Message From The Deputy HeadteacherAdmin

Education is not just a process of giving knowledge for a future job but a lifelong process which creates an understanding of moral and ethical values to guide one’s life in a right path. As a parent, you want the best for your child and we are proud to be working with you to ensure that they are given the right knowledge to face the future challenges. Parents, students and the school authorities are a team and we have to complement each other effort

Secondary school is an important and challenging time of transition in a child’s life as it is at this level that most of them begin to experience adolescence life and its associated problems. In a term, students stay with parents for not more than three weeks but most parents get relieved when it’s time for students to report back to school. Likewise when students go for holidays, we also get a relieve from stressful period of twelve to thirteen weeks when they are at school. This therefore calls for a concerted effort and cooperation between parents and the school administration in order to nurture them into responsible citizens. Our programme recognises the different needs of students at this stage.

At St. Josephs College Ombaci we focus on complete development of our students by involving them in both academic and co-curricular activities. I am sure this helps our children to realise, understand and explore their talents. In order to do this, the parents and the school authorities must work together to inculcate our core values in the students and these are God fearing, Team work, Transparency and accountability, Innovativeness, Professionalism, Hard work and Self reliance.

“If a plant is carefully nurtured by a gardener, it will become good, and produce, better fruits”. Therefore, children must be given good training from their earliest childhood.

Mr. Candia Godfrey Deputy Headteacher Admin

We teach who we are I am a teacher at heart, and there are moments in the classroom when I can hardly hold the joy. When my students and I discover uncharted territory to explore, when the pathway out of a thicket opens up before us, when our experience is illumined by the lightning life of the mind and Understanding then teaching is the finest work I know.

But at other moments, the classroom is so lifeless or painful or confused and I become so powerless to do anything about it that makes my claim to be a teacher seem a transparent sham. Then I feel the enemy is everywhere in those students from some alien planet, in that subject I thought I knew, and in the personal pathology that keeps me earning my living this way.

No matter how we devote ourselves to reading and research, teaching requires a command of content that always eludes our grasp. Second, the students we teach are larger than life and even more complex. To see them clearly and see them whole, and respond to them wisely in the moment, requires a fusion of Freud and Solomon (Robert and Sake 1982) that few of us achieve. If students and subjects accounted for all the complexities of teaching, our standard ways of coping would do, keep up with our fields as best we can, and learn enough techniques to stay ahead of the student psyche. But there is another reason for these complexities: we teach who we are. Teaching, like any truly human activity, emerges from one’s inwardness, for better or worse. As I teach, I project the condition of my soul onto my students, my subject, and our way of being together. The entanglements I experience in the classroom are often no more or less than the convolutions of my inner life. Viewed from this angle, teaching holds a mirror to the soul. If I am willing to look in that mirror, and not run from what I see, I have a chance to gain self-knowledge and knowing me is as crucial to good teaching as knowing my students and my subject.

In fact, knowing my students and my subject depends heavily on selfknowledge. When I do not know myself, I cannot know who my students are. I will see them through a glass darkly, in the shadows of my unexamined life and when I cannot see them clearly I cannot teach them well. When I do not know myself, I cannot know my subject not at the deepest levels of embodied, personal meaning, we teach who we are.

When Teachers Lose Heart As good teachers weave the fabric that joins them with students and subjects, the heart is the loom on which the threads are tied, the tension is held, the shuttle flies, and the fabric is stretched tight. Small wonder, then, that teaching tugs at the heart, opens the heart, even breaks the heart and the more one loves teaching, the more heartbreaking it can be. We became teachers for reasons of the heart, animated by a passion for some subject and for helping people to learn. But many of us lose heart as the years of teaching go by. How can we take heart in teaching once more, so we can do what good teachers always do, give heart to our students?

The courage to teach is the courage to keep one’s heart open in those very moments when the heart is asked to hold more than it is able, so that teacher and students and subject can be woven into the fabric of community that learning and living requires.

There are no techniques for reclaiming our hearts, for keeping our hearts open. Indeed, the heart does not seek “fixes” but insight and understanding.

When we lose heart, we need an understanding of our condition that will liberate us from that condition, a diagnosis that will lead us toward new ways of being in the classroom simply by telling the truth about who, and how, we are. Truth, not technique, is what heals and empowers the heart. We lose heart, in part, because teaching is a daily exercise in vulnerability.

I need not reveal personal secrets to feel naked in front of a class. I need only pause a question or work a proof on the board while my students doze off or pass notes. No matter how technical or abstract my subject may be, the things I teach are things I care about and what I care about helps define my selfhood. Unlike many professions, teaching is always done at the dangerous intersection of personal and public life.

A good therapist must work in a personal way, but never publicly: the therapist who reveals as much as a client’s name is derelict. A good trial lawyer must work in a public forum, but unswayed by personal opinion: the lawyer who allows his or her feelings about a client’s guilt to weaken the client’s defense is guilty of malpractice.

But a good teacher must stand where personal and public meet, dealing with the thundering flow of traffic at an intersection where he or she feels more like crossing a freeway on foot. As we try to connect ourselves and our subjects with our students, we make ourselves, as well as our subjects, vulnerable to indifference, judgment, ridicule.

AJIKO JULLIET DEPUTY HEADTEACHER (ACADEMICS)

FLYING THE ACADEMIC FLAG.

“St Joscom” is a school blessed with qualified teachers that well trained and a good administration. These teachers have succeeded in keeping the academic glory of the college in Arua, West Nile and Uganda at large through producing several academic giants especially in UACE and UCE examinations. The summary below proves it all to those who still doubt that St. Joscom is an academic hero.

In 2011, 129 candidates were registered for UCE and 54 passed in div 1, 61 div 2, 14 div 3. The best obtained aggregates 10.

In 2012, 145 candidates were registered, 33 Div 1, 68 div 2.

In 2013, 136 were registered, 36 Div 1, 71 div 2.

In 2014, 148 were registered, 43 in Div 1, 64 in Div 2, and the best was 10 agg.

In 2015, ,115 were registered, 29 in Div 1, 58 Div 3, and the best was 11 agg.

In 2016, 86 sat for UCE, 26 div 1, 60 Div 2.

In 2017, 96 were registered, 38 in Div 1, 55 Div 2and the rest Div 3.

The latest results indicated that out of 86 registered, 37 Div 1, 37 Div 2, and the best got 14 agg.

Expect yet the best come the year 2019. On the other hand, the UACE results indicated that over 50% of the candidates were able to attain university cut off points. In 2017, 72 were registered out of which 29 got 3pp and 23 got 2pp. In 2018 results, the best got 16 points, 15 points in 2017, the best got 17 points, 15 points in 2016 17 points. The good performance in the College in not by accident, students are well facilitated to study. The school has designed a special timetable for extra lessons to promote the coverage of syllabi in time. Join me in this great college if you are interested in a bright future.