I hope the focus of my work is in teacher training, and to be effective in this realm, one needs to know where teachers are coming from. Since I hope you follow this blog, I want to keep you in the loop.
During the Apartheid years, the black population received what was known as Bantu education. Tribes went to schools in their own respective areas. Students did not receive Math, English, or any critical thinking subjects because those were seen as topics for people destined to jobs in the service sectors, in which blacks were not expected to fill. I am not sure what subjects were actually learned, but I know the language used was Afrikaans (look it up please). Their educators were from within the tribe for the most part. These educators were predominately female and did not need a high school degree. They just need to go to 3 years of teacher college at a school in their “homeland”.
This all changed in 1994 when Mandela rose to presidency. As you can imagine, it is pretty tough to teach an old dog new tricks and much of the bad teaching habits live on in schools today. So if there is a post later on where I am super pumped about getting a teacher to get her students to genuinely analyze material or a teacher effectively teaches a rigorous lesson, you will know why.
Sean,
ReplyDeleteI hope you get this as I don't think you got any of my other emails b/c I don't see them posted. If you get this please let me know so I will know if I did something right here...LOL I want to tell you wants been going on back here in the states but want to make sure you get this short on first. I have enjoyed reading your blogs and I can hear you are having the time of your life. Hope it's everything you'd hoped for. If I hear from you I'll know you got this the I'll write more.
Nancy
sounds wonderful...i had a comment all typed up and lost it once...will brief this time...we r ok, sara ok, donna ok, pam and steve fixing to bcome grandparents-happy, cindy and rock ok, roxi fixing to take practical for beautician, have not seen matt or angela in a while. miss u, as i am sure ur frnds and family do too. fr maxi leaving, baptizing sara's nephew this saturday-he stayed one wk to help fr tomy joseph, our new priest...they say he is nice, very devout. seems young. pls keep up the good wrks. God bless you! keep posting....
ReplyDeletehey man, its so good to get some updates! sounds like you're having an awesome time. what are the engineers in your group training for?
ReplyDeleteHello Sean. We are writing from St. Mary's School in Berea. We are so excited to work with you on collecting books. We are also excited about the idea of being able to Skype with you. Please let us know when this is possible. We are brainstorming ideas on how to get the money to ship the books to you. You are doing great work!
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