I was honoured last month by my speaker colleagues – National Speakers Association- as NZ’s Educator of the Year. Last year I won NZ Speaker of the Year. It is always wonderful to have your work acknowledged by your colleagues and the hundreds of congratulations emails, posts and messages are always lovely to receive. However, […]
Read More
A message for all senior secondary students … There are five weeks to go before national school exams and if you are starting to get stressed about exam time – this is great news. Why stress is good… Experiencing stress before exams is a good thing! Stress causes your adrenaline to pump and allows you to work […]
Read More
Choosing a new phone for many may be an exciting task, however when I took my Dad to get a new phone recently he said “I don’t want a smart phone, I just want one like the one I have – so I don’t have to learn anything new.” This is not the first time I […]
Read More
This week I heard the news of the apparent suicide of Robin Williams – this has totally rocked my world – I feel numb… (note I am still in denial with the word apparent.) Robin William’s outer persona reflected (to me anyway) a confident, intelligent, successful person who had his whole life together. I guess […]
Read More
What has happened to personal responsibility? I again wondered this while on an aeroplane recently. As always the crew showed the safety demonstration. I have heard this literally hundreds of times, (as of writing this post I have been fortunate to travel on 1752 planes in the last 35 years – yes I keep a record) […]
Read More
In his book, Give and Take, Adam Grant discusses recent neuroscience which shows that giving actually activates the reward and meaning centres in our brains, which send us pleasure and purpose signals when we act for the benefit of others. “One study of more than 2,800 Americans over age twenty-four showed that volunteering predicted increases in […]
Read More
“To get to easy you have to go through hard.” This was a recent Mountain Dew advert on the back of a bus and on billboards in Wellington. This parallels a message I have been teaching students about learning – “Everything is hard before it is easy.” When students are studying for an exam, the best […]
Read More
I come from a long line of great chefs, caterers and foodies – in fact my Nana, Mother, sister and daughter are real foodies, and I’m just not one of them. I make food to sustain, comfort and for sharing with others. Now I can cook and indeed do and really enjoy it – not just at […]
Read More
I recall at high school participating in a debate “Rules are meant to be broken.” To be honest I cannot recall if I was on the affirmative or negative side, nor whether we won or lost – however I have never forgotten the topic. In recent media coverage this old topic has come back to […]
Read More
I am really excited that tomorrow is our daughters Matariki – mid winter festival. This time two years ago I wrote an article for the Teachers Matter Magazine about the power of having rites of passage built within the school system. Here is an extract from that article… Last term my daughter’s school celebrated the winter solstice, […]
Read More