Skip to main content

Correction

Image
By
In the comment thread of this post I rather glibly stated that Teach for America had a dropout rate of ~50% (n.b. that I was defending TFA at the time). Turns out it's more like 15% for two years, though it gets a bit murky after that. Regardless, I still believe that TFA is a worthwhile program with a limited scope.

The dropout rate for Peace Corps in South Africa, on the other hand, is actually about 50%. This is higher than average--according to this Peace Corps wiki, the overall rate is about 33%. I find this discrepancy unsurprising.
Labels:

Comments

  1. ShannonFebruary 22, 2011 at 10:34 AM

    Say more about this? I'd have thought SA would be pretty decent as PC placements go--decent infrastructure, clean water, plumbing (assuming you aren't living in Alexandria or Khayelitsha). Admittedly the rural areas are far less developed and I speak from the relative luxury of Cape Town, but I'd think placements in some of the former Soviet states or even other parts of Africa would be much harder. Unless it has to do with PC admin in SA. Am enjoying your blog btw.

    ReplyDelete
  2. RyanFebruary 24, 2011 at 2:02 PM

    Well, I'm living in a super-remote village, and the creature comforts are pretty thin on the ground. I live in a tin-roofed shack that leaked like a sieve until I put about a liter of caulk in it (part of the roof blew off one time), and the water comes right out of the ground. I've never gotten seriously sick from it, but I still boil it to be safe.

    However, I reckon that South Africa's relatively high early termination rate has more to do with high crime (I've been attacked by tsotsis three times, though not violently), atrocious sexual harassment (the majority of volunteers are female), and lousy PC administration. More specifically, the site development runs from patchy to downright negligent, the medical officials are incompetent, and the pre-service training is a joke. That's not to say I've had a bad time here. It's been great!

    On the other hand, it was a commonly-repeated statistic that South Africa has the second-worst ET rate in the world, but I've been told recently that we are more average. I'll see if I can dig up some solid numbers on that score.

    Glad you like the blog! :)

    ReplyDelete
  3. ShannonFebruary 25, 2011 at 9:51 AM

    We're living the reality of the South African conundrum: first-world enclaves in a third-world country. Cape Town has high crime, to be sure (I've been pickpocketed, but it wasn't violent so I count myself lucky), but it also has high-end coffee shops and internet cafes and yoga studios. I get the sense that a lot of the people who live here are trying very hard to pretend they're not in Africa.

    The sexual harassment is worse when I'm in the townships and that's probably true of rural areas too--I wonder how much of it has to do with race. I don't stand out as a white girl in Cape Town, but I do in Khayelitsha or, presumably, the more rural provinces.

    If you come to Cape Town I'll buy you a latte. : )

    ReplyDelete
  4. RyanFebruary 25, 2011 at 1:10 PM

    I was in Cape Town for the World Cup, and the thing I noticed then was the massive police presence. Literally dozens of cops on Long Street for the opening match. Dunno if that still obtains now, but it was reassuring then.

    I think the harassment is partially race and partially a foreigner thing. People have this idea that white girls are slutty and get very pushy. It's disgusting, but luckily just another guy around almost eliminates it, so I try to at least accompany my neighbor to town when I can. I don't know how they put up with it.

    Be careful what you offer, I might just take you up on it! :) I've still got a few months left and I've had a hankering to go back to the mother city. I haven't had a latte in ages.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why Did Reality Winner Leak to the Intercept?

By
So Reality Winner, former NSA contractor, is in federal prison for leaking classified information — for five years and three months, the longest sentence of any whistleblower in history. She gave documents on how Russia had attempted to hack vendors of election machinery and software to The Intercept , which completely bungled basic security procedures (according to a recent New York Times piece from Ben Smith, the main fault lay with Matthew Cole and Richard Esposito ), leading to her capture within hours. Winner recently contracted COVID-19 in prison, and is reportedly suffering some lingering aftereffects. Glenn Greenwald has been furiously denying that he had anything at all to do with the Winner clusterfuck, and I recently got in an argument with him about it on Twitter. I read a New York story about Winner, which clearly implies that she was listening to the Intercepted podcast of March 22, 2017 , where Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill expressed skepticism about Russia actually b
Post a Comment
Read more

Varanus albigularis albigularis

By
That is the Latin name for the white-throated monitor lizard , a large reptile native to southern Africa that can grow up to two meters long (see pictures of one at the Oakland Zoo here ). In Setswana, it's called a "gopane." I saw one of these in my village yesterday on the way back from my run. Some kids from school found it in the riverbed and tortured it to death, stabbing out its eyes, cutting off its tail, and gutting it which finally killed it. It seemed to be a female as there were a bunch of round white things I can only imagine were eggs amongst the guts. I only arrived after it was already dead, but they described what had happened with much hilarity and re-enactment. When I asked why they killed it, they said it was because it would eat their chickens and eggs, which is probably true, and because it sucks blood from people, which is completely ridiculous. It might bite a person, but not unless threatened. It seems roughly the same as killing wolves that
4 comments
Read more

The Conversational Downsides of Twitter's Structure

By
Over the past couple years, as I've had a steady writing job and ascended from "utter nobody" to "D-list pundit," I find it harder and harder to have discussions online. Twitter is the only social network I like and where I talk to people the most, but as your number of followers increases, the user experience becomes steadily more hostile to conversation. Here's my theory as to why this happens. First is Twitter's powerful tendency to create cliques and groupthink. Back in forum and blog comment section days, people would more often hang out in places where a certain interest or baseline understanding could be assumed. (Now, there were often epic fights, cliques, and gratuitous cruelty on forums too, particularly the joke or insult variety, but in my experience it was also much easier to just have a reasonable conversation.) On Twitter, people rather naturally form those same communities of like interest, but are trapped in the same space with differe
2 comments
Read more