Primary School Teacher Quotes

The primary goal of real education is not to deliver facts but to guide students to the truths that will allow them to take responsibility for their lives.

That day, I tell myself that even if I am not getting anything in this life, I will go to school. I will finish my primary and secondary and university schooling and become teacher because I don’t just want to be having any kind voice... I want a louding voice.

We teach brilliance bias to children from an early age. A recent US study found that when girls start primary school at the age of five, they are as likely as five-year-old boys to think women could be 'really really smart'. But by the time they turn six, something changes. They start doubting their gender. So much so, in fact, that they start limiting themselves: if a game is presented to them as intended for 'children who are really, really smart', five-year-old girls are as likely to want to play it as boys - but six-year-old girls are suddenly uninterested. Schools are teaching little girls that brilliance doesn't belong to them. No wonder that by the time they're filling out university evaluation forms, students are primed to see their female teachers as less qualified.

Your schooling is your voice, child. It will be speaking for you even if you didn’t open your mouth to talk. It will be speaking till the day God is calling you come.” That day, I tell myself that even if I am not getting anything in this life, I will go to school. I will finish my primary and secondary and university schooling and become teacher because I don’t just want to be having any kind voice . . . I want a louding voice.

Just because drivers and cooks in Delhi are reading Murder Weekly, it doesn't mean that they are all about to slit their masters' necks. Of course they’d like to. Of course, a billion servants are secretly fantasizing about strangling their bosses — and that’s why the government of India publishes this magazine and sells it on the streets for just four and a half rupees so that even the poor can buy it. you see, the murdered in the magazine is so mentally disturbed and sexually deranged that not one reader would want to be like him — and in the end he always gets caught by some honest, hardworking police officer (ha!), or goes mad and hangs himself by a bedsheet after writing a sentimental letter to his mother or primary school teacher, or is chased, beaten, buggered, and garroted by the brother of the woman he has done in. So if your driver is busy flicking through the pages of Murder Weekly, relax. No danger to you. Quite the contrary. It’s when your driver starts to read about Gandhi and the Buddha that it’s time to wet your pants.

Becoming a footballer is only the first half of the silent prayer a kid offers up to the sky or confides to his teacher in a primary school essay. The second part is the name of the team he wants to play for.

With astonishing consistency, the people of Kültepe and Duttepe all saw the same figures in their dreams at regular intervals: Boys: the female primary-school teacher Girls: Atatürk Men: the Holy Prophet Muhammad Women: a tall, anonymous Western film star Old men: an angel drinking milk Old women: a young postman bringing good news

In fact, second lieutenants were primary-school teachers. Sure, teachers with guns, but a platoon commander was, nonetheless, the guy who sorted out the working day for 30 men under his command, taught their lessons, helped them with their homework, sorted out their petty squabbles and put plasters on their knees when they fell over in the playground.

A Southern Poverty Law Center survey of high school seniors and social studies teachers in 2017 found students struggling on even basic questions about the enslavement of blacks in the United States. Only 8 percent of high school seniors could identify slavery as the primary reason the South seceded from the Union. Nearly half of the students said it was to protest taxes on imported goods.

To THE TEACHER WHOSE INTEGRITY AND PEDAGOGICAL SPIRIT HAVE CREATED A SCHOOL WHEREIN THE IDEAL MAY PROVE ITSELF THE PRACTICAL AND THOSE ENTHUSIASTIC PUPILS WHO LOVE THE LOYALTY AND BRAVERY OF ODYSSEUS THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED

Bryk and Schneider also found that relational trust—between teachers and administrators, teachers and teachers, and teachers and parents—has the power to offset external factors that are normally thought to be the primary determinants of a school’s capacity to serve students well: “Improvements in academic productivity were less likely in schools with high levels of poverty, racial isolation, and student mobility, but [the researchers] say that a strong correlation between [relational] trust and student achievement remains even after controlling for such factors.” 9

Middle-class women, barred from higher education, began to monopolize the profession of primary-school teaching. As teachers, they read more, communicated more, and education itself became subversive of old ways of thinking. They began to write for magazines and newspapers, and started some ladies’ publications. Literacy among women doubled between 1780 and 1840. Women became health reformers. They formed movements against double standards in sexual behavior and the victimization of prostitutes. They joined in religious organizations. Some of the most powerful of them joined the antislavery movement. So, by the time a clear feminist movement emerged in the 1840s, women had become practiced organizers, agitators, speakers.

