On April Holidays (April 5th-16th), we conducted a camp with 100 students at Nonko Primary School (Rwanda). During this camp, students developed their own projects about Malaria. The school decided to hold an event in honor of World Malaria day, April 25th, to show their best projects. Great Job Nonko!
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Samuel Dusengiyumva, close friend and colleague, began a blog to tell his story during the conflict in Rwanda. Samuel is heroic in his actions and a true inspiration to us all.
Please read follow his touching stories in his blog: http://dusengiyumva.wordpress.com
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This text was the base of this discussion during the Learning chat for April 14, 2010.
I first heard the following joke from Walter Bender:
What do you call someone who speaks 3 or more languages?
Poly-lingual
What do you call someone who speaks 2 languages?
Bilingual
What do you call someone who speaks 1 language?
American
This is only a joke, certainly a caricature, and obviously not 100% true. Yet there is sufficient truth in the joke (or else it wouldn’t be funny) to merit some thinking.
Almost all American children receive language instruction in school beginning around age 8 and continuing through the end of high school, typically in Spanish or French. For those that go on to university, they receive further classes. That is a lot of instruction, with curriculum, qualified teachers, texts, support, and all the things that are alleged to be the essentials for learning.
Think about that. Children receive years and years of language instruction but do not learn the language. How can that be?
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This text was the base of this discussion during the Learning chat for April 8, 2010.
Yesterday was the first day of the genocide memorial period in Rwanda. Words cannot convey the horrors, the pain, the suffering, and the inhumanity. Before I knew the date for this chat, I was intending to launch this chat by trying to focus on how we can use the laptops not merely to teach the same old things on computers instead of with paper and pencil, but how to introduce the more powerful uses of computers. I wanted to focus on the pragmatics of this, not merely to have a chat on abstractions and philosophy. It is rather remarkable that despite the shortcomings in schools, and despite the huge body of evidence of the lack of progress by using computers in this way, this trend continues. This demonstrates the power of what Tyack and Cuban term the “grammar of school.”
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