In the upcoming months you’ll find out what a young gent who works as a Marketing Manager/Graphic Designer has to say about schools, education, art and design in schools as well as his recent nostalgic memories of the institution he called home for 12 years.

Malcolm Venter
Years ago, I came home with a delightful little book entitled Bureaucrats: How to Annoy Them. The author, who loathes bureaucrats with a deep, deep loathing , relates some hilarious tales about how he set out to annoy British bureaucrats – a sort of revenge saga. Knowing that I have similar sentiments about these [...]

The National Curriculum Statement indicates clearly that learners must be encouraged to think critically and to engage in problem-solving:
v  The Critical Outcomes require learners to ‘identify and solve problems and make decisions using critical and creative thinking’ (p2).
v  The ‘kind of learner envisaged’ must ‘demonstrate an ability to think logically and analytically, as well has [...]

Ek wil nie voorgee dat ek ooit myself gesien het as onderwyser nie, en daarom was dit nogal ‘n aanpassing om weer gewoond te raak aan die roetine van skoolgaan. Soos enige jong onderwyser, was ek aanvanklik skepties en selfs ‘n bietjie skrikkerig.

I don’t believe that it is just bias on my part which makes me believe that the most hard-driven teachers in our schools are our language teachers. From one point of view, they are better off because they have always had a huge marking load and were therefore not fazed, as other teachers were, by having to do Continuous Assessment (CASS).

With the average age of Civil Engineers in SA at approximately 57 years of age, we are going to experience major problems in SA over the next 10 – 30 years with our roads, dams, electricity, water reticulation, building and construction industries, unless we can somehow change the critical Maths and Science situation in SA.

One of the demands of OBE is that teaching should be ‘learner-centred’ rather than ‘teacher-/educator-centred’. This is probably one of the main reasons for the failure of OBE. Let’s not reduce teachers to being a mere ‘facilitator’.

The dinner guests were sitting around the table discussing life. One man, a CEO, decided to explain the problem with education. He
argued, “What’s a kid going to learn from someone who decided his best option in life was to become a teacher?”.

When one exchanges the life of a teacher for that of an office worker there are some sacrifices to be made … such as holidays. I started “scouting” for other employment opportunities while I was still teaching – actually almost a year ago! The first thing I did was revamp my C.V. How you might ask?

After 12 happy (mostly happy) years in teaching, predominantly Special Needs, I have made the transition to the 9 to 5 workplace. No more holidays, but no more marking either! My decision to leave teaching was not an easy one or a quick process. I was very happy in my school, with my colleagues and with the holidays of course!

Teachers go crazy for educational software. I’ve witnessed this first hand. As I sell educational software for EvaluNet, this obviously encourages me.
The crux of the matter however, is that there are too many schools out there who have too many educational software products that they just don’t use – either because they don’t have time, [...]

In my four years of working at EvaluNet, and visiting literally hundreds of schools across the country, I often come across schools that have spent tens of thousands of rands on educational software and hardware that was promised to be of immense value but turned out to be a massively useless white elephant.
The problem lies [...]