The Spirit of a Head Teacher
This photo was taken in Bali, late in the evening, in a beachside bar. It was a quiet bar with just me, this woman, a hungover Australian and a dog as the patrons. The Australian sat in the corner nursing his head, we were a few hours from the party place in Bali on a quiet, empty stretch of coast. Both me and this woman were travelling solo and got chatting about who we were, where we were from.
She had a strong spirit, maybe it’s because I know that but I can feel it when I look at this photo. She was the head teacher of a primary school in New Zealand. She told me about how when she took over the school she had to write an enormous annual report every year. She hated it, I sympathised. The school she worked at had a significant Māori population and she was keen to include the community in the curriculum.
As our conversation about her work continued, she told me about the close relationship between Māori and eels, that the health of rivers is critically important to them because it’s critically important to the life of the eels. These are river eels but after an extraordinary 25-80 years spent in freshwater they swim 5000km into the deep ocean to spawn. She wove river restoration into the curriculum. She wove other things in too, like beekeeping, which teaches the children not only how to make honey but how to run a small business packaging and selling the honey. I loved the idea of an education that was more than academic, it was an education that connected the children to the world around them and showed them what they can create in partnership with it.
This woman was about living a connected life, she was about real learning. With a mix of mischief and defiance in her eyes she told me how she had got the annual report down from a huge lifeless document to a single photo. The photo is of a huge collage of what the students and community feel they have achieved that year, and what they want to do with the year ahead of them.
I can’t remember the name of this woman, and we didn’t swap contact details but that doesn’t matter. When I look at this photo I see her. I see who she is. I see someone showing up in the world in a way I admire. When I look at this photo, that quiet bar on the beach and that conversation becomes the present for a moment.
