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 ISSUES IN EDUCATION - COMMENTARY


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The Teacher's Gift




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Teachers: 6 ways to maintain a "good" relationship with your students

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Photo credit: pixabay.com You are in a noble profession, or so you've been told. Your job is very important. You are charged with moulding young and not so very young minds to accept and nurture what is "good" and so be a credit to society. Because, society needs "good" people if it is to surge upward in its development.  You're supposed to achieve this noble goal, in spite of whatever resistance/challenge that you meet in the classroom - students who are aggressive, disrespectful, resistant to learning what you are teaching them in the classroom... Some days the challenge of finding the right balance between allowing your students to be students, thus keeping them always happy, and getting them to perform up to the standard that you know they can perform weighs heavily on you. I have been a teacher for more than 25 years and I have survived many of these days. On one such day, I thought up this "tongue in cheek" list, intended to stir
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Improving School Leadership in Ten Easy Steps

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Robert Frost, late American poet aptly said,  "education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or self-confidence". Recently, the news media in a society that will remain unnamed reported that a male school principal was in a fight with a female student. Witnesses, however, reported that there were actually no blows thrown by the principal, in spite of his best efforts to box the student into oblivion. It was a super human effort by those who restrained the principal to keep him in check, as for a moment, he let his mask slip - the mask of being a decent, educated man, in charge of his faculties and who weilded much power - and became the man that the environment in which he grew up moulded, a base human being like many of us who does not turn the other cheek in the face of provocation. It would seem that the student does not respect anyone or anything. She has a reputation for being unruly, foul mouthed, aggressive,  uncooperative, am
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The Magician, the Cheerleader, the Martyr and 7 others: Which one are you?

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‘The man is in the coffin,’ she muttered, staring into space.   ‘How do you feel today, Ms. Brown?’ the man asked. ‘The man is in the coffin,’ she replied. ‘What is your name?’ he asked. ‘The man is in the coffin,’ she repeated. ‘Ok. Can you write your name?’ he pressed her. ‘The man is in the coffin,’ she reiterated. Six words. She was left with only six words: ‘The man is in the coffin.’ When commentators are not satisfied with the quality of the work that teachers do in the classroom and the output of the education system generally, they tend to make the mistake of presenting teachers as a homogeneous mass.  'Teachers are not doing a good job,' they say. Or, 'teachers need to take the job of teaching more seriously than they do'. Or, 'teachers are the reason why students perform poorly in school'. The list of criticisms thrown at the teacher is long. What these commentators fail to highlight is the fact that teachers differ in many
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