NZ NEITA 2010 REGIONAL AWARDS

EXCELLENCE IN TEACHING

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Hon Anne Tolley with Georgette Jenson 
Primary and Intermediate ASG Excellence in Teaching Award

Mrs Jenson's five minute speech at the Awards...

An old Koro was walking with his grandson through a crowded street in Wellington when he stopped and asked, ‘Moko, did you hear that cricket sing?”

His grandson replied “Koro,this is the busiest time of the day; you can’t hear a cricket sing with all this noise.”

‘But I can,” said Koro and he turned around and plucked from a window box, outside a shop, a small black cricket.

“Wow, Koro,” said his grandson, “ you must have super human hearing.”

‘No,” replied the old Koro and he took from his pocket a $2 coin and dropped it on the footpath.

The clinking sound that we all know, turned a dozen heads of passers by as they looked to the ground from where the noise had come.

“It’s not about super human hearing,’ said the old man, “ it all depends what you are listening for.”

One of my strong passions in education is teaching and using the Habits of Mind across the curriculm. 16 of these intelligent habits have been developed over a number of years by Dr Art Costa and are well known internationally.

In this age of Education where we are constantly measuring a child’s success in Numeracy and Literacy, both skills important in their adult years; we need to balance this by engraining mindful habits such as persistence, risk taking, metacognition and creativity that will remain with them throughout their lives, long after the school doors have swung closed behind them.

Young children have a tremedous capacity and desire to create. They are constantly exploring everything they can lay their hands or lips on. Before they come to school these young ones are in a continuous state of discovery. By the time they get to school they already know how to think and ponder, how to ask questions of why and how and when; they are passionate to learn about the world around. When I’m on lunch duty I will watch the 5 and 6 year olds play in the sandpit with cones and bottles of water. I have discovered that they don’t get ideas... they make them. Failure is just not in their vocabulary, they just keep persisting until something happens. They don’t give up. If we look through a child’s eyes, they are just awestruck by most of life’s every day events.

And I am passionate in not letting that be clouded over by the busyness of the curriculum and its assessments and deadlines that we teachers sometimes get entrapped in.

I have found over the 30+ years that I have been teaching, whether it be in a Decile One or Decile 10 school; with full emersion, bi lingual, or special needs students, whether the learners are 5 or 85; for me a way to encourage questioning and trust is to introduce them to one of my favourite habits: - Responding with Wonderment and Awe.

This year my class came up with a bright idea to breed crickets: we ended up with nearly 200 of them and thousands of eggs. The delightful story of one grandfather who stopped in to hand me a cricket in a jar, said he had gone to the service station to fill up his car about 7.30 the previous evening. He said it must have been a sight that in this wide open space there he was, chasing this cricket for his grand daughter, for about 10 minutes as it jumped and hopped all over the place.

My students built enclosures and found out amazing facts about crickets. Did you know that only the male cricket sings and it has 4 different songs. That intrigued a couple of my big rugby boys that they actually listened to them and could distinguish between the sounds.

Our Year 8s will retire around 2060. We have no concept of what the world will be like then, let alone what it may be like in 10 years time when they have finished tertiary. I do know though, they will need to be at least, flexible and creative thinkers.

Think of a teacher in your school years that most impressed you???? What fond memories do you have of him or her??

I hope I am remembered, but not as a teacher who taught them how to add fractions or to write a personal recount. I want to be remembered for the humour brought in class, for the fairness and empathy that we had for each other as we strived to always work as a team, and for the passion that I have for learning and wanted so much for them to know and grasp.

What an honour and a privilege we have, in this profession of teaching, to make all other professions possible for our students.

Tena koutou, tena koutou, tena koutou katoa