Closing the GSAT Gap

Library at Kendal Primary, ranked 5th in GSAT
in Hanover. Great Shape Inc donated many books
and assisted teachers at this school.

“Close GSAT Gap” was the headline in the Gleaner on Nov 24, 2015, the gap being between the high rankings of the Prep Schools and lower ranking of the Primary Schools. I would first question the reality of this gap, because the scores for the schools are based on the average score for all children taking GSAT in that school. If you considered only the top half of the entrants (for example the top 3 streams in a 6 stream school) in a selected primary school, you might well get scores comparable to those of the prep schools. The primary schools have no choice but to enter all the children who pass the grade 4 Literacy and Numeracy Tests. The numbers of entrants from some of these primary schools far exceed the numbers form any prep school; for example 257 from Corinaldi Avenue Primary and 251 from Mandeville Primary and Junior High. The prep schools are less likely to have as many poorly performing students, partly because the parents of prep school children are paying high fees and do everything they can to make sure their children get high scores.

The article implied that the prep schools are

In Mount Alvernia Prep Library, presenting copies of
Delroy in the Marog Kingdom, donated by past students.

performing very much better than the primary schools; and that the principal and staff of prep schools are in a position to advise the principals of the primary schools. If the principals of the prep schools took over the primary schools, I doubt if there would be any improvement in performance, given the environment and resources of the primary schools. The GSAT Gaps I am more concerned about are the gap between the performance of boys and girls; (it would be interesting to know the extent of the gender gap in prep schools) ; the gap between the best and worst performing students of any school; and the gap between urban schools (urban here meaning all urban centres, not just Kingston) and rural schools.

 In the GSAT Ranking supplement of the same day there were ‘Edu’ quotes. I select 2 of them which I think have a strong bearing on the GSAT Gaps.

1^st quote from Maya Angelou: “My mother said I must always be intolerant of ignorance but understanding of illiteracy. That some people, unable to go to school, were more educated and more intelligent than college professors.”

Buckingham Primary, a rural school

There are many people who do not see illiteracy as an impediment to advancing in life, and are skeptical of the advantages of education. They know of educated people, including trained teachers and others with university degrees unable to find jobs.  The children of farmers are extra pairs of hands, and are often taken out of school when they reach the age when they can be helpful. In urban areas, boys are sent out to hustle. Other young people get involved in criminal activities, such as ganja growing and ‘scamming’ which they consider to be legitimate means of earning a living. These attitudes are transmitted to school children whose parents don’t insist on regular attendance, punctuality or doing homework.

2^nd quote from William Temple: “The most influential of all educational factors is the conversation in a child’s home.”

This is true all over the world. Studies have shown that 6-year-old children of educated parents have a wider vocabulary and a better command of language than those of less well educated parents. In Jamaica we have the added complication of having two languages. For many children, creole or patois is their only language until they start going to school. When they start learning to read, they have to make an abrupt shift to the unfamiliar syntax of Standard Jamaican English (SJE). They are also encouraged to speak this language at school, reinforced by numerous exercises in writing grammatically correct English. There is resentment against this in some quarters, English being the language of the former slave-masters and the present-day upper classes. As a result, children perform poorly, because all school subjects require competence in SJE. The children who attend prep schools are more likely to be fluent in both SJE and patois, so do not encounter the same difficulties or negative attitudes to SJE. 

I don’t think that the school communities of prep schools would be in a position to address either the language or the attitude barriers to improved performance in GSAT. What could make a difference?

In relation to attitude, there need to be more employment opportunities together with a campaign to inform people about the qualifications needed for these jobs. Politicians are fond of announcing “Jobs, jobs, jobs,” but fail to tell people they will need CSEC English to fill many of these jobs; and that preparation for CSEC English begins in Grade 1 of the primary schools!

In relation to the language dilemma, I submit that children should be taught to read, and have their early teaching in Jamaican creole. This suggestion has been made before and research has been carried out in several countries where a creole is spoken. I quote from an article ‘Creole Speakers and Standard Language Education’, by Gillian Wigglesworth et al, in the Language and Linguistics Compass 7/7 (2013):

“However, Siegel  points out that while there is very limited research on the use of creoles in education, the positive benefits are clear and include increased motivation and improvement in the standard variety as well as improvement in overall academic performance. He also notes that none of the studies in this area show any negative effects.

The benefits of beginning schooling in a child’s home language are well documented."

