“It will suit me just down to the ground,” he says.
He adds he’s excited for the move, even though in many ways, it’s probably bittersweet.
Carl’s wife Denise passed away from cancer about a year ago, which has motivated him to make the move.
Carl says he’s been blown away by the expressions of gratitude and best wishes from students and staff as he sets to retire and leave.
“It’s been a lovely term this term, with some emotional farewells.”
Teaching was a career that “suited me”, he says.
“I got great satisfaction from it.”
An example he gives is teaching his sister to ride a bike, adding that it was an interesting challenge to find a solution to a problem that helps the person learn.
“I could find a way to help people with what they needed to learn.”
While he did look at other fields, particularly those that related to physics, which was a particular interest, teaching was what appealed the most. He sees teaching as right up there with parenting as one of the most important things a person can do.
After he left high school in Christchurch, he went to teacher’s college, studying for a degree at Canterbury University at the same time. It is there that he met his beloved Denise.
He took on the teacher training part-time which allowed him to spread it out, rather than do it all in a one-year rush.
“Which meant I did my honours degree over five years rather than four years.”
Physics was his speciality subject.
He says it’s a study of “absolutely everything”.
“Physics explains how everything works and why everything is, and that to me is the ultimate. I just loved it.”
Teaching, especially in secondary education, has changed since his training.
Carl says in teacher’s college, they would tell the trainees how they should be teaching, but he’s learned that “you have to find yourself as a teacher and what works for you”.
“We’re all individuals. There’s no one recipe that works.”
While teaching teenagers can be challenging, it’s clearly very rewarding for Carl, especially when, years later, he might bump into a former student in Pahīatua and they would chat to him about what they were doing and how his teaching had helped influence that.
He says he’s also learned as a teacher that things don’t necessarily work the first time.
“Don’t give up on them. Persevere with things for a while [and] give things a chance to succeed. Have a bit of faith in the logic behind it.”
Carl has loved living in Pahīatua, saying he’s felt “embedded in the community” and intends to come back to visit from time to time.
Leanne Warr is editor of the Bush Telegraph and has been a journalist on and off since 1996 when she joined the Levin Chronicle, before moving on to other publications. She re-joined NZME in June 2021.
