Helping students bridge the gap

OCIETY needs to respect institutions of learning and not allow them to become, as is increasingly common, the targets when anything that goes wrong in communities. By the same token, there is a place for trade unions, but not when they affect children’s education.

Words of wisdom from Dr May Mashego, speaking at the second Mind The Gap conference organised by Women in Business and held at Pietermaritzburg’s Varsity College.

Mashego, wife of former KZN premier and now ANC treasurergeneral Zweli Mkhize, was addressing a plenary session at the conference, which was attended by about 80 delegates, most of them teachers and interested roleplayers.

The event focused on the challenges students faced in making the transition from high school to tertiary institutions and how best to help them prepare for this huge step. Experts in their fields were invited to share their views.

Pulling no punches, Mashego said many of today’s youth were stifling their own potential.

“There is a culture of laziness and of entitlement. Apathy abounds and there’s the sense that they need only cruise through varsity because they expect to find well-paying jobs in government departments afterwards.”

Many students failed to see the abject poverty around them and the benefits education could bring to their communities.

“They appear just to want to be employed as fast as possible. We

Smust encourage them to see beyond that, to remember that only hard work will show results. Parents should play a more constructive role… Unfortunately many of our children’s role models are people making a quick buck – making it look too easy.

“We need to rein (students) in, ground them, teach them to be responsible and accountable.”

Mashego questioned whether teaching remained a calling.

“Are today’s teachers in the right environment to impart knowledge to students? We must acknowledge the challenges in our system. In rural schools, do we have teachers who are confident they can teach maths and science?

“Apart from the pupils accepting responsibility for their own development and acknowledging they have to work hard, teachers, too, need to be in class. They need to understand the subject matter and be committed to pupil development.”

An egg “won’t hatch unless the hen is sitting on it”.

“At hatching time, the chick has to deal with releasing itself from the shell… each of us has to be there to release our children… We need to work together to help them fly. How do we make our children embrace education and know that, without that, there is no true freedom?”

In the session on numerical blocks and overcoming learning barriers to number-based subjects, speaker Ali Engelbrecht, academic co-ordinator at Varsity College, said teachers needed to use methods that promoted active and co-operative learning if they wished to increase students’ retention.

The student profile had changed dramatically, as had the needs and methods of teaching.

“Tertiary-level children are studying for jobs that will be invented only in 10 years. Embrace new technology… If students do interactive learning, they retain about 75 percent. If they explain it to someone else, the retention is increased to 90 percent, so encourage the study buddy system. It works phenomenally well.” It also removed anxiety. Anxiety was common at this level, particularly when taking the stride from high school to university or college.

This, said Varsity College’s IT lecturer Paula Hall, who spoke on “Technology in the classroom: Hindrance or enhancement?”, was why students often preferred communicating by social media to face-toface.

“It’s becoming increasingly difficult to police technology in the classroom.”

The solution was to work with it as much as possible. Future classrooms would probably be digital, but even today students were used to instant gratification. “Their use of technology means they are used to receiving responses in nanoseconds.”

Graham Bennetts, from Maritzburg College, spoke on “Developing your personal learning network”; Varsity College’s Naz Mather on “School Projects versus Assignments: Preparing students for the demands of academic assignment writing”; Lara van Lelyveld on “Time management, accountability and resilience – Three critical factors for student success”; and Learning Identity’s Trish Gatland on “Knowledge retention and the brain: An insight into students’ working patterns.”