I’d stand at the front of the classroom, teaching my primary-school charges basic facts about language, life, the world, and I’d find that at the same time I was teaching myself these basic facts all over again—filtered through the eyes and minds of these children. Done the right way, this was a refreshing experience. Profound, even. I got along well with my pupils, their mothers, and my fellow teachers. Still

ODYSSEUS AS A YOUTH AT HOME WITH HIS MOTHER ODYSSEUS THE HERO OF ITHACA ADAPTED FROM THE THIRD BOOK OF THE PRIMARY SCHOOLS OF ATHENS, GREECE BY MARY E. BURT Author of "Literary Landmarks," "Stories from Plato," "Story of the German Iliad," "The Child-Life Reading Study"; Editor of "Little Nature Studies"; Teacher in the John A. Browning School, New York City AND ZENAÏDE A. RAGOZIN Author of "The Story of Chaldea," "The Story of Assyria," "The Story of Media, Babylon, and Persia," "The Story of Vedic India"; Member of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, of the American Oriental Society, of the Société Ethnologique of Paris, etc. CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS NEW YORK CHICAGO BOSTON COPYRIGHT, 1898, BY CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

INTRODUCTION It has long been the opinion of many of the more progressive teachers of the United States that, next to Herakles, Odysseus is the hero closest to child-life, and that the stories from the "Odyssey" are the most suitable for reading-lessons. These conclusions have been reached through independent experiments not related to educational work in foreign countries. While sojourning in Athens I had the pleasure of visiting the best schools, both public and private, and found the reading especially spirited. I examined the books in use and found the regular reading-books to consist of the classic tales of the country, the stories of Herakles, Theseus, Perseus, and so forth, in the reader succeeding the primer, and the stories of Odysseus, or Ulysses, as we commonly call him, following as a third book, answering to our second or third reader.

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the school-to-prison pipeline is a set of seemingly unconnected school policies and teacher instructional decisions that over time result in students of color not receiving adequate literacy and content instruction while being disproportionately disciplined for nonspecific, subjective offenses such as “defiance.” Students of color, especially African American and Latino boys, end up spending valuable instructional time in the office rather than in the classroom. Consequently, they fall further and further behind in reading achievement just as reading is becoming the primary tool they will need for taking in new content. Student frustration and shame at being labeled “a slow reader” and having low comprehension lead to more off-task behavior, which the teacher responds to by sending the student out of the classroom. Over time, many students of color are pushed out of school because they cannot keep up academically because of poor reading skills and a lack of social-emotional support to deal with their increasing frustration.

The introduction to the original book as I found it in Greece contains many interesting points, since it shows that educators in foreign countries, notably in Germany, had come to the same conclusion with our best American teachers. The editor of the little Greek reading-book says: "In editing this work we have made use not only of Homer's 'Odyssey,' but also of that excellent reader which is used in the public schools of Germany, Willman's 'Lesebuch aus Homer.' We have divided the little volume into three parts, the first of which gives a short resumé of the war against Troy and the destruction of that city, the second the wanderings of Odysseus till his arrival in Ithaca, the third his arrival and the killing of the wooers. We have no apology to make in presenting this book to the public as a school-book, since many people superior to us have shown the need of such books in school-work. The new public schools, as is well known, have a mission of the highest importance. They do not aim, as formerly, at absolute knowledge pounded into the heads of children in a mechanical way. Their aim is the mental and ethical development of the pupils. Reading and writing lead but half way to this goal. With all nations the readers used in the public schools are a collection of the noblest thoughts of their authors." The Greek editor had never read the inane rat and cat stories of American school "readers" when he wrote that.

In 1933 things were still being taught in the higher educational establishments which had been proven by science to be false as long ago as 1899. The young man who wishes to keep abreast of the times, therefore, had to accept a double load on his unfortunate brain. In a hundred years' time, the number of people wearing spectacles, and the size of the human brain, will both have increased considerably; but the people will be none the more intelligent. What they will look like, with their enormous, bulging heads, it is better not to try to imagine; they will probably be quite content with their own appearance, but if things continue in the manner predicted by the scientists, I think we can count ourselves lucky that we shall not live to see them! When I was a schoolboy, I did all I could to get out into the open air as much as possible—my school reports bear witness to that ! In spite of this, I grew up into a reasonably intelligent young man, I developed along very normal lines, and I learnt a lot of things of which my schoolfellows learnt nothing. In short, our system of education is the exact opposite of that practised in the gymnasia of ancient days. The Greek of the golden age sought a harmonious education; we succeed only in producing intellectual monsters. Without the introduction of conscription, we should have fallen into complete decadence, and it is thanks to this universal military service that the fatal process has been arrested. This I regard as one of the greatest events in history. When I recall my masters at school, I realise that half of them were abnormal; and the greater the distance from which I look back on them, the stronger is my conviction that I am quite right. The primary task of education is to train the brain of the young. It is quite impossible to recognise the potential aspirations of a child of ten. In old days teachers strove always to seek out each pupil's weak point, and by exposing and dwelling on it, they successfully killed the child's self-confidence. Had they, on the contrary, striven to find the direction in which each pupil's talents lay, and then concentrated on the development of those talents, they would have furthered education in its true sense. Instead, they sought mass-production by means of endless generalisations. A child who could not solve a mathematical equation, they said, would do no good in life. It is a wonder that they did not prophesy that he would come to a bad and shameful end! Have things changed much to-day, I wonder? I am not sure, and many of the things I see around me incline me to the opinion that they have not.

