Discussion forum

Educators

Registering for ICT has been a one of the best move one has made as a an educator so far. Its the best because it has granted me the opportunity to meet fellow colleagues to share ideas in a forum like the 2008/9 group. If the department of education had a platform where teachers all over SA can communicate either provincially or nationally. It has come to me attention that the fear and challenges that I face everyday as an educator are not just my imagination because through out the deliberation of the discussions, I realized that other educators face the same or even worse situations as educators that I face. The Idea of a forum for teachers is one that I have toying around with. Lets think about the possibilities of a unified teachers in SA.

Ethical issues

Colleagues

I was looking at how some pictures land up in our discussion forum and one recently was the one about the school girl and a boy making out wearing school uniforms. My question when I saw the Picture was of mixed feelings. One part of me was saying how can these children behave this way, probably they never used condoms. The other side of me was saying how can we publish this and discuss it without asking questions like who got these picture and how did they get it? Did the person who got the picture tried to help the students by talking to them or even their parents? How is this different to cheap journalism, i.e. tabloid journalism. ? The journalism I am talking of relates to stories about celebrities like Diana the late princess and stories about Manto Tshabalala Msimang drinking habits, the Caster Semenya furore, etc. How far can we go to create havoc in the name of news? Do we care about the welfare of the people involved in the pictures we take and publish? If these children were ours, would we gladly look at this pictures and say our education system has gone to the dogs? Would we call them and seek counselling for them or just let it be what it is?

SAT Format, Policy issue

Teachers

I teach grade 12 and grade 9 maths at my school. what concerns me is the fact that the format for grade 9 potfolio as it stands requires 6 tasks for the entire year. The tasks are made up of activities of 3 each. This means that you need 3 multiplied by 6 which is eighteen. The SAT is regarded as one task. If you have seen how long the SAT is, you will understand what i am talking of. How is it that the policy permits that the grade 9 be so different with the grade 12, which is 7 tasks for the whole year. 7 tasks are just that, seven, not more. How can an educator be expected to do 18 activities and 7 more activities. Are we just people who are there to complete these tasks for the sake of completing these tasks or there is quality in all this?

Respect

Colleagues

I have been recently blown away by people who stay away from institutions of learning. Their commitment to learning. There is a group of educators who come from KZN, FREE State, LIMPOPO, etc...these are some of the educators who sacrifice a lot to study at institutions like UJ. They come by taxis, some by overnight transport just to get a qualification. Why is it that most of the people who stay just a couple of Kilometres away from these campuses do not take the opportunity with both hands? I also noticed that institutions like UJ, Pretoria University, Wits, etc are full of people who do not stay in or around Gauteng. Why is this? Is it that those who stay in Gauteng don't value education as much as those who stay in Gauteng, or there is something else that makes this picture the way it is?

Democracy

To Colleague
The liberation struggle has brought "freedom". The freedom brought in a form of democratic processes that has made most of us vote for our prefered party to lead us to the promised land of "freedom". Our voting system is that of represantative government, the party with the most votes always has the last say in parliament, e.g, the scorpion saga, the prefered constitutional judges, the shabir scandal just to name a few. We vote for the party and the party choose their prefered candidates into government and parastatals positions like your SABC, your SAA and many more. The loophole in our democratic system is such that if those the party has rewarded with positions are not perfoming as required, only the party leaders can remove them. And the party leader is always pushing the interests of the ruling party, so mostly the interests of the people are last on the Agenda. His opinions and beliefs are sometimes compromised for the sake of the party. It is said that its a team sport, but only the influential determines the goals of the so-called team. These are the same people who has somehow find a way to our universities, propagating equality, inclusivity when it suits them. Having politicians deciding what is best for us ordinary people has its price. They have to fill their pockets and those of their relatives and friends before they come to us. They push policies that failed elsewhere because they owe other people at our expense, e.g, OBE. The problem with this is that our learners can't read nor write their own languages let alone English. Then people wonder why Educators want to be spoon fed at tertiary level. Is there a way out of this democratic process of represantative party election systems? Think about this, can someone you appointed into a high position be fully objective when it comes to you? Just blowing off some steam.

old dog, new tricks

To
I would like to firstly say how frustrated i am when i realised that i can't open or do something related to teaching. I am a maths guy and i ussually i know how to solve problems relating to the subject matter. With the webquest and websites its a different situation all together. learning new stuff when you are old with responsible is not an easy task. You have to work hard than when you were young. It is also expensive to learn. My question to my colleagues is, how do you cope with all this? The lectures do what they think is enough to help us but sometimes its not. I also realised that i have to collaborate a lot with different educators at school or at UJ. The problem is there is no time. How do you win?

where i will be in 5 years

To colleagues

If i knew precisely where i would be in five years i would be a happy person but I whim that the course i am doing now will open some doors for me within the fraternity of education and if not, i am considering going out of the country to see the world and broaden my horizon. The sad part is that the current SA climate requires people to be comrades to progress within the departments and because of this a lot of individuals who are capable are being sidelined because of their political believes. The ideal situation would be that i plough back to schools what i am learning now. The Honours i am doing encourages me to join the discource communnities in a tertiary institution and do my masters. It will be great to experience the changes that i am going through with other teachers and seeing us bring change at schools.