Month: May 2013

Why we went global when it came to our daughter’s education

 When the latest South African high school graduation exams results were announced in January of this year amid a furore of expert criticism, I felt I’d made the right decision in moving my daughter into an international education system.

As a teacher myself, I have witnessed what many believe to be falling standards in education and the challenges this brings to students in their first year at university. A low pass rate for the graduation exam means that many students qualify to go onto university but discover when they get there, that they do not have the right skills to cope at that higher level. It is a real issue in this country that of every 1,000 children who start out in grade one in national education, only around five make it through tertiary education.

I’m fortunate that in my professional career I was introduced to the educational route that is also proving successful for my daughter. I started my career in government schools, but my teaching style didn’t always suit the official style. A school which offers qualifications from Cambridge International Examinations opened in my local area in 1999 and it didn’t take me long to realise that this was a syllabus I wanted to teach.

My friends teaching at the College persuaded me to join the team in 2001 and it was the best decision I have ever made for my career.  The qualifications suit my teaching style and I thoroughly enjoy the freedom of being able to develop my students and their attributes and interests as part of a bigger picture.

As my daughter approached high school age, she was also increasingly looking for a school environment which would give her more freedom, encourage creativity and prepare her well for university.

With this in mind, in her grade 8 year, we enrolled my daughter at the school where I teach – Ridgeway College in Louis Trichardt, Limpopo Province.  In recent years, she has studied a number of international qualifications, first Cambridge IGCSE and now Cambridge International AS Level. The benefits of these international qualifications are manifold.

Cambridge qualifications are recognised by universities all over the world – they provide students with skills they need to flourish in tertiary education. Locally, our universities are also becoming increasingly aware of the exceptionally high standard of education that Cambridge students enter into university with. Students are equipped with universal thinking skills, an analytical perspective and an ability to adapt to any change in their environment. They are taught communication skills, self-discipline, independent thinking and the ability to work on their own as well as a level of confidence that makes them stand head and shoulders above their peers in other systems.

Furthermore, international qualifications prepare young people for the world at large, above and beyond university.  I feel my daughter has been provided with a holistic, flexible education that enables her to cope in a workplace that – in today’s world – is fast moving and ever changing. She’ll be able to cope with new situations and be able to face challenges and move beyond her comfort zone. What’s more, emigration is definitely featuring more strongly in young people’s future plans than ever. By providing our children with the opportunity to do an international education, we are enabling them to have a wider choice for career options or studying overseas.

I feel certain that my daughter is much better prepared than her peers to cope with the ever-increasing demands of the outside world, because she has a set of skills that makes her adaptable and able to cope with pressure and large volumes of work.  Her level of confidence has shot up as she has been given the skills to communicate, to analyse and to problem solve in every aspect of her academic and personal, life.

I fully believe that our choice of qualifications have helped my daughter work towards achieving her long-held career dream of becoming an Air Traffic Controller.

In Grade 10, she completed work experience at the Air Force Base, coming home at the end of the first day having memorized the call signs of the fighter aircraft pilots, and being able to read and interpret both the weather station’s data and the radar system. She received a glowing appraisal for her confidence and her ability to analyse, interpret and apply information totally new to her.

As a teacher, I’ve witnessed how an international education can steer a student towards success but it’s really as a mother that I have experienced the full impact of these qualifications on all aspects of a young person’s life and I look forward to watching my daughter continue to reap the benefits for many years to come.

By Annaline Smit, mother and teacher at Ridgeway College, Louis Trichardt, Limpopo Province, South Africa

Online short story competition gets language students writing

During an economic crisis, resources (books, budgets, infrastructure) are limited but high standards and qualifications are required so that learners can survive on the job market. Can the use of technology help learners and teachers overcome this problem? If so, how?

Why not try the Extremely Short Story Competition (ESSC) for a fun, free, online writing activity for your students?

The project is the brainchild of Peter Hassall a professor at Zayed University Dubai who has run the competition for several years.

Language students have to write a short story on any topic they like in exactly 50 words and enter it on the ESSC administrative website. They can add a title which is not included in the 50 words and even a visual, if they wish, but it must be the exact number of words. The competition is free and students can enter as many stories as they like, but they must undertake that the work they enter is their own without help from anybody else.

The competition can be run through language schools who have to find prizes and arrange a prize-winning ceremony, but that offers great scope for publicity, coverage by local media, and exhibitions of students’ work. Basically the administration (processing, editing, judging by an international panel of judges) is taken over by the website which relieves the teachers of any work: all they have to do is encourage students to write in English. The ESSC can be done as a class activity or done privately at home, especially where students get enthusiastic about expressing their thoughts in the target language on any topic. There are a lot of exercises available too to help language teachers make use of the activity.

The material on the website www.zu.ac.ae/facets shows where this writing activity originates. It is also the best website for seeing the potential of the project. The Facets material (in fact an anthology of short stories produced with sponsorship as a result of a recent run of the competition) shows the use of nicknames to provide anonymity so entrants can express themselves freely, a feature that is important in the Arab World, as many of the writers are female.

As an international project, the ESSC has also been run for several years in Japan with high school students. With translation of the short stories, there is a rich source of teaching material as well as displayable material to show how good the students are.

So why not try the ESSC for your language students? For more information, contact pjhassall@gmail.com or kcollins@wanadoo.fr if you want to give it a try.

After teaching in Saudi Arabia, UK, and Singapore, Ken Collins acquired extensive ESOL teaching experience. The last part of his working career was in Dubai where he eventually became Head of the Centre for ESL at the University of Dubai until 2007. He was also Middle East consultant for EAQUALS (Evaluation & Accreditation of Quality Language Services). He now is Project Co-ordinator for the Extremely Short Story Competition in Europe and resides in Southwest France.