Co-parenting after a divorce.

While a couple is married, the husband usually goes out to work while the wife takes care of the children and the home. After a divorce, how should the roles be shared? 

In most African lands, the father takes custody of the children and fends for them, while the mother goes away alone like a single lady. While this will make it easier for her to remarry, the father can't stay home all day and so leaves the children behind with a stepmother while going to work. He won't be able to supervise her treatment of his kids and be able to confirm or refute any allegation of ill-treatment. As a result, a bad stepmother maltreats the children or a good stepmother is maligned out of jealousy. 

Children are usually better off with their mother. Even if she remarries, she will be the one to spend more time with the children than their stepfather will. He will, therefore , have no opportunity to ill-treat them in her absence. Their father can always send money into their mother's bank account and mentor the children via phone calls, online messages,etc as they grow up. The e-statements of account and the online chats will show that the father did his duty by the children in spite of the divorce. 

We rarely hear about the wicked stepfather because he is unlikely to be alone with the children in their mother's absence. He can't starve them, since their mother is the cook who will get the feeding allowance from him. 

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If the mother gets custody and the father pays maintenance as described above, children will adjust better to life after their parents' divorce. Also, no stepmother will be able to maltreat them (or be wrongly accused of maltreating them , in a bid to send her packing and reunite their biological parents). Rather than be wrongly called a wicked stepmother, some women would rather live outside (like mistresses) to bear and rear their kids until their stepchildren grow up and leave home. 

In the Bible, mothers usually got custody of their children (including sons) after a divorce (Genesis 21:9-21 ; Ezra 10:44).

Every teacher should have a typed-questions bank.

The summary passage of the June 1998 WASSCE English Language paper describes how public exam bodies set their questions months or even years in advance, vet the questions and then store them securely for future use.  

In this smartphone and Internet age, every teacher can easily keep a bank of his or her past and future typed questions. This is especially important for teachers of Mathematics and other Science subjects (whose questions need careful typing and proofreading because of the subscripts, superscripts, fractions, matrices, vectors, diagrams, etc). They should submit their handwritten questions to the typist early and get the typed Word document sent to their smartphones for careful proofreading before printing. Otherwise, they will have to go and make the corrections right in the examination halls. Even then, the question papers will be unsightly.

After proofreading the Word document and making all the necessary corrections, send the document to the printer. Keep the edited document on your phone & upload it as an email attachment for future reference. Each new term, paste in your new set of edited questions and upload the new document as an email attachment again. You are gradually building up your typed exam questions' bank. 

You can create a future questions' bank by: (a) using your phone to take pictures of typed questions on paper, extract the text in those pictures (with Google Photos, etc) into your phone's keyboard clipboard, and paste those questions into a Word document for proofreading ; (b) copying the text of questions found online into a Word document for proofreading. If your handwriting is legible enough, you can convert pictures of your handwritten questions into typed text. Pictures can be photographed (from books) or screenshot (from the Internet) and inserted into the Word document. You can also use your phone to draw complex diagrams with the help of an Office app and a photo-editing app .

You are now ready to churn out quality questions even at short notice. Your used and new questions are already in typed form and can be selected, copied and pasted into a new document, rearranged and numbered to your taste, etc within 30 minutes and sent for printing. You are ready to beat any deadline and can now concentrate on writing your lesson notes, delivering the lessons, marking your students' scripts, etc. WPS Spreadsheet (or other equivalent apps) will help you calculate the sums and arithmetic means of many students' scores fast during the result collation stage.  

Most typists make silly typing mistakes while rushing to type many questions within a week or two. Assist both them and yourself by submitting your questions early, proofreading your typed questions on your phone or computer (while they continue typing other people's questions on their computer) and keeping a typed question bank document regularly uploaded to your email box for safekeeping.