My Jamaican Experience

"The fairest land ever eyes beheld . . . the mountains touch the sky." This is what Christopher Columbus wrote in his log when he landed on the north coast of Jamaica on May 5, 1494. This statement has been affirmed over the years, resulting in up to two million tourists visiting Jamaica each year. Since then, Jamaica has gone on to become a record producer of sugar, banana, and bauxite (aluminum ore). Jamaica was the first country in the Western Hemisphere to have a postal system, a piped domestic water system, and a golf course. In the nineteen sixties and early seventies, Jamaica had one of the highest growth rates among the developing countries. Jamaica won more Olympic track-and-field medals, as a ratio of its population, than any other country in the world, and only the United States has a larger aggregate. In spite of this early sterling performance, Jamaica has been through a turbulent political uprising and is still trying to navigate through a crippling economic malaise. In the nineteen seventies and early eighties, Jamaica was ground zero for the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. The author will take you through the good old days of the natural simplicity of growing up in rural Jamaica. He will recount the past and present great achievements that have been accredited to Jamaica. You will also visit with him the days of wrath when Jamaica was the staging ground for the proxy war between the Soviet/Cuban axis versus the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

“The fairest land ever eyes beheld . . . the mountains touch the sky.” This is what Christopher Columbus wrote in his log when he landed on the north coast of Jamaica on May 5, 1494. This statement has been affirmed over the years, resulting in up to two million tourists visiting Jamaica each year. Since then, Jamaica has gone on to become a record producer of sugar, banana, and bauxite (aluminum ore). Jamaica was the first country in the Western Hemisphere to have a postal system, a piped domestic water system, and a golf course. In the nineteen sixties and early seventies, Jamaica had one of the highest growth rates among the developing countries. Jamaica won more Olympic track-and-field medals, as a ratio of its population, than any other country in the world, and only the United States has a larger aggregate. In spite of this early sterling performance, Jamaica has been through a turbulent political uprising and is still trying to navigate through a crippling economic malaise. In the nineteen seventies and early eighties, Jamaica was ground zero for the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. The author will take you through the good old days of the natural simplicity of growing up in rural Jamaica. He will recount the past and present great achievements that have been accredited to Jamaica. You will also visit with him the days of wrath when Jamaica was the staging ground for the proxy war between the Soviet/Cuban axis versus the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

This book offers first-person narratives of teachers’ curriculum encounters. The reflections of teachers are presented using Pinar’s Method of Currere as a tool for undertaking deep analysis of teachers’ curriculum encounters. The Method of Currere allows teachers to embody curriculum in all its forms, allowing for reflection on encounters in the formal, informal, hidden curriculum and beyond. The book aims to provide readers with a broad understanding of curriculum as the lived experience encapsulating the educational, personal, and professional life of the teacher. In this way teachers are able to trace and make sense of the development of their knowledge and make changes that lead to the continuous offering of quality education. The book will be of interest to students, scholars and practitioners involved in curriculum studies, teacher education/training, teaching, and general education.

Doors fly open and opportunities arrive on your doorstep once you start to understand the basic principles of career success. Your Career, Your Life reveals these important foundations and shows that career growth is a process that starts inside you. SUCCESS is a direct product of your thoughts, words and actions. While all careers can grow up to a point through consistent hard work, going further requires wisdom, preparation and focus - conscious career management. We all have the potential to turn our DREAMS into REALITY, but we need knowledge, tools and a guide. Using an original week-by-week approach to present sometimes difficult concepts in an accessible, often humorous manner, recruitment specialist Annette Kinnear has produced that guide for South Africans. Drawing on examples from real-life situations and inspiring quotations from an eclectic range of sources, Your Career, Your Life imparts wisdom that is applicable not only to career development but also to life as a whole. The weekly structure and well-chosen activities make it easy to assimilate Kinnear's principles, both intellectually and emotionally, resulting in a book that is both supportive and challenging.

Provides cooperative education and internship professionals and researchers design, carry out, and disseminate quality research and evaluation studies. Highlights key programs and shows how to demonstrate sound learning outcomes. --Publisher description.

