FINALLY..ongle real yaadie learn dis a primary school

[evanovitch]

Back to primary school poetry ... i wonder what poems they are teaching in school in Jamaica these days?

and poetry was not taught with passion it was taught as a memory rote... imagine MG or you teaching children "Spanish Needle"....to a group of young children?

But to me it was just taught as a lesson uin rout learning...and it was the attractiveness of the cadance not im

Think of Claude Macay... who he was, When he was born, what he did ... and the last line of that poem... do you of the exile dream ? Out of that poem we could have been taught so much ..

i never understood when he called the Spanish needle dainty.. now i do.. it was a food supplement for pigs and rabbits... But as a kid having to see it as a weed among my red peas or getting the little little brown stems seed on my clothes it was a nusiance.. but compare the spanish needle flower with a rose or any other flower in north and it is fragile ethereal...

Did those that teach us actually reaslise what a march they lost ?

my experience of Jamaican teachers is such that we learnt in spite of the teacher not because of them.... they had such brilliant source material and they never inspired., at least few of mine did... well may 2!.. I know there may be the children of Jamaican teachers on here but i suspect if u look at their teaching methods critically they may fall short of inspirational......and Blu will no doubt will say the teachers are right and compare them to New York...

ur time in Jamaica saw some unfortunate influences to hear u tell ur story….every teacher i was fortunate to have, from primary thru HS, actually taught….we may have stood under the tree in the shade , learning at primary school, but reciting aloud, taught us diction, pronunciation, punctuation etc in addition to memorization….dictation wich was the teacher reading aloud n our having to write what she was saying, again taught us things like use of punctuation…it reinforced what had been taught re using said while reading aloud….comma showing pause as opposed to full stop being just dat…stop at the end….mental arithmetic whereby we had 5 minutes to do 100 sums using the methods they had taught…e.g wen multiplying by 25, add two zeroes n divide by 4….rounding up 4.95 to 5, doing the multiplication then subtracting the other number times 5 from the total to realize the answer…..things along that line have stayed with me thru out life….i realize that the little hill in St Andrew that i called home had a phenomenal group of teachers who came out of Shortwood , Mico etc in that time period….i ongle have to look to people like Dr Terrence Forrester OD n Musgrave Gold Medal winner to just name one of so many i could name to prove that my primary school n the methods of the teachers then bore fruit….ours inspired n they never let absence of material hinder their finding to way to bring us knowledge

[Wahalla]

Evan I do 3 years primary school class..I attend two different primary schools. One of which had in the 30 years I think 1 years anyone passed a CEE..'.3 years any one passed the technical school exam....

The first was technical exam pass, was a exceptional individual, who went to STETHs....but had been there for only 1 year'..and apparently no one could remember any one ever passing a exam...u will remember that exam passes were printed in the gleaner..so the entire community found out the same time...it was an event for 5 or 6 communities it served...'

I looked at its record in GSat assessment this year ad itas out of 4100 it had average score of 1100...

I know this wasn't dum students.....bad teaching which remains the same....note this is not the worst school....

So to me I simply can't reconcile this...

By luck I mmanaged to convince my parents to change me.. I walllked the 7 miles each. Way and out of a cohort of 100 7 passed.......

I owemthe fact to parents who home school me...and a brillliant friiend who took the time to teach me (odd I am accused of being that person)...so to me the fact it took 20 years to understand SpanishNeedle....

Do u see me by the bushes...
Catching crayfishh
Neath the stone


My point is support ed by the gleaner assesmmennt...

Not bitter but nearly every day I meet people who are llless competent than my felllllow schoollllers who failed to makkke the cut..


And it bothers me thhhat there are those in power who don't understand this waste..

[evanovitch]

note that i don't negate ur experience…i merely show that elsewhere, there were teachers who used what they had n did a remarkable job….i learnt poetry appreciation in the process of learning to recite the poems they exposed us to…..it was in primary school that i learned that famous poem MENDING WALL n the meaning of that line, GOOD FENCES MAKE GOOD NEIGHBOURS….i.e. in addition to memorizing we were taught to analyze the meaning etc…..n the teachers back then had wat dem called Senior Cambridge or some such….n if they were able, the went to Mico, etc…but they were self taught in terms of reading n exposing themselves so that they could in turn expose their students….maybe it was the post Independence fervour but i realize i really lucked out…my primary scored passes in numbers that rivalled any town school…and town living was suppose to be superior at the time….snicker…some work n rise despite their initial deficiencies as exhibited by ur example n some add on to the fortunate start they had….the beauty of both circumstances is that they were added to

[Wahalla]

i think then ur school was exceptional.....
As the only assement was teh passing of CEE for primary schools for decades then schools in ST E was singular failing as at MC only running at 45 % of students were from ST E....and give that it was only boy schools for CEE intake in our era then it means that the % pass of CEE was in single diget percentiles in ST E....Bear in mind the lower mobility then....