Teacher: 'I feel undervalued'

Tina Peters: "Does it really mean anything? I don't know what they have done since they've been there." Photo / Jason Oxenham

Carmel College teacher Tina Peters is striking because she is disappointed.

"Disappointed about the respect," she said. "They set up all these taskforces to look at this and that - and this is all we've got in the end."

Peters, a 39-year-old solo mum with an 11-year-old son, worked as a colour consultant and had an art gallery before deciding to go teaching "because I like kids".

"I had other jobs that were less demanding, with pay that is on a par," she said.

She was excited by the rhetoric from Labour and NZ First politicians before the last election, and by Jacinda Ardern's invitation to her former teacher to attend her swearing in as Prime Minister.

"Those are things that made me think, 'Yea, we are being valued!'" she said.

"But does it really mean anything? I don't know what they have done since they've been there."

As the sole Māori teacher at Carmel College, Peters runs the kapa haka and waka ama groups, meets regularly with Māori whānau in the evenings, liaises with reo Māori teachers in other schools so that they can "moderate" each other's assessments, and is organising a cultural festival for her community of learning on Friday.

"Sometimes I feel like I give more to other kids than I do to my son," she said. "I hope that he sees the value in it, of giving to other people."

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• Day of disruption as teachers walk out

Fairness 'goes beyond sharing toys'

Linda Stewart and her 6-year-old daughter Eliana will march with the teachers today. Photo / Dean Purcell

Onehunga mother Linda Stewart will hopes her 6-year-old daughter Eliana will learn a lesson about fairness when they join the teachers' march up Queen St today.

"She is going to learn that fairness goes beyond sharing toys and cutting the cake into equal pieces," she writes.

Stewart (no relation to teacher leader Lynda Stuart) is a former early childhood teacher and got annoyed when Ministry of Education deputy secretary Ellen MacGregor-Reid said the teachers' strike would "inconvenience" parents and "disrupt" children's education.

She has recently started volunteering for two hours a week in the new entrants classroom at Eliana's school, Te Papapa, and can see the teachers' conditions at first hand.

"Teachers talk about how they can't go to the toilet during class," she said.

"Te Papapa is a small school with a small staff, that means the teachers have to do double duty - you don't just get playground duty or road patrol once a week, they have to do more because there's less of them."

Strike aims at 'incorrect target'

Alwyn Poole says each school has the ability to reduce teachers' workload through small class sizes and sharing lesson plans. Photo / File

Charter school founder Alwyn Poole says teachers' workload will not be relieved through collective agreements, because it's mainly driven by each school principal.

"The strikes are missing the correct target and the vast majority of workload issues are not dictated by the contracts," he said.

Poole's two former charter schools, South Auckland Middle School and Middle School West Auckland, have had to become state schools with special character after the Labour Government abolished the charter school model.

But he said he had kept classes to only 15 students for each teacher by using the state operations grant, and kept preparation time to a minimum by using common resources for learning units that all teachers use.

A teacher at another state school told him her experience was quite different.

"She had meetings four times a week, and each staff member was required to prepare their own lessons and unit plans," he said.

"I expect our teachers to do their job [but] if one person is taking 60 hours a week to do their job, I'd hope they would come and talk to us and say, 'Goodness, how do I make this more efficient?'"