The School Corridor Tatler

If you want to learn how to build relationships with learners, go to the gurus in the field of building relationships. Find a school and ask them to take you straight to the foundation phase teachers. There you will find teachers who are passionate and willing to try various strategies to unleash children's capacity to learn. Foundation phase teachers are always hungry for new ways to reach their little ones. Take today's Maths conference run by Foundation phase teachers for eighty two of their peers at neighbouring schools. The presenters were energetic young teachers from Capricorn Primary, a school tucked in an informal settlement and a more experienced, live wire teacher, Cheryl Thomas and Ashley from Kleinberg Primary school in Ocean View, another depressed working class area. I joined Melissa and her Capricorn Primary school team to hear what they are doing in their Maths classes. The topic was on teaching the South African currency. The next minute we were all fir...

Adrian in the foyer at the school, Floreat Primary School, where he has been teaching for the past two years You will agree that even though you love your job, there are days when you wonder whether you are in the right place, don't you? Then there are those days - and hopefully they are the norm - when you ask yourself whether it is really possible to have so much joy; so much pleasure, when those with whom you work make you feel like a mentee on steroids? You know that feeling, right?   Now, today I had one of those "mentee on steroids" days. I was merely going to pay two short courtesy visits to Floreat and Capricorn Primary schools in the heartland of the broader Lavender Hill-Steenberg area. However, each session became a reflective session on the quality education agenda driven at these two schools. I must add that I had not engineered any of the sort. My focus was just going to be on "basic functionality" - checking on textbooks, time tabling, staffing...

Capricorn Primary School celebrated the launch of their Maths hub today, on International Children's Day. This was the perfect day to host this event. Although the focus was on the Maths hub, we were given a snapshot of the integrated, strategic whole school development that is in place. Children performed dance and song items to celebrate their artistic gifts and the guests were taken on a guided tour to show how the school is living the Millennium Development Goals without the rhetoric. Powerful stuff. Many of the guests sat there, in awe and moved by the humility and the unapologetic celebration of the children by the school. The Maths hub The Maths hub was created to deepen the Maths teaching for learners by allowing dual teaching moments for Maths lessons. While half the class learns Maths in their dedicated classroom, the other half of the class goes to the Maths hub to be taught by a Maths teacher there. Nicky Roberts, who is one of the school 's Maths partners and who...