the curse of being average...

To exist in the middle...to be average is to be invisible. Authorities the world over are concerned about those who are doing poorly, seeking ways to improve their existence and those doing exceptionally well are encourage for they are beneficial to their interests. Yet there are those who exist in the middle, stuck not too low or too high for anyone to notice. what about them...?

the sun shines in the land of hope..

         

















The short rains expected in march have failed, this has left us crossing our fingers for the April rains...we need a miracle here in the land of hope.

of studies and academic friends...

It's 3am and the lights now look yellow, you have gone through the handout 3 times, the text now look alien, you have underlined with a red pen, highlighted with a green pen, taken side notes with a blue one, and now you are searching your pouch for the black one...in search of clarity. You are stuck and you know it!.

Then you get a text from your classmate on the issue, and just like that everything plays back and it all makes sense. This is an academic friend. This are the people who sort you out when no one else can, not your family or significant other. It is with them that you keep the coffee pot boiling and pull all nighters and then some.

If you observe university students, they always seem to be happy to see each other, the sharing of minds and scholarly troubles creates a warm and close relationship between them. A platonic yet powerful bond is formed. These are the friends whom you have no trouble telling that you have no idea what the unit is about..yet its mid-semester, because you know they will help you catch up. Valuable, this people...and rare too.

I take this opportunity to express my appreciation for all my academic friends.  Those who have pushed me to do better, to toughen my arguments and achieve as much as I have. Through them I have come to appreciate the power of support!

classroom curiousity...

In class you always have a variety of characters. Students who are as different as they are many. you might find in your class a student who like to frown. Yes to frown. For no good reason they just push their brows together and stare at the board, you would be forgiven for thinking that aliens are growing from the wall. When i ask then what seems to be the problem is they just go silent for a while then an ohh I got it now is given.

however i prefer those  any day over the curious bunch. Last week while we were discussing rotation, a point on direction of rotation came up and clockwise was given as the negative direction and vise versa. There was a murmur among the curious bunch... then hand up so why is anticlockwise positive and clockwise negative ? my first instinct was to ask them why is '+' addition and '-' subtraction...but that would have been in bad taste, therefore i took a protractor and explained that the degrees increase from 0 to 180 in the anticlockwise direction hence positive direction..

Turning point...

There comes a time in every mans life..ha ha that sentence sounds so cool. Anyway, there comes a time in every woman's life when they have to make hard decisions. Decisions that will affect their life for the better part of 1 year. well because if things go bad you can always make another decision to stop or change things . Such a time has come for me. I am faced with a multifaceted problem to which i must find a multipronged strategy to solve it. This is because one solution may lead to a loss in opportunity that I may not recover from easily and deprive me of much needed socializing. While the other solves a long standing problem...this are the times i ask for divine mercy and wisdom.

ideas...

for the last 5 days my internet connection has been down, i couldnt access my  mails or anything..tough luck. however this gave me time to reflect, its almost 3 months now since i  began blogging and this needs to be celebrated. I am hoping to get a chance to interview Dactari  (Dr. Kiarie) and share the interview with you guys as a treat. so if there is a question uve been wanting to ask...now is the time. wish me luck.

Back to business..

^{Recently I have been having my ideas pounded by the most unlikely people. I happened to share the idea of sewing with a seemingly poor fellow and they told me that they wouldn’t sew even if it was the last thing on earth. it was her opinion that if you want to tie down a woman buy her a sewing machine! she will sit there like a cow; sewing, eating and going to the loo!! ( translate that to kiuk..)}

^{I enjoy teaching and anyway education is not the worst field to pursue but apparently everyone else thinks that it is. So far I haven’t met with anyone who speaks positively about teaching ( except my father ofcourse..). Not even the teachers themselves. Now am wondering is it them or are the ideas I have just so out there..}

makangas

i actually wanted to write more earlier but the only thing that came to my mind is whats up with these makangas... the touts are so beyond any human characteristic that you can think of; rude, time wasters, noisemakers and they have very little regard for their passengers. they refer to a client as a 20 or 50 or whichever amount you are going to pay them. they at times refuse to stop the vehicle at a stage to pick passengers if they suspect those passengers are only 20s or mbaos as they like to call them...this way of thinking never benefits anyone, they are living proof that such methods do not work, otherwise they would be wealthy by now!  seriously...

whats up with makangas..?

Stop working so hard...ur making us look bad.

I hate beating around the bush, but sometimes the bush needs to be beaten. There are so many lazy crooks lurking behind this bushes waiting to pounce on unsuspecting public. 

