minute. And when being a sucker collides with vanity, you have yourself a whole lot of emperors walking around in their birthday suits. Take the multitudes who bought some of what were purported to be Nelson Mandela’s art works, specifically the handprints”.

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/ 25 April 2005

Working it out

Getting Schools Working has its roots in research commissioned by the Presidents’ Education Initiative published in 1999 as Getting Learning Right. This new book addresses the methodology and shortcomings of the previous book. The authors provide a sustained reflection and analysis through their detailed review of the stream of research between 1998 and 2002. Getting […]

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/ 25 April 2005

The mechanics of learning

Learners and learning is the fourth module in the study of education series produced by the South African Institute for Distance Education. The focus of the module, as the title indicates, is on understanding the process of learning. A learning guide, a reader and an audiotape make up the full module. The question guiding the […]

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/ 25 April 2005

Injecting girls is no solution to abuse

The year is 1974. The apartheid State has just set up its free family planning programme, with one of its explicit aims to curb the population growth rate among blacks. Among other methods, the state encourages the coercive use of the injectable contraceptive Depo Provera among young black women studying for matric and black women […]

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/ 25 April 2005

A huge responsibility

One of the interesting sides to working as an education journalist is that there is hardly anything that is not of relevance to my beat. From a hoola-hooping contest to national budgets or the onset of war in distant lands, everything has either relevance to, or influence on, the processes of learning and teaching. The […]

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/ 25 April 2005

Counselling from the heart

Counselling from the heart I am a life orientation educator, and at times I feel my work is so important as I feel so emotionally close to my learners. They trust and honour me to the extent that they express their deepest and most personal emotions to me. One day when I was busy in […]

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/ 25 April 2005

Alonso resists rampant Schumacher

Fernando Alonso resisted huge pressure from rampant defending world drivers champion Michael Schumacher to seize a thrilling victory and complete a Formula One hat-trick in Sunday’s San Marino Grand Prix. The young Spaniard, showing the verve and calm temperament of a future champion himself, steered his Renault to a third straight win to confirm his early-season leadership.

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/ 25 April 2005

It’s safer to be out in the open

Q: How does one disclose your HIV/AIDS status to people close to you? — Themba Langa, Cape Town A: There are many ways. Joe Manciya of the National Association of People Living with Aids (Napwa) says, ‘Disclosure is a process, it is not a one-off event”. First test the reaction of a person by referring […]

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/ 25 April 2005

Close-linking deepens learning

The Revised National Curriculum Statement (NCS) for Grades R to 9 was published in June last year with surprisingly little publicity. There are many good things about the NCS which schools will welcome. It flows on from Curriculum 2005 but is simpler. The central question in teaching is still are my learners getting better at […]

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/ 25 April 2005

Girls’ rights horror

When I started preparing to write this article about issues around gender in our young democracy, I was feeling quite calm and ready to write about how our proud Constitution and progressive laws has advanced in the protection of girls’ rights and how the conditions of young girls had actually changed for the better. But […]