No more excuses for failing matric
ALEXANDRA – Matriculants at Realogile High School are given study guides to help with their matric examinations.
Realogile High School matriculants will have no excuse not to excel in their final examinations in two months’ time.
The school pupils were recipients of a donation of matric study guides for accounting, chemistry, maths and physics from Presto Books, a student-run matric pupils’ empowerment company.
Presto Books, which was initially set up to launch the study guides programme at Alex High School before being moved over to Realogile, is an educational resource provider that produces study guides written by top South African students for fellow students.
Co-founders of the project Shivad Singh and Fuaad Coovadia, both ex-students of the University of Cape Town were still students when they established the business after pondering the reasons behind the non-performance of a high number of matriculants in their final year.
The pair then came up with the reason – the fact that pupils often do not understand their study guides that are written by university professors and then presented to them by other academics in the form of their teachers.
With their familiarity of student issues, they said, “We were convinced that if we could simplify the language and reduce it to the level and standard of the students, and using fellow students to write the guides, we [could] witness a phenomenal pass rate in the matric examinations in our schools.
“It was not long before this concept of ours was embraced, though not without its own teething problems, and today we can boast of the success of the project and hence we’re launching it here in Alexandra to also help pupils of this township to excel and lift themselves up from the clutches of poverty,” Singh said at the presentation.
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The organisation also runs a ‘buy one – donate one’ concept which means for every study guide purchased, one gets donated to a less fortunate school, ensuring that their matric pupils have the same access to the content as pupils from the more privileged schools.
Realogile matric pupils, whose school remains at the tail-end of the performance stakes of Alexandra schools with a 59,3 percent pass rate, were added to the list of beneficiaries to receive the free study guides, and the donors said pupils at the school will have no excuses for notexcelling in the year-end examinations.
Because the school is one of the paperless pilot schools under Gauteng MEC for Education Panyaza Lesufi’s programme to roll out iPads in schools, the pupils were not given book-form study guides but were shown how to access the guides using their iPads.
Alex’s own maths wizard, 18-year-old Kholofelo Mohale who hosts Saturday maths classes for fellow pupils in the school, was among the beneficiaries of the study guide.
