Schools, Leaders & Teachers

Our schools are always on the verge of emergency preventing the proper attention, support, and guidance to beginning teachers. After few months of trial by fire, many beginning teachers give up on their efforts to be innovative in the classroom.

World Teacher’s Day!

5 October is World Teacher’s Day. Started by UNESCO, it’s a day to commemorate the contribution that teachers have made , and continue to make around the world.  In honour of World Teacher’s Day (Hey, maybe you should ask for the day off!)  I tried to find some interesting teacher statistics :

In the US alone there are more than 6.5 million teachers.

There is a shortage of teachers around the world – it is estimated by UNESCO that we have a 10.3 million teacher shortage, especially in Maths, Science and ICT.

A study by the International Labour organisation pointed out that the ratio of primary pupils to teachers remains three times higher in the Least Developed Countries than in developed ones. In countries such as Benin,   Chad, Congo, Gabon, Malawi,  Mozambique and Senegal, for example, ratios of between 50 or 100 pupils per teacher not uncommon.

In Indonesia , a state school teacher with 15 years experience earns an average US$2,938 annually, while in Peru, all teachers, regardless of the level they teach or their experience, earn little more than US$4,700 a year (ILO).

In the UK, the reason most people cite for entering teaching is a desire to help young people. The third most popular reason is because they were inspired by a former teacher. Money, unsurprisingly, isn’t in the top ten!

Are We Learning for Earning—or for Living?

Question of Value:

Are We Learning for Earning—or for Living?

….. a writer for MSN.com’s Money section defends the cost of a college degree as an investment leading to 60 percent greater lifetime earnings than a high school graduate can expect-an additional million dollars. Hardly a day goes by without some media source listing the 10 or 20 highest-paying careers (and sometimes the lowest-paying, invariably including teaching) and the schooling…..

Contemplating the future..

It’s the beginning of another semester and my second year in the Learning Sciences and Technology doctoral program. I am starting this new academic year very slowly, almost at snails pace, but I am glad I am moving and not totally idle.

So much has happened during this last few months while I was trying to enjoy the long summer vacation with family and loved ones especially with my son and wife. When I try to look back at last three months, my head start spinning and I am forced to shut my eyes just like when I took roller coaster rides. To begin with, I was very excited to continue on Shupe Scholarship for the second year and stop worrying about the funding for sometime. ( Not sure what will happen after this??). While on summer vacation, I had several opportunities  to understand some critical issues related to technology integration and teachers in the Maldives and explore and help them find solutions to some of their problems in technology integration. I spend almost four weeks working with Center for Higher Secondary Education(CHSE) teachers and management to bring technological innovation and to inspire teachers to use technology. This experience gave me some new insights and ideas for my research. I have been thinking about the possible use learning community model for promoting teacher learning for technology integration and read number of exciting research from several countries.  I have had several meetings with Dr. H and Dr. B to align and clarify my interest in understanding teacher learning and technology integration in the Maldives. To go along with this, I realized that the most important factor for Maldives is to provide instructional materials that facilitate technology integration through teacher learning or what is know as “teacher professional development”. I see the most crucial problem in the system from the curriculum and textbooks. Most of the textbooks do not provide any support or guidance for teachers or students to use technology in teaching and learning. The same applies to the curriculum as it lacks innovation. If these teachers are to use technology in their own learning or teaching they need to start from ground up and create their own instructional materials. They need to work as instructional designers.

I’m still in the process of exploring this idea of teachers as instructional designers and hopefully it will all stick in the end. The people I have been working with have been awesome and I really couldn’t be doing this without them. So the future, I feel like the more I do the more things I become interested in. I know I need to narrow down what I’m going to do for my dissertation, which I’m working on, but I find that so many more things come my way and I can’t pass them up.

In my personal life, I finally managed to bring my wife and kid to Lehigh, but unfortunately my wife was not able to cope with the stress and lonesome life here and wanted to go back. She is all set to go home to Maldives and I am hoping I can survive the after sock when they leave me in few weeks time!!

Two students slashed with knife in Allen…

Two students slashed with knife in Allentown school

This is scary news for educators and parents alike.

ALLENTOWN, Pa. – April 19, 2010 (WPVI) — A 16-year-old will be charged for slashing two fellow students with a knife inside an Allentown school Monday morning.

http://abclocal.go.com/wpvi/story?section=news/local&id=7393881

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