I am back again, not that I went anywhere before, just been mad busy and ain’t nobody got time for no blog. I am not here to put up a funny post not as if my posts are usually funny, there won’t be any long disclaimers either, except all grammatical errors are mine and I apologize for not using spell check before putting this out.
I am sure you lot read my post on Efe’s blog chronicling my 2012, well one aspect of my work, the NGO just got bumped up and I’m even considering quitting my regular 9-5 to focus on this.
The project started off with one school in 2011 (Kuramo Primary School, VI) where we worked with 18 teachers for a period of 8 months every Saturday. The teachers reduced in number after training and evaluation of their soft skills and technical abilities, now we’re stuck with 8 dedicated teachers to run the project/clubhouse. At the clubhouse, the children are allowed to use the computers which ranges from the OLPC XO, the Intel’s CMPC and the Encipher tablets after school hours (between 2-4PM, Mondays through Fridays). The whole idea is to expose the children to screen-based technology, hence the variations of the computers available in the clubhouse.
In 2012 we moved to a school on the mainland (Lagos Mainland Local Government Primary School, Ebutte Meta) teacher training was for 6weeks and was completed towards the end of last year and we decided to start working with the children
The children naturally are faster learners than teachers, it’s no surprise that a handful of them picked up what we taught the teachers in six weeks in less than two weeks. We also discovered something really disturbing, 80% of the children we worked with can’t read. Debo gave them a simple task to write a sentence on what profession they want to take on when they became adults and only 5/30 students typed something meaningful. Almost all of them could not spell “want”, when they were eventually taught to spell it, they typed things like; “I want to be a soja” another typed “I wants to be a loya“. I’m sure you know what they meant, but for 10 – 14 year olds! *sigh*
This is quite appalling and really makes me sad, to think these children are in primary 5. These children are meant to be the future of Nigeria for gossake!.
Myself and the team (L4L) had a brainstorming session to find a way of improving this situation. The temporary solution is to start Saturday classes for these children to improve on their reading and writing skills as well as their phonics.
Three more schools are about to be added to the existing schools, bringing the total to five. We are pretty stretched on resources and would love young, energetic folks passionate about primary school education and wanna hook up with a fantastic team. If you’re interested in this cause, got ideas on how to improve the literacy of these children and want to volunteer by working with children as well as teachers, feel free to use the comment box to holla or send an email to tola@tvcng.com.
Will keep you posted and sorry for grammatical errors as this post was put together via a mobile device.
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