Education

Kenyan Education

Ettaleah Update

I’m still in regular contact with Rebecca Muhalya who runs Ettaleah Children’s Home, a bootstrap operation that she started out of compassion for unwanted children in her town.  She lives in Kakamega County in western Kenya, far from Nairobi and the promises of the Kenyan Department of Education.  The KDE web site claims that all primary education in Kenya is free and mandatory; secondary education free but not mandatory.  Well, Rebecca’s primary and secondary age children were sent home after the Christmas holidays because they couldn’t pay the school fees.  So much for free education in Kenya, if true.  I’m checking on it now to find out what the background is on this.

Reading and Favourite Books

Recently came across this web site: http://xpatnation.com/french-childhood-books-and-stories-that-changed-the-way-i-viewed-the-world/ and thought it was so useful, I decided to share it.  I plan to read all the books on the list–and in French!  Might take me a while.

What were your favourite books growing up?  Some of mine were the following: all the Enid Blyton books (a must-read for British kids at one time), Charles Dickens The Christmas Carol, and books by an author called Anthony Buckeridge who wrote all the Jennings books.  When I was 10, I thought the Jennings series to be the funniest books I’d ever read–absolutely brilliant.  There was also a “twins” series of books that told stories of how children in other cultures lived.  So there were the Dutch Twins, the Chinese Twins, the French twins, and so on.  I was fascinated.  One of my favourite books was the atlas!

Online Learning–Coursera and Others

If you’re not looking for a degree but just want to increase your knowledge or follow an interest, online learning for fun is the way to go.  Many prestigious universities around the world are offering full courses on just about every subject under the sun for free.  Yes, free!  Of course, for paying $0, you can’t expect to sit for exams and get marks and degrees, and so on.  These courses are for professionals to upgrade their knowledge and keep up with new discoveries, and also for people like me who now have the time to pursue anything and everything that interests them.  Tomorrow I start Korean language!  I’ve just finished course on Vital Signs (nursing beginners); and am still doing Buddhism and Psychology; Neurology, and other brain courses.  Fabulous way to not feel guilty about sitting at your computer.

 

 

Education that is available to all children, boys and girls, all over the world is something that interests me deeply.  I follow many different schools and stories about education, so now I’m going to blog about them and put all interesting news here.  If anyone has a school they are interested in supporting or in giving news about, you can comment here and we can get a dialogue going about how we can make a difference.

TEACHING METHODOLOGY IN TODAY’S WORLD

To be or not to be–electronic?

I’m tutoring a young man to improve his writing skills and find that his writing is done on a tablet at school!  In grade 5.  Not only that, it has a spell check feature.  How in heaven’s name are kids going to learn how to write and spell if all they do is tap keys and have their spelling electronically checked?  This isn’t the way our brains work.  Well, it will create more work for tutors, so there’s that.

There is also the small problem of their/there/they’re and similar words that spell check can’t handle.  Honestly!