In Aruba, Papiamento, a creole which has its origins in African languages and Portuguese, replaced Dutch as the official language in 2003. Aruba has one of the highest standards of living and lowest unemployment rates in the Caribbean region. In addition to speaking Papiamento, many people there are fluent in Spanish, English and Dutch,

 Here in Jamaica, Hubert Devonish, Professor of Linguistics at UWI, one of the strongest advocates fighting for Jamaican Patois as a language. He carried out a study in a primary school, teaching the children from grades 1-4 in both patois and SJE. The children, especially the boys, performed better than average in this programme. Teaching in patois could also help to close the gap in performance between boys and girls. Although the results of this study are gathering dust on the shelves in the Ministry of Education, Professor Devonish is confident that Jamaican Creole will become one of the official languages of Jamaica. He carried out a survey in which he found that 70% of the population would be in favour of this. However, there are many Jamaicans who have a negative attitude towards patois.

Georgene Growe (r) donated Delroy in the Marog Kingsom to
the Principal of Kendal Primary School. At left,Gretchen Lee,
a volunteer organizer with Great Shape Inc.

Giving children more access to books for them to read for pleasure would be another way of closing the GSAT gaps. It has been shown that children who read regularly (about 40 books a year) for pleasure perform better in all subject areas than children who read very little. The average prep school child is more likely than the average primary school child. to be an avid reader. Only a small percentage of children make frequent visits to their local libraries, and school libraries vary considerably in their usefulness. Class libraries stocked with enough books at the reading levels of all the children in the class would go a far way towards meeting this need, as I explained in my blog post of September 23, 2014 "How to Help Kids Become Skilled, Passionate, Habitual, Critical Readers". "A class Library Movement" would require funding, but more than that would require the will and the understanding of teachers and parents to make it work. Past students could also be asked to  donate books for class libraries.
So that is my wish-list for closing the GSAT Gaps: a desire for education throughout the population; the teaching of children in Jamaican Creole; and Class Libraries for every class in every school. In the future these libraries would have in them books written in Jamaican Creole and illustrated by Jamaicans!

My Paper Presented at Jamaican Storytelling Conference 2014

 If we don’t tell our stories, who will?

 Paper presented at Ananse Sound Splash: Storytelling Conference and Festival  

November 2014

This written version is more or less what I presented, and I have included links.

Helen Williams at mic

Introduction

After graduating from Oxford University in the UK, Helen Williams embarked on a 38-year teaching career, 34 years of which were in Jamaica, at Rusea’s and Green Island High Schools, Lucea Prep School (as founding principal) and Montego Bay Community College. Since retiring, she has taken up writing for children.

Her short story “Finding My Roots” was published in Tony Bradman’s Anthology, ALL IN THE FAMILY in 2008.

DELROY IN THE MAROG KINGDOM, a chapter book in the Island Fiction Series, published by Macmillan Caribbean in 2009, under the penname Billy Elm, won the people’s choice award for Best Children’s Chapter Book in the BIAJ’s biennial awards 2011. It was chosen by the Jamaica Library Service to be read by children aged 9-12 in the Annual Reading Competition 2011.  

ERROL’S TAXI, a reader in Pearson’s Stepping Stones Series, was published in 2013.

A short story, FLASH, won a silver medal, and an award for Best Junior Short Story in JCDC’s Creative Writing Contest in 2010. It is self-published as an e-book. 

Presentation

Robert McKee, a well-known creative writing instructor, said, “Storytelling is the most powerful way to put ideas into the world today.”

Who is telling our stories, my story, your story? If we don’t tell our stories, who will?

I know this festival is about the oral tradition, but I beg the forgiveness of the organizers in including mention of written stories, because I write. But I also affirm that the telling of stories gave birth to their writing.   

I now make 2 assertions, which I’d like you to remember if you don’t remember anything else.

1.     Jamaican children need to hear about themselves in stories, see themselves in picture books, and read about themselves in books, not as tricksters, shape shifters and villains, but as heroes and heroines, mentors, heralds and gatekeepers.

2.     Reading for pleasure is the single most important educational activity for a child. It improves comprehension, it increases vocabulary and improves grammar. It even improves math scores.

I would like now to discuss the importance of telling of stories to children. Repeating point #1, Jamaican children need to hear themselves and about themselves in stories.

Before children learn to read, they need to hear stories. Thus they learn to listen, hold ideas in their heads and follow stories. They need to remember and retell. They learn to experience emotions and situations vicariously. Whether they recognize themselves or others in a story, they feel empathy for characters in stories.  They will transfer these skills when they learn to read. How often do our Basic School and Grade 1 teachers tell children stories? What stories? How many different stories? There should be a story time every day, with a variety of stories repeated often. Are teachers taught to be storytellers?

Now here’s a dilemma. Stories can be told in creole, but children are not taught to read creole. Although creole is written, and is easy to read, they are taught to read English. Countless studies have shown that children, who learn to read in their mother tongue, transfer that skill to the reading of a second language better than if they were taught to read in that second language, but suggest that common-sense approach in Jamaica, and there is an uproar. Ask a creole speaking 5-year-old to remember and retell a story told to him in standard English. He will retell it in creole. Look at the comments on Facebook by Jamaicans, who learnt to read and write in English, and transferred that skill to the writing of creole. But if you present a child in the first few grades of primary school with text in creole, they will have difficulty reading it. So we are stuck with teaching the reading of standard English, with its countless idiosyncrasies in spelling, grammar and syntax, for the time being.