Recently there has been debate on ethnic balancing which to me is being carried out as a camouflaged plan for anything but.  A survey was done that showed that 6 major tribes dominate student population and jobs at university level…Yes, rain is falling water. Thank you for stating the obvious. They went ahead to report in the press that lecturers who are from the same region as the university should  probably be posted to far off places, to avoid ‘one community’ dominating jobs in that institution. What!?

Whoever did this study….am wondering, did they by any chance find out how difficult it is to get a job in a university as a lecturer? There are so many requirements, you must have a degree, no, wait a  masters degree and or be a PhD student. It is so difficult to get a degree in Kenya; first the cut off marks for public university are inhibitive, the cost of alternative degree programs is disabling to say the least and it takes a minimum of 4 years to graduate with a first degree, through at least 56 painful units!

This so called “dominating tribes” work themselves to the bone from the wee hours of the morning to late in the night. Just to afford their school fees and upkeep for their family. There are no handouts given to them, yet all the while they are accused of loving money and working too hard yet we all die…yeah that.!

Yes we have 50 or so tribes to them I say…”Go To School” and if you are just realizing it now ‘Education is expensive business’!

I think ave gotten that bush cleared.

Early childhood education...my take

In our Kenyan setting, Early Childhood Education is still on shaky grounds. Educators claim to be working toward making our children literate. However I feel strongly that we are going about it in the wrong way. What they end up doing is forced speech and alphabetization with no regard to the child’s background.

When a child is born, the home is the first school he/she attends. The child learns to walk and talk to themselves and others. They develop self confidence and gain curiosity about their environment. The child’s caretaker acts as their first teacher. This young learner gains confidence and becomes fluent in their mother tongue. They are able to identify in their mother tongue ‘mother’ ‘father’, ‘chair’, ‘tree’, ‘fruit’ among other things in their environment. They are taught how to read and write their names in English with their mother tongue being used as the language of instruction. This child is literate!

Then the child is taken to nursery school and is reduced to dumbness, by being addressed to and forced to speak in an alien language, in our case English. For a four year old child the move from home to school is stressful enough. You cannot begin to imagine what that child is going through when they can no longer communicate. They are reduced to ‘infants’ whose only recourse is to cry when in need. This is traumatizing for the young learner. A once bubbly and bright child becomes dull and withdrawn. They are forced to relearn ‘mother’ ’father’ ’fruit’ ’chair’ and everything they knew about  their environment in English.

Clearly there is need for a re-birth of methodology and our approach to Early Childhood Education in our country.

Under the mulberry tree...

        Some of the greatest lessons I have learnt in life have been under the mulberry tree. Yes the mulberry tree not a mulberry tree. This is because I am referring to a specific tree outside our house. It was there I learnt that eating too many berries will give you an upset stomach, how to climb a tree and how it feels to fall from one.

          Last Sunday my sister and I went home for a visit and found my dad and big brother under that tree. The afternoon was so hot; it was like being in an oven. The only cool place was under the mulberry tree. Here I got to listen to my dads thoughts on the future of education. He was particularly concerned with the trend of wastage in our secondary schools. Later we said the rosary together. It got rather interesting when kalie my nephew who is very shy was asked to say his 10 hailmary’s. His Swahili is a special one, he speaks through his nose and he has a tendency to swallow up some words. However he soldiered through them with the help of Guka (grandad). That marked the beginning of my week, quite nice if I do say so myself…under the mulberry tree.

something sweet...

Teach me how to roll
am always in the mood


Couldn't take the road
I want'd to see the moon


Won't you, won't you tell me
tell me, tell me something
something something sweet


Then teach me how to sing
ad love to hear my ring.


My ears need sound thats pleasing 
ring ring to the beat


won't you, won't you tell me
tell me, tell me something
something something sweet


Whisper in my ear
till there is nothing to fear


listening to my stories 
to all of  my ideas


raise me to the sky
so I won't be shy


Then won't you, won't you tell me
tell me, tell me something
something , something sweet.

what i write on

Ave been told that I only write on tough issues, that I can't bring in a light topic with the same vigor. I disagree. However given the difficulty this paragraph is giving me to write..haha maybe I have a tiny bit of a problem writing if am not commenting on or trying to start an argument on a sensitive issue. For example why is it that the girls only perform well in English and loose in mathematics to boys with 0.0001 mark. Statistically that difference is negligible. Yet it is put there to maintain the lie that girls are weaker in maths than boys. This has been disputed by various researchers, its all about a learner’s individual ability and then some...I'll try again next time.