Teachers' enthusiasm inspires

FIZZING: Youngsters perform in Castlecliff School's 2014 production, Te Ika A Maui.PHOTO/FILE

THE greatest thing about my job is seeing people fizzing at the bung and excited about their work. This can be while engaged in vocations, occupations, callings, hobbies or what to the casual observer appears to be the most menial task. But a huge difference which can go unnoticed to the untrained eye. The difference between the job done and the job done well is like night and day to the end user.

Some of the most infectious enthusiasm comes from teachers and it is in their hands that the aspirations and expectations of young people are often held.

This week I visited Castlecliff School and found an excited bunch of teachers, students and teacher-aides in love with their work and totally focused on their work. The configuration of classes was different from when I went to school. In the post-war period it was a matter of being grouped, across the classroom, silent unless spoken to, learning by rote, hair off the collar, hem above the knee etc.

"Mind you, we all knew our times tables." But the gaps between those who learned easily and those who struggled to learn were much closer. The social impacts that deny the ability to learn for some, such as unemployment, absentee parents, drug use, crime families, poor housing, and low wages largely didn't exist or were well mitigated by full employment; stay-at-home mothers, closer neighbourhood supports and interventionist government agencies. So educating children today is a challenge.

At Castlecliff School, kids learn in classes set up for them to learn best. The teachers deal with issues of the day that get on the road of learning, rather than try and teach despite the elephant in the room that is distracting the child.

The Afterschool homework programme is oversubscribed. The Team Tama (two male teachers in one room) makes learning maths applicable to the kids' world and the dictate of the syllabus so that kids don't even know it is maths they are doing. Rocket-making brought a whole swag of dads into the school to watch and learn from the teachers and kids - uninvited but hugely welcome.

You know a school is the hub of the community when it is natural for parents to arrive for the fun of it and not because they have an appointment with the principal. This principal meets in every child's home once a term, so four times a year. With the engagement of adult education and programmes such as Computers in Homes, the school is becoming an educational hub for a whole suburb.

Yet competition generated by schools also means they poach each other's kids. Five rural schools pick up kids from the Castlecliff area and take them off for the day. They cannot be a local school from 30-40 kilometres away. These schools are using money donated or allocated for education to keep positions in schools viable. It beggars belief.

I have used one example of one school in one area of Whanganui, but many schools have similar stories to tell. About 80 schools are in the electorate and most are a tribute to the leadership, staff, pupils and families represented at the desks, on the bean bags, up the trees, in the swimming pools, on the sports fields and in the sand-pits of those schools and communities.