Meeting William Pike

This week I had the privilege of meeting Mr William Pike. In 2007 William Pike had walked to the crater lake at the top of Mt Ruapehu and was spending a night in the Dome Shelter. During that night, Mt Ruapehu erupted with rocks and water being blown out of the crater. As William said, “what goes up must come down”, and within seconds rocks were smashing their way into the Dome Shelter. William had one leg crushed and had to have it amputated. He spent nine months in hospital and then made the conscious decision that this set back would not stop him from achieving his dreams. He learnt to walk with an artificial leg, and has continued with his adventures. He has even gone on to climb mountains in Antarctica. In 2010 he set up the William Pike Challenge Programme, which is now in 99 schools. This year is our first year that Wesley Intermediate School have been part of the Programme, with seven students opting in. Their challenge is to complete different outdoor activities, or try new things, and to do volunteer their time to work in the community. As I listened to William speak I was reminded of the two years I spent fighting cancer, (which apart from God’s grace I would not have survived). After this personal battle I was told, I would not be able to do certain things. Like William, I enjoy the outdoors and the mountains in New Zealand and challenged myself to get fit and walk the Routeburn and Kepler Tracks in the South Island, which I have managed to do in recent years.

Term One Highlights

What a fantastic term we have had. A particular highlight for me was the visit from John Pritiken, (a guest speaker from USA). John has done a number of things in his life, including setting Guinness World Records, and his photo is actually in one of the books that come out annually. He showed us how he could break a softball bat, and roll up a frying pan. While we all enjoyed this part of his talk, he also spoke about the severe bullying he had experienced while at school in USA. We were all shocked at what he went through, and his message was very clear… bullying should not be tolerated at all. I was pleased to hear him talk about showing respect for self and others, and he affirmed the PB4L behaviour programme we have in our school. His talk was one of the most emotive and uplifting messages I have ever heard.

The year started off with the Ako Hiko Cluster Wananga where teachers from all of the Ako Hko Schools meet in our school and heard about the history of the Ako Hiko Cluster, and where we are heading into the future. The whole ethos around the cluster was to combat the equity issue low decile schools in our area were facing in our area. We wanted what was best for our students, and wanted them to be at the ‘leading edge’ of education initiatives in New Zealand. All of the schools in the Ako Hiko Cluster share the same pedagogy of “Learn, Create, Share”, and even teachers planning is shared with parents. Students work is on the Learning Log and can be shared with staff, other students, and parents. One area we are working on as a Cluster is the ‘summer drop off’ where students tend to forget about school over the summer period and their academic marks drop backwards by 4 - 6 months. As a cluster we have introduced the Summer Learning Journey programme which is based around blogging. Students who complete this programme start the new year at the same academic level, (or higher in some cases), as where they finished at the previous year… and do not slip backwards over the Christmas Holidays.