Seeking and nurturing that spark
ISTARTED off teaching in primary schools in this rohe, and then I moved up into the college about 1988. retired in 2003, but I’ve taught most of my life, so that’s 40-plus years of teaching.
I did have a lifelong passion working with kids, until at the end it just got a bit hard. It was the paperwork that just took it right away.
The biggest lesson I learned was that everybody is different. There’s always something good or worthwhile in everyone. It’s about recognising that ‘spark,’ and working from there. As primary school-trained teachers, we teach the child; secondarytrained teachers teach the subject. We had more success with our Ma¯ ori kids, teaching to their needs.
So that’s something I’ve learned, even in our kapa haka. Somehow or other we usually finished up with all the naughty kids. But I just found that if you could find something and focus on that, you’d get the best out of kids. So one of our big deals was we always — before kapa haka — made sure they had a feed, even though it might’ve been just bread pudding or fried bread or something — or fruit! But we always had something to eat, and through that we could get anything out of our kids.
You know, just having that attitude, just homing in on anything with them — those kids would do anything for us. They used to look after us, those kids. I have fond memories of so many of my students; some are now nanas and papas — hard case!
I suppose at the end of the day I learned that everybody has got something worthwhile to offer, but it’s just trying to find that spark. There’s always a good speck in everybody, it’s just trying to find it.