Kate Hawkesby: Hats off to all the kids and parents finishing NCEA this week

Hats off to all the kids who’ve sat NCEA the past few weeks, that’s wrapping up this week, Friday’s the last day for exams. Hats off also to all the parents who’ve managed all that stress at home, juggling kids study schedules while also running them round to rowing before the crack of dawn or all the other sports they’re doing, as well as calming nerves, washing sports gear, trying to make nourishing meals.. look it’s a process. And no matter how many times you go through it, we’re onto our fifth time, it’s always good when it finishes and all that pressure comes off. It’s also good to remember all the hard-working students who actually are bothering to attend school, who do study, and do take education seriously. We talk a lot about all the ones who aren’t or don’t, all the truancy, all the drop outs, all the youth flicking the bird at education. But in that taking up all our focus, we forget all the kids who are getting up each day, getting out of bed, putting on uniforms, lugging heavy books, bags and laptops round the place, and actually going through the paces. On that note, the teachers who’re working hard for them too. The older your kids get the more you appreciate the good teachers. They’re not all good of course, some are downright terrible. But the good ones are like gold, the ones who ‘get’ your child, who go the extra mile, who have a great sense of humour, who encourage debate and a contest of ideas. Those are the cool teachers. The ones who rule with an iron fist and a ‘do it my way or the highway’ routine, the ones who think along one line only, they’re the weakest links. Worse yet are the ones who inflict their political opinions or world view on your kids, that happens more often than you think. Yet another reason to protect kids from having to vote at 16, when their head had been filled with ideas that are not necessarily their own. But it’s funny to watch that as time ticks by, as each year passes, with each child completing another year of education, how little has changed in all this time, even since we did it. The curriculum, scarily, at High School level hasn’t changed much, the approach to secondary teaching in many respects is the same too. But I can’t help feeling like the kids these days have more to worry about. The internet is a double edged sword. On the one hand, I wonder how any of us got through school without Google. It’s awesome that these kids can tap into virtually anything they want to know, and find that information in seconds. The flipside is of course, you have to be increasingly vigilant about what that information is, and where it came from and whether it’s accurate or not. But to have so much info at your fingertips and not have to flip through endless pages of thick textbooks to find it – that’s cool. Although the internet is a tap you can’t really turn off. It’s a good education tool but it’s also often their social playground too – and that can be all-consuming and in many cases detrimental to their mental health. So, kids carry a lot these days, but so do their parents. Which is why I for one am glad NCEA is coming to an end this week, and we can all pack up the stress and pressure for another year.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.