This fear of the upheld mirror in the hand of genius extends to the teaching profession and perhaps to the primary and secondary school teacher most of all. The teacher occupies a particularly anomalous and exposed position in a society subject to rapid change or threatened by exterior enemies. Society is never totally sure of what it wants of its educators. It wants, first of all, the inculcation of custom, tradition, and all that socializes the child into the good citizen. In the lower grades the demand for conformity is likely to be intense. The child himself, as well as the teacher, is frequently under the surveillance of critical, if not opinionated, parents. Secondly, however, society wants the child to absorb new learning which will simultaneously benefit that society and enhance the individual's prospects of success. Thus the teacher, in some degree, stands as interpreter and disseminator of the cultural mutations introduced by the individual genius into society. Some of the fear, the projected guilt feelings, of those who do not wish to look into the mirrors held up to them by men of the Hawthorne stamp of genius, falls upon us. Moving among innovators of ideas as we do, sifting and judging them daily, something of the suspicion with which the mass of mankind still tends to regard its own cultural creators falls upon the teacher who plays a role of great significance in this process of cultural diffusion. He is, to a degree, placed in a paradoxical position. He is expected both to be the guardian of stability and the exponent of societal change. Since all persons do not accept new ideas at the same rate, it is impossible for the educator to please the entire society even if he remains abjectly servile. This is particularly true in a dynamic and rapidly changing era like the present. Moreover, the true teacher has another allegiance than that to parents alone. More than any other class· in society, teachers mold the future in the minds of the young. They transmit to them the aspirations of great thinkers of which their parents may have only the faintest notions. The teacher is often the first to discover the talented and unusual scholar. How he handles and encourages, or discourages, such a child may make all the difference in the world to that child's future- and to the world. Perhaps he can induce in stubborn parents the conviction that their child is unusual and should be encouraged in his studies. If the teacher is sufficiently judicious, he may even be able to help a child over the teetering planks of a broken home and a bad neighborhood. It is just here, however--in our search for what we might call the able, all-purpose, success-modeled student--that I feel it so necessary not to lose sight of those darker, more uncertain, late-maturing, sometimes painfully abstracted youths who may represent the Darwins, Thoreaus, and Hawthornes of the next generation.

Tragant (2006: 239) sums up the evidence: ‘When FL (foreign language) instruction starts early in primary school there seems to be a decline in the learners’ attitudes around the age of ten to eleven; when most students start a foreign language or enter immersion programmes in secondary school, their initial attitudes are positive but their interest soon wanes.’ This may, of course, have a lot to do with the kind of teaching the children are subject to. If teachers are untrained in foreign language instruction for young learners, it’s unlikely that even the small amount of time available will be used to best effect. This is especially the case if instruction mimics the kind of teacher-fronted, transmissive, grammar-focused instruction that characterizes language teaching at secondary and tertiary level. And a transmissive approach is typically the default choice in large classes of (potentially) unruly children.

Some of our findings were surprising in that they challenge some popularly held beliefs about what makes a teacher effective. For example, style of organization for mathematics teaching was not a predictor of how effective teachers were. Whole-class ‘question-and-answer’ teaching styles were used by both highly effective and comparatively less effective teachers. Similarly, individualized work and small-group work were used by teachers across the range of effectiveness. At the school level, setting across an age group was used in schools with both high and low proportions of highly effective teachers. The same published mathematics schemes were used by highly effective and comparatively much less effective teachers. Our findings also raised questions about the sort of mathematical knowledge teachers need in order to be effective. Despite what might be expected, being highly effective was not positively associated with higher levels of qualifications in mathematics. The amount of continuing professional development in mathematics education that teachers had undertaken was a better predictor of their effectiveness than the level to which they had formally studied mathematics.

frustration has flared up over the Common Core initiative, involving the implementation of national reading and maths standards for primary and secondary school children. The Gates Foundation played a central role in bringing the standards to fruition. Spending over $233 million to back the standards, the foundation dispersed money liberally to both conservative and progressive interest groups. The two major teachers' unions, the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, each received large donations, as did the US Chamber of Commerce. Gates himself suggested that a benefit of the standards is that they open avenues towards increasing digital learning. In 2014, Microsoft announced it was partnering with Pearson to load Pearson's Common Core classroom material onto Microsoft's Surface tablet. Previously, the iPad was the classroom frontrunner; the Pearson partnership helps to make Microsoft more competitive.

I know that I don’t want to work somewhere that the kids aren’t the primary focus. I don’t care about statistics and meeting the school’s goals as much as I care about the individual children finding their path to learning what they need to learn. I know that as a teacher, the other stuff should be vitally important, but it’s their learning that I want to be a part of. At the end of the day, I want to know I’ve done everything I possibly could to help them, not everything I could to ensure the statistics are met. That will come with successful learning, but I don’t think it needs to be the focus.

People are multi-layered. Anyone can have a private side that verges on the dark and dangerous. Your doctor could be a sadist. Your primary school teacher could be a paedophile. Your beauty therapist could be a murderer. It could be anything.

I tell myself that even if I am not getting anything in this life, I will go to school. I will finish my primary and secondary and university schooling and become teacher because I don’t just want to be having any kind voice . . . I want a louding voice.

