READERS' CORNER: Dear parent, your child is better off in a town campus

Dear parent, your child is better off in a town campus

Of late, universities have been advertising how good they are and how they will ensure your child prospers. They boast of having the best professors and lectures. However, all that glitters is not gold. How well do you know that university that you would like your child to join?

The May intake is here with us. Any parent will wish for a strike-free campus life for their child. Dear parent, please consider satellite campuses, or what some may call campus branches, for your child.

Strikes are rare in these campuses. They are built on small spaces, mostly within the Central Business Districts or town centres. It is easier to supervise a small area. It is difficult for students to organise strikes in the satellite campuses as the information would leak to the administration.

Most satellite campuses do not have hostels. Students live in rented houses or their parents’ or guardians’ houses, hence security personnel have time to screen them, unlike in big campuses where students stay in the school.

We also have the notion of ‘half-baked graduates’. Many students prefer main campuses because of the availability of resources, both physical and professional. This overpopulation stretches the available scarce resources. When the lecturer-student ratio, the student-resource ratio and other things that facilitate learning are not kept in balance, we end up with the ‘half-baked graduates.’

I wonder how a lecturer can mark over 1,500 papers within two weeks, yet the same lecturer teachers over 10 units in various other campuses. Common units are always overpocrowded. Half the class boycotts lessons without the lecturer’s knowledge. Some sign the attendance list on behalf of each other. Students will make copies of the various modules, cram and produce the same in exams. Parents are you ready to know where your children go after failing to attend these lessons?

Graduating from overpopulated classes is more of luck than knowledge. The billion dollar question is, is it possible for one to be lucky for the eight semesters? It is impossible.

Satellite campuses, on the other hand, will for example have a maximum 80 students in its common unit class. A lecturer will mark all scripts and even aid students in their revision work. Here, students have direct contact with their lecturers, an impossibility in the main campuses. Here, a lecturer is a surrogate or foster parent. Students are closely monitored, moral values kept.

Satellite campuses carry higher education from the major cities to mashinani (the villages). This gives parents opportunity to take care of their children and monitor them.

Parents are you even aware of the pubs and bars in the main campuses? Don’t be shocked. These are within the universities and they have names like Anex, for example.

We also have various worshiping centres, denominations and even cults where many of your naïve and gullible children are going to be lured into.

For those with daughters, how sure are you that your child is not already married and multi-tasking at university? She could be dividing her minimal time between classes and taking care of her ‘husband,’ who could be an abusive fellow student. Do not wonder why the number of university students dying for ‘love’ is alarming. This is why a satellite campus is the best option.

Dear parents, do you know that in the universities there is the beginning and end of semester bash? What of Mr and Mrs Campus contest? Do you know what happens in those events?

As you take your children to university, know that in these places, people do more than book work. Here, children grow into adults, and some become parents. Peers compete in almost everything, from class work to dressing code. I would speak till my mouth goes dry, write to the last drop of ink, but the bar rests with you. Enough said. Dear parents and guardians, satellite campus is your option, but you can chose to ignore.

Noah Otok

The writer teaches English and Literature at St Charles Lwanga Secondary school, Mombasa, and is a student at Kenyatta University

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Children are being taught plagiarism

It is possible to steal somebody’s intellectual property by using their ideas in your work, be it an article, a book, a research paper, a song or a video, without their permission. It is a violation of copyright laws and an offence called plagiarism.

There are times when you may not be able to reach the originator of the work you want to use as a reference point for permission. In that case, plagiarism can be avoided by acknowledging and indicating the source of your information.

And yet, having taught at primary school level, I observed that, to a large extent, the teachers of languages — in our case English and Kiswahili — inculcate this illegal practice in the mind of the learner from a tender age. They emphasise to the learner that for their writing to impress and fetch them good marks, they have to colour them with super language. That the learner should employ ‘advanced’ vocabulary, colloquial expressions and figurative language proverbs, similes, metaphors and so on.

I have no problem with this in itself. The question whether a learner who has not yet acquired the basics of grammar is capable of this.

