Nickie Muir: Humbled by the hard cases

Nickie Muir

Sometimes it's good to get a thrashing. An old friend used to call it "a humbling". He'd be feeling either that life was too hard, and he needed to build up a bit of resilience or - the obverse; that life was too comfortable and he was taking easy options. He'd take a small bat canoe out from the wild Wellington coast, get trashed around by the freezing washing machine mayhem for a few hours and come back feeling like he had things back in perspective.

This year I've taken a humbling - back teaching in a low-decile school after years of either very small classes or running small businesses. It's hard being an old female canine learning new tricks - especially when the ones teaching you seem to know every trick in the book, not unlike being thrashed around in a small plastic boat underwater and not knowing which way is up.

It's trite to say that I've learnt more than I've taught but it's lamentably true. I've learnt things I can't believe I didn't know and relearnt things I shouldn't have forgotten.

Like: some kids in New Zealand have every single odd running against them, with very few cheerleaders and not much going their way and yet they still turn up to school and still achieve. You don't often hear about these kids or what it is that makes them achieve what they do. I couldn't always say the same for my own outcomes.

Other things like: there are still kids in New Zealand who have no running water in their homes but can still turn up to school in a clean school uniform. I've learnt that the hardest kids are often the most brittle and easily break - tough hides are made not born yet, paradoxically, life can wear their skin very thin. Handle with care.

I've learnt too that I can't necessarily read kids like I thought I could. Seasoned practitioners, after years working at the chalkface in our communities, will see some kinds of behaviour and will interpret it in a completely different way to what I have done. Far more often than I care to admit their deeper knowing of the kids we work with every day means they see the invisible currents that run through a child's life which allows a far more generous and, lets face it, kinder interpretation of events.

I've learnt that there are massive inequalities in our education system, especially from the perspective of low-decile rural schools, and that often teachers are expected to wave magic pixie dust over all social ills and with some agentic thinking and high expectations they can achieve the impossible. And that there are the masters of their craft - who sometimes actually do. More than anything, I've learnt that the raw humour, vivacity, infuriating haututu, hard case and, ultimately extremely rewarding talent of kids here in Northland - especially the ones who sometimes have the cards stacked against them, makes their teachers into what I call "the L'Oreal educators". Why? When they can be so hard - why do they teach them? Because they're so damn worth it.