Swimming upstream

Last week at school I said goodbye to a colleague that I had been a good friend through the craziness of last year and supported me through my eFellowship last year. Sometimes looking at something new can result in heightened skepticism which leads to self-doubt. Though I had the full support of senior leadership because it was new territory you often get people questioning the value of a new pursuit which leads to you also questioning the value. My colleague though was someone who really got what I was doing and was hugely positive around it. He visited the eSports matches asked about results and built up my positivity. On leaving I printed the awesome, Find Your Marigold: The One Essential Rule for New Teachers, this had been shared with me by Kit Haines last year and something that has helped me grow.

Marigolds grow best together.

Towards the end of the term, many of the ākonga including the teachers were getting weary and tired from assessments, marking and the busyness of life had brought them down a bit. A few girls approached me upset about the teacher leaving and wanting me to sign the card they had bought. They asked me if I was upset. Have course I said yes but then took it on as a teaching moment. I said yes I am upset but I have said goodbye to lots of good friends in the past and will do so in the future, I guess though it is hard it is a big part of growing up.

My other gift was the paper by Tokona Te Raki | Maori Futures Collective into ending streaming in Aotearoa. Streaming in New Zealand is the practice of students being selected on academic ability for 'top classes". In the report, it talks about how this practice had seen Pasifika and Māori streamed out of education as they miss out on these classes.

"The decision was made by the principal and senior leadership team to make the school an unstreamed institution, so no streaming at all! This was supported by the HOD maths but most maths teachers were either hesitant or disagreed. A common reason given by teachers was worry that ‘good students would be taken to other schools by their parents’. They also felt it easier to teach students of the same ability" (p14).

The quote above really cut into the issue for me, there are simple ways of whānau streaming their way out of a school and choosing to go to a private school or going to a school that would still stream students but at what expense to our society at large. Unfortunately, we have been put into a competitive market, and schools fight for students to come through their doors. In some communities, there is little choice in others lots. Will, there ever be a fair platform for schools to compete against each other, and does it even matter if we are deliberately not creating a fair platform for all students and leaving Māori and Pasifika behind through the practice of streaming. Education is a tool for social change and this needs to be at the heart of our decision-making.