She had been a primary school teacher for thirty-nine years. So much talking. Parents and pupils always wanting something. Now it was her time to sit and read.

Children need to be taught and retaught expected behaviours. This is critical in a secondary school where children are moving between teachers. In a primary school, as children move between activities and environments, it is no less important. It might be comforting to think that we reach a certain age and suddenly know how to behave. The reality is that there is no such age.

This creates a huge waste of talent. Among all those people who drop out somewhere between primary school and college and those who never start school, many, perhaps most, are the victims of some misjudgment somewhere: Parents who give up too soon, teachers who never tried to teach them, the students’ own diffidence. Some of these people almost surely had the potential to be professors of economics or captains of industry. Instead they became daily laborers or shopkeepers, or if they were lucky, they made it to some minor clerical position. The slots that they left vacant were grabbed, in all likelihood, by mediocre children of parents who could afford to offer their children every possible opportunity to make good.

They went on to form NOW and, with that organization, achieve their stated goal of taking down the Patriarchy through a massive coordinated promotion of promiscuity, eroticism, prostitution, abortion and homosexuality. Their proposed method was to infiltrate every institution in the nation: the universities, the media, primary and secondary schools, PTAs, Teachers Unions, city and state governments, the library system, the executive branches of government as well as the judiciaries and legislatures. One of their most desired results was the smashing of every taboo in Western culture. Imagine that! Think of that alone! The normalizing of every taboo: polygamy, bestiality, Satanism, pornography, promiscuity, witchcraft, pedophilia—all activities which rot the human soul and city.

I learnt that in teaching young children the concept of number, you should start with the concrete, then move to the pictorial, before finally representing numbers in the abstract. I learnt that children should be encouraged to articulate their processes, and feed back to each other on whether they are right or wrong, and why. And I learnt that this is so children understand number concepts, not just procedures, because (though not only because) the PSLE tests understanding, not just memorisation. As I was chatting to the professor in the car as she gave me a lift to the station, she also expounded on the importance of teacher-student relationships – 'you can't touch their brain until you have touched their heart'.

In 2019, the Wall Street Journal reported that a primary school in Jinhua required its fifth-grade students to wear EEG headsets, which fed data to their teachers, parents, and the state. The US-based manufacturer and supplier of the devices, BrainCo, had shipped more than twenty thousand of them to China already.13 About an inch wide and made of black plastic, the Focus 1 (or Fu Si) headsets are worn across students’ foreheads. A light in the middle blazes red, yellow, or blue to signal the student’s engagement.14 More intensive brain wave data is sent in real time to the teacher’s computer, whose software generates real-time alerts about students’ attention levels. The teachers overseeing the program believed that brain monitoring substantially improved their students’ engagement. One student agreed, saying he had “become more attentive in class. All of my assignments come back with perfect grades.”15 Other students are less sanguine, having been punished by their parents for their low attention scores.

The modern institution of the presidency is the primary political evil Americans face, and the cause of nearly all our woes. It squanders the national wealth and starts unjust wars against foreign peoples that have never done us any harm. It wrecks our families, tramples on our rights, invades our communities, and spies on our bank accounts. It skews the culture toward decadence and trash. It tells lie after lie. Teachers used to tell school kids that anyone can be president. This is like saying anyone can go to Hell. It's not an inspiration; it's a threat.

He fit here, in this school, much more than she did. She was popular, always on every party list, and always announced, during assembly, as one of the “first three” in her class, yet she felt sheathed in a translucent haze of difference. She would not be here if she had not done so well on the entrance examination, if her father had not been determined that she would go to “a school that builds both character and career.” Her primary school had been different, full of children like her, whose parents were teachers and civil servants, who took the bus and did not have drivers. She remembered the surprise on Obinze’s face, a surprise he had quickly shielded, when he asked, “What’s your phone number?” and she replied, “We don’t have a phone.

My friend’s dad was a teacher in the local public schools, a loyal member of the teachers’ union, and a more dedicated liberal than most: not only had he been a staunch supporter of George McGovern, but in the 1980 Democratic primary he had voted for Barbara Jordan, the black U.S. Representative from Texas. My friend, meanwhile, was in those days a high school Republican, a Reagan youth who fancied Adam Smith ties and savored the writing of William F. Buckley. The dad would listen to the son spout off about Milton Friedman and the godliness of free-market capitalism, and he would just shake his head. Someday, kid, you’ll know what a jerk you are. It was the dad, though, who was eventually converted. These days he votes for the farthest-right Republicans he can find on the ballot. The particular issue that brought him over was abortion. A devout Catholic, my friend’s dad was persuaded in the early nineties that the sanctity of the fetus outweighed all of his other concerns, and from there he gradually accepted the whole pantheon of conservative devil-figures: the elite media and the American Civil Liberties Union, contemptuous of our values; the la-di-da feminists; the idea that Christians are vilely persecuted—right here in the U.S. of A. It doesn’t even bother him, really, when his new hero Bill O’Reilly blasts the teachers’ union as a group that “does not love America.

