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Zimbabwe

Persisting political instability, widespread violence, economic crises, and natural disasters are common factors affecting children worldwide. Zimbabwe serves as a powerful reminder to policymakers about the importance of prioritizing the needs of children during great social, economic, and political challenges.

UNICEF proclaims that the true measure of any nation’s standing is gauged by how well it attends to its children. Many indicators can be used to measure child welfare, including children’s health and safety; material security; education and socialization; and a sense of being loved, valued, and included in their families and societies (UNICEF, 2007).

In Zimbabwe, political and economic instability, food insecurity, and disease are among the factors that threaten the welfare of children. This article discusses how each of these factors affects the welfare of Zimbabwean children, especially within the context of education.

source: Challenges affecting the education of children in Zimbabwe

To encourage young Zimbabweans to be educated, Education Zimbabwe was initiated in 2013.

We assist students with information that will help them learn with a vision driven mentality, so that they can make an impact to the nation after their studies.

We envision a nation with people determined to build a better Zimbabwe

Cisco

Live 2016 Berlin broadcast

Watch Live Online! Featuring keynotes, on the scene interviews, and technical talks covering DevNet, Enterprise Networks, Security, ACI, Cloud, Collaboration and Service Provider.

Free on-demand session videos and live interactive events with Cisco experts from Cisco Live.

Source: Cisco Live 2016 Berlin Broadcast

Four Quartets

Best known as a musical composition, the late string quartets of Beethoven are well known examples.

The quartet form has also lent itself to profound poetry such as TS Eliot’s Four Quartets.

This video shows Four Quartets in the form of paintings by Ian Barton Stewart.

Little Scientists

$4 million has been committed to the Little Scientists program in Australia to inspire three year old and four year old children, through active engagement with the world around them. Young Australians are becoming more numerate and scientifically literate by learning to count with little towers of wooden blocks and blowing bubbles. Nurturing the imagination of each child ensures they will go on to create the prosperity for Australia to remain a first world, generous social welfare net, high wage economy. read more

Activities start with familiar objects and experiences. Each child asks questions, which can be explored rationally. Making connections, drawing inferences, and creating new information are the building blocks for a culture of science and technology to create an innovation nation.

The curriculum encourages the autonomy, self confidence and self esteem of each child, based on the progressive ideas of Friedrich Fröbel, the renowned educator, who developed the Kindergarten concept 175 years ago. The program sparks interest in science, technology, engineering and mathematics by encouraging teachers to implement ideas and concepts from workshops, while exploring together with the children in their care.

Source: Little Scientists Australia

The five year olds agree: trees make the wind by shaking their branches. Their teacher does not correct them, but instead asks whether anyone has seen the wind in a place where there are no trees. One boy recalls a visit to the seashore, where the wind was whipping up water and sand with no trees in sight. Another child says that moving cars make fallen leaves twirl. Perhaps, they decide, trees are not the source of a breeze.

Little Scientists marks a departure, says a kindergarten teacher who participates in the programme. “You have to be willing to do something with the kids that might not lead to a result. They will not take something home that they can show their parents.” Teachers trained in the method encourage children to ask questions about natural phenomena and everyday objects. read more

War veterans

What people of the past can teach us about recovery from war.

Silence was long the norm for returning combat veterans.

Military leadership added to the horror by assuring soldiers that everything was fine. “You saw horrible things. But you have to forget them. Just do not think about it anymore.”

A cluster of symptoms occur after someone is exposed to death, serious injury, assault or the threat thereof. Symptoms include reexperiencing the trauma, as in nightmares or intrusive memories, avoiding talk or triggers, negative mood and thoughts and unusual patterns of arousal, such as hyper vigilance or problems concentrating.

“Something has happened in the brain and in the central nervous system that has caused a permanent change, or a relatively permanent change, in how they feel, how they think and how they behave,”

Moral injury refers to a betrayal of “what’s right”, no matter what that might mean in a particular culture, by a legitimate authority figure in a high stakes situation. Moral injury in combat is an issue dating back at least to Homer’s Iliad, the epic poem about the siege of Troy dated to around the eighth century B.C. The poem opens with the commander of the Greek army, Agamemnon, taking a captive woman, Briseis, from the warrior Achilles. Achilles, offended by this betrayal of “what’s right” in Greek military culture, refuses to fight.

Restoring trust

Cognitive behavioral therapy, mindfulness meditation, and therapy that challenges skewed thinking patterns are all crucial tools for the treatment of trauma.

