Tag: education
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Con Templation
The word “temple” comes from the Greek “templum/temenos” – “to cut away with a scythe”; reminiscent of Chronos, the Titan God of Time brandishing his scythe, later morphed into the incarnation of death. The temple is literally the place to put time apart from reflection away from it all. Glorification of the human condition reflects…
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“Children these days…”
Among the many silly platitudes you hear from the average Maltese Joe is the endless tirade against the “children these days” (“It-tfal tal-llum”). How spoilt they are, and how they know no suffering, and so on and so forth. I often wonder if the people spouting such nonsense are aware that children do not spout…
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Setting Them Up to Watch Them Fall
The system is failing; the amount of content that is expected across the board, even without considering the various individual needs of the students to interact with the curriculum, is laughable. Does anyone out there know or realize that a lot of what my generation was expected to know at the secondary level is now…
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…with a Whimper.
I have said before that I hold no faith in the unions representing education locally. And people wonder why we are not taken seriously; I find these to be an overall embarrassment to whatever education is. Here we are, meaning to empower the educator to better perform what they do while indulging in a veritable…
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Holding the Standard….
Those who do not work in education would not know that the situation is far from good, (perhaps even because we are afraid to complain about it publicly for one reason or another) and this is not the fault of the children in it, and very often not of the schools themselves, some of who…
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Inclusion Is…
Inclusion is not a trophy for participating. Inclusion is not just representation. Inclusion is not hand-waving your presence that you are there. Inclusion is not having pity Inclusion is not putting other identities down in order to promote yours. Inclusion is not an unfair advantage over the others. Inclusion is not dumbing down everything so…
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Access for All…Terms and Conditions Apply
A lot of effort has been made in helping disadvantaged students achieve some sort of grade in recent years. However, as an LSE I have found that certain access arrangements have still been putting these children at a disadvantage. Most glaringly obvious is the fact that there is no faculty to allow under an official,…
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Not for Employment but for Life
John Dewey once wrote that education and experience cannot be automatically equated to one another, and that is absolutely true to some extent. Education in itself is useful change that occurs in experience, the encounter with a different other (see Piaget and his theory of schemas). Non-useful change can be turned into useful if a…
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Sectoral Agreement Woes and Whoas
The meeting regarding the sectoral agreement for educators in Malta is fast approaching and my fellow educators and I have already started working ourselves up. Without a shadow of a doubt, a lot of the discourse started floating around wage raises and finances, and numbers of which I have so far made it absolutely clear…
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The Powerless Educator, part 2
A powerless educator is an unhappy and unhealthy educator. This is not to say that an educator should enjoy absolute freedom; that is a privilege that nobody in reality has or should have. There is freedom for, and freedom to, and a delicate balance in between that cannot realistically be broken without unfortunate consequences. But…
Typical Topical 