It’s time to rethink how foreign languages are taught at universities: An effective way of learning a new language is recreating communicative situations – this often doesn't work in a lecturer room setting. Shutterstock Many people underestimate the difficulty involved in learning a language. This is because language acquisition goes beyond comprehension. It also involves …
The way history is taught in South Africa is ahistorical — and that’s a problem: History textbooks suggest that in 1994 when formal apartheid and racial exclusion ended, so did prejudice and racism. United Nations Photo/Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND History may soon be a compulsory school subject until Grade 12 in South Africa. A task team …
What the pandas Python data analysis library and SQL taught me about taking an average: For Python developers who work primarily with data, it’s hard not to find yourself constantly knee-deep in SQL and Python’s open source data library, pandas. Despite how easy these tools have made it to manipulate and transform data—sometimes as concisely …
The way French is taught in South Africa offers lessons in decolonisation: The influence of countries in francophone Africa, like Ivory Coast, have shifted how universities think about the French language. Reuters/Luc Gnago French has been taught and learned in South African classrooms for decades, even though it isn’t one of the country’s official languages. …
This is not a drill: how 1985 disaster taught Mexico to prepare for earthquakes: Every year, on September 19, Mexico holds a public drill to mark the anniversary of the devastating earthquake of 1985, which killed 9,500 people and had a traumatic effect on the country. This year, just two hours after the annual drill, …
We taught bees to play football so we could learn about their brains: Most people don’t often think about bees’ brainpower. Bees are generally regarded as tiny unthinking machines, flying from flower to flower, genetically pre-programmed to collect pollen and nectar and make honey. But bees have some impressive cognitive capacities. Bumblebees and honeybees can …