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/ 2 May 2007

Thriving on love

Belle Primary School in Orlando West has no library, inadequate teaching staff, no staff room, too few classrooms and desks. It recently merged with Tlhoreng School and this month a name will be brainstormed for the new school. Belle is one of eight schools in District 12 in Soweto that had to be merged to avoid wasting resources, according to the Gauteng department of education.

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/ 8 March 2007

Drug menace

Younger children are experimenting with drugs more than ever in the history of South Africa, and it appears to be widely spread over the racial, cultural and economic sections of society.

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/ 7 February 2007

Dean of rock ‘n’ roll

Lou Reed once had this to say about the man often held to be the United States’s most intellectually rigorous rock writer: "How do you think it feels," barked the singer in the middle of a particularly rowdy 1978 New York performance, "working for a fucking year, and you get a B-plus from an asshole in the Village Voice?"

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/ 7 February 2007

SA – maths = crisis

There is a wonderful inherent logic and rationality to maths, and not just with equations. It is a great pity that the department of education is unable or unwilling to apply some of this rationale to dealing with the problem of low pass rates in maths in the country.

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/ 7 November 2006

Teachers still tops

The overwhelming majority of South Africans — a total of 90% — say they respect teachers for their dedicated service to children. This is according to the South African Social Attitudes Survey (Sasas), which has just been published by the Human Sciences Research Council.

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/ 7 November 2006

Making sense of disorder

The neurological condition attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is genetic, new research has found. “You often find that if one child is ADHD, the other children are too, because the condition in 80% of cases is genetic, research shows,” says Professor André Venter, an international expert based at the University of the Free State.