Teaching in Africa has been one of the most rewarding experiences I've had during my 25+ years' in the home-school, private and public school 'classroom'. However, I have had the honor to sit with, laugh with, eat with, cry with and impart knowledge to young people from just about every walk of life.
And here's what I've learned: Children do not need to be drugged up to learn. All the labels we use in the educational field to describe hyperactive children and the methods administered to curb it unto hypoactivity has dimmed their cognitive light almost to the point of completely blowing it out.
In my motherland, especially in the rural villages, the way to "cure" hyperactivity in our learners is to dance with them, sing with them, and play, play, play! That's right. The teacher must get more actively engaged with such learners keeping them busy with educational games, kinesthetic lessons, creative arts projects (mostly packed with crayons, paints, non-toxic glue , , . any child-friendly materials) and mind-blowing science experiments!
It doesn't cost anything to re-design a lesson plan to meet the needs of all the learners in your classroom. It does take much time, effort, and concentrated thinking on how to achieve the lesson's objective(s) in ways that often do not fit into that perfect "status quo" curricular "box". So, let's step outside that box and create new curricula which incorporates children who learn in various unique ways. Yes, in this blog, we shall do it together.
No more drugs, please. Let's take the challenge, parents, teachers, educational administrators, to build new educational paradigms that help all children look up and grasp their cognitive and artistic light.
