EDUCATIONAL BURNOUT
When I entered teaching in 1959, emphasis was on matching achievement to children’s individual ability. Now New Zealand politicians are turning our world class system into a sausage machine copying Yankee lock-step programmes.
I spent 40 years in the service as a primary school teacher and principal. Before tomorrow’s schools, I saw clever children stretched to excellence, average children enabled to reach achievable goals, and miracles worked on slower children. Borrowed lock-step programmes of work ensure many are bored or humiliated if unmatched to child ability.
Mainstreamed children are ‘dumped’ on classrooms with severely rationed teacher aide assistance, with promised support remains pie-in-the-sky because politicians prefer to fund jails rather than schools.
The honourable profession I entered is now subject to scurrilous criticism from those making ever greater demands on dedicated teaching staff. I believe that teachers feel that they are being reduced to state-paid servitude. For example, ‘national standards’ - directed from Wellington’s Ivory Towers while completely ignoring all expertise in New Zealand Council of Education Research - compels time gobbling statistical record to satisfy political clamour. Nothing should replace professional attention devoted to children and classroom planning, certainly not slick, imported child labelling, unstandardised for New Zealand.
Unsympathetic political masters in denial are causing burnout of dedicated principals trying to balanced limited budgets and rationalise staff workloads. Sweet reason cuts no ice with bossy bean counters.
They are ever ready to heap more blame or make fresh demands, further maiming an education system that produces
ERRORS IN LETTER
To answer Rangimarie Gordon (ac) Sole’s letter in the Star on November 17.
He suggests I worked for Brown’s Construction Co. That is totally wrong. Browns didn’t have anything to do with it. I worked for Mr G Williams of Ohangai who was the organiser of all building constructions.
Mr Sole also suggested that the rubbish was dumped there in the era of the Hawera County
Council.
If the council was paying a caretaker (Mr J Wright) why would he allow the dumping of rubbish there?
Why would the council have a caretaker there with known interest in the reserve. I may be of Tupaia descent, but in my opinion I am telling what actually happened.
Tom Sole
Hawera
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