A British State of Education report found that four-fifths of teachers are worried about children not being prepared for starting primary school (which in the UK happens at age five) due to poor social skills and delayed speech, which many of the teachers attribute to parents’ excessive use of smartphones and tablets. “There is limited parent/child interaction,” one teacher writes, according to the Guardian. “Four-year-olds know how to swipe a phone but haven’t a clue about conversations.” According to the survey, as many as a third of the students who are enrolled in primary school are not ready for the classroom.

local authority has issued educational guidelines suggesting that in order to make transgender children feel more accepted, teachers in primary schools should tell children that ‘all genders’, including boys, can have periods.5 And in the US a Federal bill was passed in May 2019 which redefines sex to include ‘gender identity’.

This fear of the upheld mirror in the hand of genius extends to the teaching profession and perhaps to the primary and secondary school teacher most of all. The teacher occupies, as we shall see a little further on, a particularly anomalous and exposed position in a society subject to rapid change or threatened by exterior enemies. Society is never totally sure of what it wants of its educators. It wants, first of all, the inculcation of custom, tradition, and all that socializes the child into the good citizen. In the lower grades the demand for conformity is likely to be intense. The child himself, as well as the teacher, is frequently under the surveillance of critical, if not opinionated, parents. Secondly, however, society wants the child to absorb new learning which will simultaneously benefit that society and enhance the individual’s prospects of success.

refrain among Finnish teachers captures it nicely: “The work of a child is to play.” In the United States, play is practiced in Montessori schools. In Finland, it’s mandated in the common core for all primary schools. The Finnish government insists that children play, because their policymakers understand that play fosters a love of learning. That’s a value best developed early on—and one that ultimately builds both better cognitive skills and better character skills.

Language had a role to play in all this, the written language of course, but especially the spoken form. Some of the most problematic words created unimaginable difficulties, such as ‘gentleman’, ‘lady’ or ‘miss’, to cite only three. These words were rightly considered significant obstacles in the transition to communism. Each communist country had had its own experience of its language, often strange, as in the case of Albania. This little country, generally famous for its failings and backwardness, took an unexpected approach to these three words. Whereas the word ‘gentleman’ disappeared from currency in the very first phase of socialism, like in the Soviet Union, the word ‘lady’ had a certain staying power. But the nicest surprise turned out to be the word ‘miss’. There was a determined effort to replace it, because in Albanian it carried the affectionate connotations of the word ‘mother’, especially in primary schools. Despite the annoyance it caused, it was used by tens of thousands of little children instead of the word ‘teacher’. Efforts to supplant it failed one after another. The children stubbornly continued to call their teachers ‘miss’. It was this army of countless toddlers that proved indomitable, and the word ‘miss’ with its striking

Schools were designed for obedience training and drill, and they persist today primarily toward those ends, regardless of what school administrators, teachers, parents, and students themselves might want the ends to be. The structural elements of schools—the confinement of students into age-segregated classrooms, the top-down hierarchy of authority, the required curricula, and the uniform systems of testing and grading—all dictate that obedience and memorization are the primary ends. As long as students obey by doing what the teacher tells them to do and memorize what the teacher tells them to memorize, they will pass. The only way to fail is to disobey.

Charlotte Mason was explicit about the need to educate children not only intellectually, but morally, because she shared a vision about the primary purpose of education with the teachers of the past. Modern education has been plagued by utilitarianism for a very long time, and both teachers and students have come to think that schools should teach only what will be useful in the pursuit of a career.

Michelle Phan grew up in California with her Vietnamese parents. The classic American immigrant story of the impoverished but hardworking parents who toil to create a better life for the next generation was marred, in Phan’s case, by her father’s gambling addiction. The Phan clan moved from city to city, state to state, downsizing and recapitalizing and dodging creditors and downsizing some more. Eventually, Phan found herself sleeping on a hard floor, age 16, living with her mother, who earned rent money as a nail salon worker and bought groceries with food stamps. Throughout primary and secondary school, Phan escaped from her problems through art. She loved to watch PBS, where painter Bob Ross calmly drew happy little trees. “He made everything so positive,” Phan recalls. “If you wanted to learn how to paint, and you wanted to also calm down and have a therapeutic session at home, you watched Bob Ross.” She started drawing and painting herself, often using the notes pages in the back of the telephone book as her canvas. And, imitating Ross, she started making tutorials for her friends and posting them on her blog. Drawing, making Halloween costumes, applying cosmetics—the topic didn’t matter. For three years, she blogged her problems away, fancying herself an amateur teacher of her peers and gaining a modest teenage following. This and odd jobs were her life, until a kind uncle gave her mother a few thousand dollars to buy furniture, which was used instead to send Phan to Ringling College of Art and Design. Prepared to study hard and survive on a shoestring, Phan, on her first day at Ringling, encountered a street team which was handing out free MacBook laptops, complete with front-facing webcams, from an anonymous donor. Phan later told me, with moist eyes, “If I had not gotten that laptop, I wouldn’t be here today.