Is the learner able to use advanced vocabulary and other expressions naturally, correctly, skilfully and maturely and, therefore, communicate effectively at the very early stages of learning? My answer, as one who taught English at this level and marked the learners’ scripts, is no. Only one or two exceptional learners ever reached this level of writing at primary school level.

What about the vast majority of learners who are not capable of this? They resort to plagiarism so that their pieces are just a collection of expressions and sayings that do not mean anything to the reader. The result is that, although their compositions are full of ‘learned’ vocabulary and expressions, there is no flow and they do not communicate anything.

As every teacher knows, learning is a step by step process and that is why there is a syllabus for every class. Learners acquire concepts step by step, in stages. That is why a good foundation is a prerequisite to success in learning. Thus, if a learner misses important concepts in the early childhood classes and lower primary, you cannot expect them to do well in Kenya Certificate of Primary Education (KCPE).

When learners begin school, they should be helped to acquire languages — English and Kiswahili —  by training them in listening, speaking, reading and writing. Here, what is important is for the learner to be able to communicate in English and Kiswahili fluently, confidently and intelligently. That can only be possible if they master the basics in grammar.

I think that, by asking learners to use the vocabulary and expressions that they have not yet acquired, the teachers and our education system have failed. You cannot run before you have learned to walk. You cannot use super language before you have learned the art of sentence construction.

What we have done, as teachers, is to inculcate the culture of plagiarism in the young learners before they even know what it is and that it is illegal. There should be no place for drilling and rote learning in our classrooms.

by Samuel Sifuna Wafula

The writer is based in Kitale

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No, Kiswahili critics are not really silent

Enock Matundura’s opinion article titled ‘Why Swahili literary critics should break silence’ (Saturday Nation, April 16, 2016) was a poor attempt at polemicising a non-issue, unless it was meant to be black humour. The motif of treating literature in Kiswahili as inferior to literature in English seemed founded on parochial activism (uanaharakati butu) that has come to be associated with a small clique of insecure Kiswahili enthusiasts. These enthusiasts, sadly, are led by emotions rather than reason.

Scholars whose speciality is literature in English are not obliged to read or approve literature in Kiswahili. If the point was to cast Kenyan scholars of literature in English as enemies of Kiswahili progress, then the argument fell flat on the face. Some of those scholars are on record, on this very space, for lauding contemporary Kiswahili literary works. Tom Odhiambo, Evan Mwangi and Kingwa Kamencu are examples.

Mr Matundura went on to claim that Kiswahili winners are not given a chance to give a speech during biannual Textbook Centre Jomo Kenyatta Prize award ceremonies. It is common practice the world over for winners of literary awards to give an acceptance speech.

The Kenya Publishers Association, the managers of the said award, know. I attended a past ceremony in 2009 when K.W. Wamitila’s Unaitwa Nani? won the Kiswahili adult literature category, and he gave an acceptance speech.

The conclusion that Matundura drew from Godwin Siundu’s article titled ‘Is Zanzibar the Blind Spot in East African Literature’ (Saturday Nation, June 15, 2014) was, sadly, wrong. I do not imagine a scholar of Dr Godwin Siundu’s repute can be ignorant of the existence of Kiswahili literary writers from Zanzibar.

Finally, Matundura discussed this ‘Literary Discourse’ page. He opined that the fact that there have been few articles from Kiswahili literary scholars paints the picture that nothing meaningful is going on in Kiswahili scholarship. However, we cannot measure scholarly output based on a newspaper column. This space is limited. Serious literature in Kiswahili scholarly output, however, is evident in online journals and other publications.

by Sam Ng’ang’a

The writer is a Kiswahili editor with a local publishing firm. [email protected]

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We need more humour books

With a lot of vices around us, writers could do a lot more with humour. Everyday, we are fed with sad stories. News of leaders stealing taxes, politicians insulting each other and bank managers running away with customers’ money flood our TV screens. Sad stories of anguish, poverty, domestic violence, rape and murder are all we read about.

What of students unrest, conmen and thieves? Social media is awash with tribal insults. With all these vices, creative writers could do a lot by writing humour to bring some laughter to our weary souls. Laughter is the best medicine.

by Daniel Mani Owiti

The writer is a poet