School Foundation Program
Do you find it difficult to
keep up with school curriculum?
This program provides you with a solid base for your future learning.
TeachBahrain
Inspiration
TeachBahrain’s School Foundation Program is inspired by the late Marva Delores Collins. Marva Collins took in students who were rejected from schools in Chicago. She treated them like geniuses who were previously labelled by schools as learning disabled, retarded or emotionally disturbed. Their parents had also given up on them which is not surprising as the schools they were paying, rather than doing their work, were blaming and labelling their children. Again, not surprising as this still happens in our society today!
She started teaching these so-called retarded kids (as labelled by schools) by encouraging them to read the likes of Aristotle, Tolstoy and Shakespeare, and her hard work paid off when wealthy suburban high school students were unable to match the intellectual abilities of her students.
Education is not only
for the 'smart ones'!
Many schools around the world seek out ‘geniuses’ and make special dispensations for students in this category. Even the entry exams provided by schools around the world are focused on searching for brilliant minds. One wonders if this is a ploy designed to bolster school rankings by consistently publishing high annual scores achieved by ‘brilliant students’. But is it truly the school’s achievement or the student’s own talent?
The role of schools is to welcome and educate students. But how can schools do that when commercialisation has increased class sizes and focusing on a child’s problems has become irrelevant. Each and every child is different and he or she deserves attention from their teachers.
The two types
of students
Objectively, it would appear that there is a clear-cut distinction between student capability in our current education systems:
Today, many teachers take on a simple approach - label and degrade students. Carol Dweck writes in her award-winning book ‘The Mindset’ how she was degraded by her teacher even though she was a maths whiz, and her teacher used to discourage female students in class by saying that education is not for girls. This conditioning led her to wonder why she should bother studying at all!
Whereas education was traditionally focused at males, it is now focused at ‘smart students’. Smart students set the examples for a school and help increase its trophy count which the school uses as an advertising tool. Teachers tend to prioritise these students, setting aside more time for them than others. While it should in fact be the reverse, neglected students are also being abandoned, to an extent, by families who are not aware of this policy and who are not questioning it.
What kind of outcome can there be for a child who is neglected at school, only to be further ignored and demotivated at home?
Parents need to
know their rights!
These days, the cost of educating children is high. Education is not free. As parents, it is our right and duty to question a school’s evaluation of our children as under-achievers or ‘lost causes’!
Why is TeachBahrain
building this program?
TeachBahrain’s Foundation Program is specially designed for these ‘hopeless cases’ - the ones society, schools and, sadly, even parents abandon. We have built this program to take them in as a challenge and work with them, in order to build brighter futures for every child - something we consider to be the real job of schools and the education system.
What will we teach
in this Program?
Every book has numbered pages - the process of reading. If a student has not understood the previous pages, was neglected at school or experienced other forms of neglect, advanced reading becomes far more difficult. Many factors contribute to a student’s unwillingness to learn or study. Bullying and neglect are two of the biggest causes of student drop-out rates. When a student ‘doesn’t get it’, it essentially means that their foundation is weak and they need help. Once we fix the foundation, the rest of the building will be strong!
In this program we focus on building their foundation in core academic areas like reading, speaking, writing, mathematics, history, geography, business, economics, ICT, science and much more. We want our students to have knowledge in different areas of academia in order to mould them into intellectuals of tomorrow.
Why is reading
our main focus?
Our main focus is reading, a fundamental activity required for every subject. Very often, students simply don’t understand, or comprehend what they are reading. It could be because English is not their first language or they simply have difficulty understanding the content. As parents, we need to understand how important it is to help our children read and learn to comprehend. Poor comprehension skills affect every subject that is written in English. Like the domino effect, solving that problem leads to solving others down the line. Reading is an essential habit, and it will not only provide benefits at school, but also lay the foundation for University and future career success. At University level, reading will pave the way for success with assignments, and in work life it will help with innovation, knowledge and many more benefits.
How we build a unique
foundation program.
As previously stated, every student is different. Therefore every student is catered for according to his or her needs. Every subject is carefully chosen and the program is prepared after an initial student counsellor evaluation to determine the student’s personality and future goals. After the evaluation, the student counsellor will work along with his/her parents to start building a program. The student counsellor will offer advice, and subjects will be carefully selected so the student’s foundation can be strengthened in the areas necessary for his/her future success.