Cricket and Curriculum
on Kate in Guyana (Guyana), 29/Apr/2010 19:26, 34 days ago
Here's signing off for this week, as I am off to Linden for the day tomorrow, then from there I'll be going straight on to my weekend trip to Rockstone on the Essequibo River. Let's hope for some fine weather. The 20 20 cricket starts tomorrow, so there is quite a fatalistic notion that it will rain. We are going to the cricket on Monday afternoon, which is England v West Indies. So I expect my next blog will be Tuesday.We had a busy day at work yesterday - I was assisting in facilitating a workshop for head teachers of special schools about curriculum. At the moment there is no curriculum guide for special schools, they just adapt things from the nursery or primary guides as they see fit. The problem is that the curriculum guides here are extremely prescriptive, and teachers feel they must follow them to the letter, or they will be criticised. So all children are being taught the same thing in the same way at the same level throughout the country. This causes problems for children in mainstream schools getting left behind as you can imagine. We were working yesterday on the idea of having a core curriculum as well as an auxiliary curriculum, for instance having sign language or Braille tuition. A vast amount of expertise and work will be needed to get all this down on paper, but I guess that a start can be made.I'm still hoping to get the Unicef funding through for the SEN training days which start May 10th, but I've now agreed with my manager that if we don't have funding agreed by Monday 3rd then we will cancel, and try for the June training dates. If not then I'll just keep going round the schools myself, encouraging and cajoling... I enjoy the trips out!