Another program that evolved from the Cultivating Emotional Balance project is Stress Management and Relaxation Techniques (SMART) in Education, an eight-week, 11-session program that involves after-school or evening sessions for a total of 36 contact hours. With the support of the Impact Foundation, this program was developed by Margaret Cullen, a licensed therapist, MBSR instructor, one of the developers of CEB, and a primary facilitator for CEB research.

Primary Science confused her (if man descended form monkeys, how com the monkey that loved with Mama Boy near the church, and has lived with her for so long as anyone remembered, has not evolved and become human?) and grammar baffled her even more (she could never grasp why it was 'Run Run Ran' but 'See Saw Seen'). When she was caned by her teacher for failing to conjugate the verb Fear (she had said 'Fear Fore Forn'), she decided that school was not for her. There was no logic in what she read, all the teaching seemed designed both to compound her problems and to confound her. When she asked questions, her teachers told her off for being disruptive. How could it be 'Tear Tore Torn'? Change the first letter and the rules changed completely! How was she supposed to remember all of that? 'See Saw Sawn'. It was an unrealistic demand. And on top of that there was the illogicality of mathematics to deal with. Finding solutions to abstract questions that had nothing to do with real life. She did not see how any of this would help her, how it would help anybody really.

mouth to talk. It will be speaking till the day God is calling you come.” That day, I tell myself that even if I am not getting anything in this life, I will go to school. I will finish my primary and secondary and university schooling and become teacher because I don’t just want to be having any kind voice . . . I want a louding voice.

The Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009, has made it every Indian child’s right to access full-time elementary education of satisfactory and equitable quality until the age of fourteen. Estimates vary, but India has a shortage of almost half a million teachers and over eight million primary school-age children still do not attend school.

Admiral Tait Primary was a school that people from my home neighbourhood could only dream of. The teachers knew what they were doing and the library had the right books for my daughter to read. It was expensive though, and I dreaded what would happen when she finally reached high school. If I didn't get my life sorted soon, she'd be forced into a former Group B school in the high-density areas: a sure way to flunk and get pregnant before she was nineteen. There were nights where I couldn't sleep worrying that my baby would not have the sort of future she deserved. [74]

Dark, was banned by the Irish state censor for obscenity. The story was set, as so much of McGahern's later fiction would be, in isolated rural Ireland and dealt with the bleak consequences of parental and clerical child abuse. On the instructions of the Archbishop of Dublin, McGahern was sacked from his job as a primary school teacher. He later left the country. Despite these apparent setbacks, McGahern's literary friends reassured him that all this was a wonderful opportunity in terms of publicity and sales. Remember Joyce and Beckett being forced overseas? This was Irish literary history repeating itself, and preparations were soon being made to mount a campaign against the anachronistic and widely derided censorship laws with McGahern as the figurehead. Sign up for the Bookmarks email Read more McGahern agreed that the situation was indeed absurd, and says that even as an adolescent reader he had nothing but contempt for the censorship board.

Education in Italy is paid for by the state. All children must attend school between the ages of six and 14. Most go to local state schools, although there are some private schools where parents pay for their children’s education. Children leave primary school at the age of 11, taking an exam before entering middle school. At 14, it is possible to leave school altogether, but most pupils take another exam to qualify for further education. According to their skills and interests they might choose to continue with academic studies at a liceo (grammar school), or they may prefer technical studies, taking an arts course at an academy, or training to become a teacher. Pupils in further education can take an exam which, if they pass, entitles them to a place at a university. There are some government grants for university students, although most of them pay about 200,000 lire ($160) each year in fees. In recent years, the Italian government has made a great effort to improve standards of education and to make sure that everyone learns to read and write. However, the northern, more industrial part of the country still has better equipped schools than the less populated south.

The school system Nursery School 3 to 6 years Primary School 6 to 11 years Middle School 11 to 14 years Academic Studies 14 to 18 years Technical Institute 14 to 18 years Teacher-Training College 14 to 18 years Arts Academy 14 to 18 years University 18 years and over

When we first went to Provence, I assumed I would be observing a different culture. With attachment in mind, it became obvious to me that it is much more than a different culture — I was witnessing a culture at work and a culture that worked. Children greeted adults and adults greeted children. Socializing involved whole families, not adults with adults and children with children. There was only one village activity at a time, so families were not pulled in several directions. Sunday afternoon was for family walks in the countryside. Even at the village fountain, the local hangout, teens mixed with seniors. Festivals and celebrations, of which there were many, were all family affairs. The music and dancing brought the generations together instead of separating them. Culture took precedence over materialism. One could not even buy a baguette without first engaging in the appropriate greeting rituals. Village stores were closed for three hours at midday while schools emptied and families reconvened. Lunch was eaten in a congenial manner as multigenerational groupings sat around tables, sharing conversation and a meal. The attachment customs around the village primary school were equally impressive. Children were personally escorted to school and picked up by their parents or grandparents. The school was gated and the grounds could be entered only by a single entrance. At the gate were the teachers, waiting for their students to be handed over to them. Again, culture dictated that connection be established with appropriate greetings between the adult escorts and the teachers as well as the teachers and the students. Sometimes when the class had been collected but the school bell had not yet rung, the teacher would lead the class through the playground, like a mother goose followed by her goslings. While to North American eyes this may appear to be a preschool ritual, even absurd, in Provence it was selfevidently part of the natural order of things. When children were released from school, it was always one class at a time, the teacher in the lead. The teacher would wait with the students at the gate until all had been collected by their adult escort. Their teachers were their teachers whether on the grounds or in the village market or at the village festival. There weren't many cracks to fall through. Provençal culture was keeping attachment voids to a minimum.