A synchronic sociolinguistic study of Jamaican Creole (JC) as spoken in urban Kingston, this work uses variationist methods to closely investigate two key concepts of Atlantic Creole studies: the mesolect, and the creole continuum. One major concern is to describe how linguistic variation patterns with social influences. Is there a linguistic continuum? How does it correlate with social factors? The complex organization of an urbanizing Caribbean society and the highly variable nature of mesolectal speech norms and behavior present a challenge to sociolinguistic variation theory. The second chief aim is to elucidate the nature of mesolectal grammar. Creole studies have emphasized the structural integrity of basilectal varieties, leaving the status of intermediate mesolectal speech in doubt. How systematic is urban JC grammar? What patterns occur when basilectal creole constructions alternate with acrolectal English elements? Contextual constraints on choice of forms support a picture of the mesolect as a single grammar, variable yet internally-ordered, which has evolved a fine capacity to serve social functions. Drawing on a year's fieldwork in a mixed-class neighborhood of the capital city, the author (a speaker of JC) describes the speech community's history, demographics, and social geography, locating speakers in terms of their social class, occupation, education, age, sex, residence, and urban orientation. The later chapters examine a recorded corpus for linguistic variables that are phono-lexical (palatal glides), phonological (consonant cluster simplification), morphological (past-tense inflection), and syntactic (pre-verbal tense and aspect marking), using quantitative methods of analysis (including Varbrul). The Jamaican urban mesolect is portrayed as a coherent system showing stratified yet regular linguistic behavior, embedded in a well-defined speech community; despite the incorporation of forms and constraints from English, it is quintessentially creole in character.

Nowhere is teachers’ lives and work more challenging than in Jamaican schools. Teachers in Jamaica are regularly faced with limited resources and challenging students. Teacher pay has been historically low and current conditions continue a long tradition of providing minimal compensation for teachers’ work. Recent school reform efforts has been successful in producing a teaching force that is better educated than ever before, and yet, teachers are seldom given the autonomy in decision-making and/or respect that accompanies the work of comparable professions. Coupled with these issues, teachers regularly face hunger, poverty, behavioral issues and a lack of parental support as part and parcel of their experience in 21st century schools. If teachers are perceived as having low professional status, it is not surprising that they are often blamed for the shortcomings of Jamaican schools. The citizens of Jamaica are firmly committed to the notion that “every child can learn, every child must learn;” however, the reality is that while all children can learn, many children do not learn in this country where the allocation of resources favors the rich and disowns the poor. Public schools in Jamaica vary tremendously across the fourteen parishes. Geography and social class regularly determine both the context and circumstances of teachers’ work, and yet, discussions of teachers seldom acknowledge the differences. There is a place for a more in-depth examination of teachers’ work and teachers’ lives in Jamaica where a consideration of the emergence of teacher leadership and higher professional status can intersect with a vision of new roles and responsibilities for teachers. While many of the reports on Jamaican education consider the role of administrative leaders, there is an absence of any discussion of the role of teacher leaders is school reform. It is interesting that a country can advocate for higher levels of teacher preparation and an upgrading of the professional status of teachers, and yet, ignore the potential power of teachers as major actors directing efforts to reform the schools. Teachers acting as leaders, in a profession dominated by women, would challenge the status quo and usurp preconceived notions regarding the work of teachers. In this book, 21st century descriptions of teachers’ lives and work will accompany a consideration of how the transformation of the teaching profession could positively impact both schools and classrooms across the island.

“In these kaleidoscopic stories of Jamaica and its diaspora we hear many voices at once. All of them convince and sing. All of them shine.”—Zadie Smith An O: The Oprah Magazine “Top 15 Best of the Year” • A Well-Read Black Girl Pick Tenderness and cruelty, loyalty and betrayal, ambition and regret—Alexia Arthurs navigates these tensions to extraordinary effect in her debut collection about Jamaican immigrants and their families back home. Sweeping from close-knit island communities to the streets of New York City and midwestern university towns, these eleven stories form a portrait of a nation, a people, and a way of life. In “Light-Skinned Girls and Kelly Rowlands,” an NYU student befriends a fellow Jamaican whose privileged West Coast upbringing has blinded her to the hard realities of race. In “Mash Up Love,” a twin’s chance sighting of his estranged brother—the prodigal son of the family—stirs up unresolved feelings of resentment. In “Bad Behavior,” a couple leave their wild teenage daughter with her grandmother in Jamaica, hoping the old ways will straighten her out. In “Mermaid River,” a Jamaican teenage boy is reunited with his mother in New York after eight years apart. In “The Ghost of Jia Yi,” a recently murdered student haunts a despairing Jamaican athlete recruited to an Iowa college. And in “Shirley from a Small Place,” a world-famous pop star retreats to her mother’s big new house in Jamaica, which still holds the power to restore something vital. Alexia Arthurs emerges in this vibrant, lyrical, intimate collection as one of fiction’s most dynamic and essential authors. Praise for How to Love a Jamaican “A sublime short-story collection from newcomer Alexia Arthurs that explores, through various characters, a specific strand of the immigrant experience.”—Entertainment Weekly “With its singular mix of psychological precision and sun-kissed lyricism, this dazzling debut marks the emergence of a knockout new voice.”—O: The Oprah Magazine “Gorgeous, tender, heartbreaking stories . . . Arthurs is a witty, perceptive, and generous writer, and this is a book that will last.”—Carmen Maria Machado, author of Her Body and Other Parties “Vivid and exciting . . . every story rings beautifully true.”—Marie Claire