(Jamaica Gleaner) It’s not often that a mother and her daughter graduate at the same time, from the same university, with the same degree. But come 2022, that will be the story of Taneka McKoy Phipps and her daughter Shereece Bryan.
The mother-daughter duo will graduate from The Mico University College, certified as early-childhood practitioners, a feat that will be celebrated as a remarkable achievement and one on which education in Jamaica will climb several notches.
“Mico is a great institution,” McKoy Phipps says of the oldest teacher-training institution in the Western Hemisphere. “One of their core values is academic excellence and they try to keep you well equipped and well informed. But you have to want it, though.”
They emphasise critical thinking, but McKoy Phipps notes that applying whatever is taught is key.
The women sit in the same classes. A proud Shereece says: “She (her mother) got the late start. I got the right start, but our destinies collided.”
McKoy Phipps, not one to be merely reactive, dares, instead, to confront the bull by the horn. In fact, three Ps characterise the person who is Taneka McKoy Phipps – passionate, purpose-driven and prayerful. She says it, giving us further insight as to who she is.
And there is a determination to succeed that is exceptional. This is evident in how, along with Shereece, she dealt with the failure to secure scholarships for them to continue their studies at the university. They self-financed the first term and borrowed money in order to continue into the second term.
Things looked dismal financially, with the inability to secure the scholarships stalking them. But they didn’t give up. “We were teaching in the day and selling poems that she (mother) had written,” Shereece reveals. And when they still came up short, they sat out two years.
It was not the end of their pursuit of education, however, for today, here is a mother and her daughter at this premiere institution for teacher training, formalising a skill that for Phipps is innate and for her daughter, one which she is nurturing. Shereece received one of Mico’s scholarships last year, awarded by the Gore Foundation.
McKoy Phipps has already made the news, locally and internationally, rescuing scores of children in inner-city communities of Kingston who seemed destined to fall over the cliff of mental incapacity. These children were squeezed out of the education system because they did not have the technology to allow them to participate in the online learning. COVID-19, which has taken hundreds of thousands of lives around the world and has wrecked economies too, has chased education out of the established classrooms.
Schools are being conducted in the homes, via the Internet. Jamaica has not escaped this and has been grappling with the fact that some children could be slipping through the cracks because their parents cannot afford to get them the computer, the tablet or even a smart phone. When McKoy Phipps went to investigate the noise she was hearing recently in Union Gardens, and saw a group of children playing in the streets when it should have been school time, this was something to be confronted head-on. And that she did. It is a well-told story how she turned the walls in the community into blackboards and started setting lessons on them for the children.
“When I saw the children playing, proactivity came into play,” says the teacher who believes that critical thinking is essential, but argues, “Critical thinking without proactivity is dead, just like faith without work.”
There are now more than 120 children in at least seven communities who are instructed via these blackboards on the walls of residences, created by McKoy Phipps. These communities include Union Gardens, Mongoose Town, Payne Avenue, Tavares Gardens, all in south-west St Andrew. She is now being assisted by other persons, including Shereece, and another daughter, Martanek, herself a teacher.
DRIVEN BY THE CHILDREN’S DEDICATION
But having set the work on these roadside blackboards, she just doesn’t leave it there. The children’s work is assessed as if they were in a regular school. It was not her intention, initially, to do so, but knowing the encouragement that the children get from a tick or just a smiley face, she had to do it, she says.
“They need the feedback, or they are not motivated,” McKoy Phipps says.
And surprisingly, it is not the girls who are coming to her most times to have their work checked.
“It’s the boys who mainly come with their books to be signed. They are more extrinsic and need the boost. The girls are more intrinsic and do it (the work) not for fame, but the need to do it. The boys need to hear you say ‘well done’. They want to man up.”
When she turned the walls of these residence into blackboards, it was not the first time that she was doing so. When she was only a teenager, about 14 years of age, she noticed that some children in her community were not going to school, although they were intelligent. These children were between the ages three and five years old. She saw them playing and thought that their energy ought to be properly channelled.
“I started out on the cognitive teaching,” she explains. “I got things like toothbrush, rags, soaps, combs, toothpaste, and asked them to match the items.”
The desired response from the children inspired her to take this teaching further, so she created ‘chalk’ by burning wood. The coal became that tool and yes, the ‘blackboard’ was a wall in the neighbourhood.
“I wrote on the wall and started to teach them the one-two-threes and the A-B-Cs, and as I spent time with them I saw parents doing it, too, and even asking me to incorporate their students with mine.” All this while she was just a teenager. But she charged them nothing, because she “did it for the love”.
This grew into a classroom as children came to her after school. At the age of 19, she decided that with or without credentials – just the raw passion and ability – teaching beckons. She went to the principal of a basic school in Kingston where the need for a teacher was dire. She was accepted and was an instant fit, because the parents were already familiar with her teaching skills. This school had a population of 28 to 30 students, with about 22 in regular attendance. Within the space of a year there were 50 children there and when she eventually left, all the students were attending regularly.
McKoy Phipps left to start her own school. It was under a mango tree at 20 Delacree Lane, with 17 students. But within four months of having started it, enrolment grew to 50 students.
As for Shereece, teaching wasn’t her choice for a profession. She says she wanted to be a lawyer, but the Lord redirected her to stand by her mother. Now, she says they are on their way out of poverty, through education. And she finds it fulfilling to be able to serve, along with her mother and sister, children who are in need. And even though the communities in which the blackboards are set up are not adjoining neighbourhoods – they have to take public transportation to get to them – whenever they cannot afford the bus fare, they walk.