second model, that of a technical or trade school, would conceive the primary task of psychoanalytic education to be the learning of a clearly defined skill or trade, with no emphasis on artistic creativity. Teachers

The first basic income pilot in a developing country was implemented in the small Namibian village of Otjivero-Omitara in 2008–9, covering about 1,000 people.40 The study was carried out by the Namibian Basic Income Grant Coalition, with money raised from foundations and individual donations. Everyone in the village, including children but excluding over-sixties already receiving a social pension, was given a very small basic income of N$100 a month (worth US$12 at the time or about a third of the poverty line), and the outcomes compared with the previous situation. The results included better nutrition, particularly among children, improved health and greater use of the local primary healthcare centre, higher school attendance, increased economic activity and enhanced women’s status.41 The methodology would not have satisfied those favouring randomized control trials that were coming into vogue at the time. No control village was chosen to allow for the effects of external factors, in the country or economy, because those directing the pilot felt it was immoral to impose demands, in the form of lengthy surveys, on people who were being denied the benefit of the basic income grants. However, there were no reported changes in policy or outside interventions during the period covered by the pilot, and confidence in the results is justified both by the observed behaviour, and by recipients’ opinions in successive surveys. School attendance went up sharply, though there was no pressure on parents to send their children to school. The dynamics were revealing. Although the primary school was a state school, parents were required to pay a small fee for each child. Before the pilot, registration and attendance were low, and the school had too little income from fees to pay for basics, which made the school unattractive and lowered teachers’ morale. Once the cash transfers started, parents had enough money to pay school fees, and teachers had money to buy paper, pens, books, posters, paints and brushes, making the school more attractive to parents and children and raising the morale and, probably, the capacity of its teachers. There was also a substantial fall in petty economic crime such as stealing vegetables and killing small livestock for food. This encouraged villagers to plant more vegetables, buy more fertilizer and rear more livestock. These dynamic community-wide economic effects are usually overlooked in conventional evaluations, and would not be spotted if cash was given only to a random selection of individuals or households and evaluated as a randomized control trial. Another outcome, unplanned and unanticipated, was that villagers voluntarily set up a Basic Income Advisory Committee, led by the local primary school teacher and the village nurse, to advise people on how to spend or save their basic income money. The universal basic income thus induced collective action, and there was no doubt that this community activism increased the effectiveness of the basic incomes.

I would describe my primary school experience as being an environment where I did not receive the support that I needed in order to achieve my full potential’. (Questionnaire respondent five)   ‘terrible, I spent the majority of primary school feeling inferior. I would work twice as hard as others but never get anywhere.’ (Questionnaire respondent eight)   ‘my teachers didn’t really pick up on it at all… so I didn’t really receive a lot of support for it’. (Interview participant).

Liked Following Message More Contact Us .. Status Photo / VideoOffer, Event + . Write something... . 1 Draft Created Saturday, November 5 at 4:05pm. See draft. . The Year of “Alphabetization In the Cuban post revolution era it was at “Che” Guevara who promoted educational and health reforms. 1961 became the “Year of Cuban Literacy” or the “Campaña Nacional de Alfabetización en Cuba,” meaning the “Year of Alphabetization in Cuba.” The illiteracy rate had increased throughout Cuba after the revolution. Fidel Castro in a speech told prospective literacy teachers, “You will teach, and you will learn,” meaning that this educational program would become a two-way street. Both public and private schools were closed two months earlier, for the summer than usual, so that both teachers and students could voluntarily participate in this special ambitious endeavor. A newly uniformed army of young teachers went out into the countryside, to help educate those in need of literacy education. It was the first time that a sexually commingled group would spend the summer together, raising the anxiety of many that had only known a more Victorian lifestyle. For the first time boys and girls, just coming of age, would be sharing living conditions together. This tended to make young people more self-sufficient and thought to give them a better understanding of the Revolution. It is estimated that a million Cubans took part in this educational program. Aside from the primary purpose of decreasing illiteracy, it gave the young people from urban areas an opportunity to see firsthand what conditions were like in the rural parts of Cuba. Since it was the government that provided books and supplies, as well as blankets, hammocks and uniforms, it is no surprise that the educational curriculum included the history of the Cuban Revolution, however it made Cuba the most literate countries in the world with a UNESCO literacy rate in 2015, of 99.7%. By Captain Hank Bracker, author of the award winning book “The Exciting Story of Cuba,” Follow Captain Hank Bracker on Facebook, Goodreads, his Website account and Twitter.