So much of what happens in a war zone is chance. It is almost random and it is out of individual control. It is difficult to recover from thinking ‘Bad things happened, therefore it was my failure’ .

Reducing the social and moral implications of events, such as war or genocide, to a biological set of consequences may unintentionally and paradoxically decrease social and moral responsiveness to these events.

980x-1 — Shakespeare wrote about visitations by ghosts and spirits after battle.

Soldiers who lived thousands of years ago can give us a deeper understanding of psychological trauma.

Source: How Old Is PTSD?

Mixed emotions

Many Western cultures see these feelings as reflecting indecision.

Mixed emotions are a sign of emotional complexity, not necessarily a sign of indecision.

People who show mixed feelings are better able to differentiate their emotions and experience their lives in an emotionally rich and balanced way.

In cultures where there is more emphasis on family bonds and duty, people are more likely to experience emotional complexity because they are able to see different perspectives. A job loss may be disappointing, but also an exciting opportunity to spend more time with family or to try something new.

People experiencing higher emotional complexity are also better able to control their emotions and have a lower incidence of depression.

Source: The Type of Feelings That Signal Emotional Complexity – And Not Indecision After All – PsyBlog

Types of Play

Through play children learn and practice many basic social skills.

They develop a sense of self, learn to interact with other children, how to make friends, how to lie and how to role play.

Types of play

The first four types of play do not involve much interaction with others, while the last two do.

While children shift between the types of play, as they grew up, children participated less in the first four types of play and more in the last two – those which involved greater interaction.

Unoccupied play: the child is relatively stationary and appears to be performing random movements with no apparent purpose. A relatively infrequent style of play.
Solitary play: the child is completely engrossed in playing and does not seem to notice other children. Most often seen in children between 2 and 3 years-old.
Onlooker play: child takes an interest in other children’s play but does not join in. May ask questions or just talk to other children, but the main activity is simply to watch.
Parallel play: the child mimics other children’s play but doesn’t actively engage with them. For example they may use the same toy.
Associative play: now more interested in each other than the toys they are using. This is the first category that involves strong social interaction between the children while they play.
Cooperative play: some organisation enters children’s play, for example the playing has some goal and children often adopt roles and act as a group.

learning to play is learning how to relate to others

Source: 6 Types of Play: How Children’s Play Becomes More Social

Sedan

Sedan was founded in 1424. In the sixteenth century Sédan was an asylum for Protestant refugees from the Wars of Religion. Until 1651, the Principality of Sedan belonged to the La Tour d’Auvergne family. It was at that time a sovereign principality.

During the Franco-Prussian War, on 2 September 1870 the French emperor Napoleon III was taken prisoner with 100,000 of his soldiers at the First Battle of Sedan. Due to this major victory, which also made the unification of Germany possible, 2 September was declared Sedantag “Sedan Day” and a national German holiday in 1871. It remained a holiday until 1919.

Proust

A pair of wings, a different respiratory system, which enabled us to travel through space, would in no way help us, for if we visited Mars or Venus while keeping the same senses, they would clothe everything we could see in the same aspect as the things of the Earth. The only true voyage, the only bath in the Fountain of Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them sees, that each of them is; and this we do, with great artists; with artists like these we do really fly from star to star.

Marcel Proust developed many themes, including the enigma of memory and the necessity of reflection, in his monumental novel À la recherche du temps perdu, published in seven parts between 1913 and 1927. In Search of Lost Time was earlier translated as Remembrance of Things Past.

Proust’s father, Adrien Proust, was a prominent pathologist and epidemiologist, studying cholera in Europe and Asia. He was the author of numerous articles and books on medicine and hygiene. Proust’s mother, Jeanne Clémence Weil, was the daughter of a wealthy Jewish family from Alsace. Literate and well read, she demonstrates a well developed sense of humour in her letters, and her command of English was sufficient to help with her son’s translations of John Ruskin.

Stadtilm

The largest market place in Thuringia is at Stadtilm. The size of 10,635 sqm was confirmed when the MDR-Thüringen did a survey in public on 1 November 2011.

Every year on the last weekend in August, the Stadtilm festival takes place on this market square.

The market and its adjacent streets become the cultural centre for a summer weekend every year. Jointly organised by clubs and tradesmen of the city, this festival is a highlight for the Stadtilm people and their guests. There is a vast variety of food, drink and entertaining stage shows as well as fun and games for the children. In addition to the well proven programme there is something new to hear or to see every year.

The city is at the meeting of the former trade routes between Ilmenau and Weimar as well as Erfurt and Rudolstadt.