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.