Sally | Grey Lynn
“I work at the Northern Health School, and I arranged to meet a student at Glenfield Library. I’m a schoolteacher, so that’s a daily – I make people feel special daily. It’s my job.
I’ve had 12 and a half years frontline Policing before I trained as a schoolteacher in 2009. I’m a secondary school, I trained as a secondary school teacher, and what I like about it is, and it happened today; a student understood some concepts, and she got really quite excited, and she could do all these math exercises, and it is, I feel good when students get it and grasp the concepts.
I’m employed by the Northern Health School, and we work one-to-one with students that have health issues. There’s quite a lot of privacy involved in that, but basically, the students come to the health school. It’s either mental health issues; anxiety, depression, bullying, or they’re oncology students, so cancer students, or they are injured to an extent that they’re unable to attend, and it’s working with those students one-to-one, to often just build up their motivation and confidence for the mental health side, till they feel able to go back to their original school.
I, that’s a difficult one, because I think, I think people need to know that they’re wanted, but the special, because of the nature of the work we do, it’s not normal classroom teaching. I don’t sort of want to talk about that too much, because there are privacy and confidential issues with the work, but I think things like self-esteem; people have too little self-esteem. I think you can also have too much self-esteem. So it’s finding that balance. I think if people are happy in their own skin, then they are better citizens, generally.
I was born in Levin, and I grew up on a sheep farm, just north of Levin, between Levin and Foxton, and I’m in mid-50s. I just slip in as a baby-boomer, and I value more of a collective view of society, rather than individual responsibility, though I think sometimes people do have to step up and take responsibility for themselves.
I can talk about that for hours. Because I’m a baby-boomer, I remember pre to the 1980s and the deregulation and how everything shifted from sort of collective, I wouldn’t say socialist, but more of a collective society, and suddenly everything was measured by individual responsibility, and accountability, and I remember what it was like before the 1980s. Then we had that shift when suddenly everything is measured in accounting terms, and we’ve lost the fact that people are human beings, not numbers, and I think part of the problems we now have with mental health issues, a lot of issues actually, goes back to the fact of what happened in the 1980s with the deregulation, and the de-institutionalisation. Lots of things happened in the ‘80s, and I think we’re paying the price for that now with the society we now have, and I think the answers, a lot is put into individual responsibility, and a lot of it’s, I think the answer comes from collectively people working together, acknowledging that you live in a community. You’re part of a family, you’re part of a community, you’re part of a society, and we are all responsible for each other.”