Expanding on point #2: Reading for pleasure is the single most important educational activity for a child, but most Jamaican children are short-changed by not having enough books available for them to look at in Basic School, or for them to read in every grade of primary school, and certainly not enough about people like themselves. Even in the USA, where in 2010, 14% of the population was African American or African, only 4.5 % of the books were about them; while 63% of the population was Caucasian (and not Hispanic), and 91% of the books were about them. (See my blog Racial and cultural bias in books for children.)

When I went to teach at Green Island Secondary School (as it was then) in 1974, I was in the library when the librarian opened boxes of new books. Many of them were Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys books. The children pounced on them, wanting to borrow them immediately.  I wondered, “Where were the books by Jamaican authors?” I didn’t see them in the bookshops either. The only Jamaican author that came to my notice was Orlando Patterson. His “Children of Sisyphus” had been prescribed for the older students. There was a big argument in the staff room about whether the students should be allowed to read this book. I didn’t read it myself until recently and now wonder what those students made of it.

Years later, I was to discover that there were at that time many wonderful stories set in Jamaica written by Jamaicans – Jean D’Costa, Vic Reid, Andrew Salkey, Everard Palmer, James Berry and since then many more by Diane Browne, Hazel Campbell, Cherrell Shelley-Robinson, Jean Gouldbourne and others, published by LMH and Carlong in their Sand Pebbles Series. (See a list of books for 8-12 year-olds on my blog.) Why were/ are these books not prominently displayed in the bookshops? Because, according to the boards of these bookshops, they won’t sell. Obviously they won’t sell if you don’t stock them or display them. Parents read Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys and books by Enid Blyton, which are prominently displayed in the bookshops so that’s what they buy for their children. 

Island Fiction on the shelves in Fontana, MoBay

Novelty Trading distributes books, including my book “Delroy in the Marog Kingdom”. It was on the shelf in Fontana Pharmacy, Montego Bay, along with other Island Fiction Books, then I didn’t see it again. On enquiring, I was told it wasn’t selling, so was removed to make space for other books. What other books? Do they really need the space to display 50 copies of the Diary of the Wimpy Kid?

So, that’s part of my story. If I don’t tell my story, who will? Going back to 1974: assuming that there was a dearth of children’s books by Jamaican authors, I was presumptuous enough to think that I could contribute in that area. I started a story in 1981, and worked on it sporadically over the next 2 decades, starting by writing long-hand, then using a manual typewriter, then an electric typewriter and finally a word processor. When I retired in 2003, not knowing how to get a book published, I started to read “How to” books on writing fiction, and I took a UCLA online course on children’s writing. The book I’d been working on went into a box under the bed, and my energies went into writing adventure stories for boys. I wrote four of these, none yet published but I’m always optimistic.

My break came in 2007, with 2 stories at once. My short story Finding My Roots was published in an anthology “All in the Family” edited by Tony Bradman. This story included a great house, a moonshine baby, a rolling calf and Grandma Aggie’s Tamarind Switch (my original title!).

My chapter book “Delroy in the Marog Kingdom” was accepted by editor Joanne Gail Johnson’s for inclusion in Macmillan Caribbean’s ‘Island Fiction Series.’ The requirement was for Fantasty, Sci Fi and Folklore set in the Caribbean. The fantasy – Delroy turns into a marog – a type of frog. The folklore – River Mumma. (No Sci-Fi – I’m not a fan of that genre.) What turned out to be pivotal was that in my research on frogs, I found a Taino legend that if mothers went away leaving their children hungry, the children would turn into frogs. Normally, no Taino mother would have done this, but when the Spaniards enslaved them, it happened. It happened also to a Taino princess, who tried to drown herself, but, as Jamaican legend tells, she was turned into River Mumma. I have written 2 sequels to the published book – “Delroy and theMarog Princess” in which she returns to Delroy’s village in human form, available on Amazon as an ebook.  In “The Last of the Marogs”, Delroy time-travels to the time of the Tainos.This story won a silver medal in the JCDC Creative Writing Contest 2013, but is not yet published.

The treasury of Jamaican culture and history, and the infinite variety of settings and characters is my inspiration and can be yours too. Our children need many, many more Jamaican  stories - there aren't nearly enough. Don't forget they need illustrations as well. With the advent of the tablets in schools project, and the ease of e-publishing, the doors of opportunity for you to write for them are thrown wide open. But don’t expect to make money immediately – do it for love.

If we don’t tell our story, who will?

TO FOLLOW in a future post: An account of other most interesting presentations at the conference.
I welcome comments and questions on this post.