The regular public schools ... have become more secular ... and more value-free. The education profession's cherished "progressivism" is part of the reason. And the close scrutiny of fierce watchdog groups ... has made schools and educators gun-shy. In recent years, however, perhaps the strongest influences have been postmodern relativism and multiculturalism, which first trickled, then gushed from university campuses into primary and secondary school classrooms. If scholars, teachers, and those who train them abjure fixed distinctions between right and wrong, if all judgments are said to depend upon one's unique perspective or background rather than universal standards of truth, beauty, or virtue, if every form of family, society, and polity is deemed equal to all other forms, and if every group's mores and values must be taught ... who is there (in school) to help children determine what it means to be an American, how to behave, and what to believe?

My primary school teacher always pointed out one learner as the cream. She said the rest of us where a piece of shit that would'nt make it. Last year, she read one of my published books and sent a message expressing her excitement

Reinforcing the notion that a primary purpose of school is for students to develop conceptual understanding of complex material, the teacher conveys that it is not sufficient for students to be able to go through the motions, to follow a procedure without understanding why. No—they must develop conceptual understanding; it must build from one idea to another, and students should be able to explain to the teacher, or to another student, why something is the way it is.

A key decision made early on was to build a school that would help us kindergarten through twelfth grade. No other school in the county has this range of students, and few public schools anywhere in the country do either. indeed, at one point, the planners considered building only an elementary and middle school, and perhaps create is sattelite of one of the nearby high schools within the town. According to Rosen, they went for the K-12 idea for 2 primary reasons. First, a lot of educational research has found advantages in keeping siblings together in school. There is continuity for students, teachers, and families. Plus, parents can devote more time to volunteering at a single school. Second, there was a feeling that resources could be shared among the grades. For instance, if the high school had an excellent physics teacher, from time to time that teacher could also work with children in the lower grades.

While there may be Christian Sunday School teachers and other significant people in a child’s life, parents must never go back on their God-given responsibility to be the primary source of religious instruction for their children.52

26 March 1958 Nehru reiterated: Let us remember that a school is essentially the teacher, not the building. The teacher, without any apparatus or building, can function as a school. This is an obvious proposition and yet it is ignored. I think the time has come, indeed it came long ago, for us to decide, definitely and positively, to have schools in our village without buildings, and to spend more on the teacher and on equipment. I think we can do without buildings completely for the primary schools, though, of course, a building is desirable where possible. But let us compromise on this issue and have the smallest structure, just to keep books and equipment, the classes being held in the open… Our climate is such that, for the great part of the year, it is easy and indeed healthier to sit in the open or under some shady tree. Perhaps the monsoon period is the only time when it is difficult to sit in the open. Let us have our school holidays during the monsoons. The main thing is the teacher. Let us train him better and give him a higher salary and some amenities. The rest will follow. (JNMF 2010; pp.822–3)

When Masha's not talking, I go into this other world I have, of living in the village with Slava. I'm not Together with Masha there, and Slava and me are both Healthy. He works as an accountant and I'm a science teacher in the primary school. I can picture it all in my head: the stove, the tables and chairs, the rug on the wall, the books we have and the vegetable plot in the garden. I have all these different situations I think up and I go through the conversations, word by word, in my head. It's my other world. My real world.

Hannah wanted to put the next day's work on the blackboard. This would mean that she needn't turn her back on the class first thing, which is as unwise in junior teaching as in lion-taming.

After a couple of hours she breathlessly put aside her palette knife and asked, ‘Did you ever experiment with your handwriting?’ I thought about this as Jacinta poured herself a glass of milk from a carton. ‘I suppose so. Once I wasn’t being forced to use joined up writing with a fountain pen any more. Why?’ ‘You sent me a few of my old exercise books from school after you cleared out Mum’s place a few years ago. Do you remember?’ I told her I didn’t. Maybe David had posted them to her. ‘When I was at primary school I wrote using the whole wide line. The capitals touched the top and everything was balloony, you know, round and chipper. But my handwriting in the later exercise books, I think I must have been fourteen or so, was completely truncated like inky footprints made by ants. I could hardly make out what I’d written. I don’t know how the teachers deciphered it. I still don’t quite know what comes naturally when I write. I don’t have a style. It changes. Sometimes it’s all swallowed up and at other times I write using tall, spindly letters. Maybe it’s the pen and paper I’m using. That makes a difference.’ ‘Yeah, it does,’ I agreed. ‘I hate thin-ruled paper.’ She took a gulp from her milk. The light was behind her. I couldn’t see her features. Her hair was pulled back into a low ponytail like the one she wore to school for years. I hated Mum. I hated Pete. I hated Gavin. I hated myself. Jacinta said, ‘When I paint I have a signature. It’s my own and I don’t have to be afraid.’ ‘I’m sorry, Jacinta. I’m so sorry. I didn’t know what to do.’ ‘I don’t blame you. But I thought you’d forgotten. Or forgiven. Or a bit of both.’ ‘A bit of both,’ I admitted. She was quiet, began to clean up. I didn’t help. I just watched. And eventually she turned back to me and said, ‘How’s Zoey?