Dunedin-born Emma White joined us at the beginning of this year as an English teacher. Mrs White brings with her an interesting teaching background, ranging from relieving in some of London’s most challenging schools, to training as a literacy specialist.

Mrs White says her two years teaching in London was where she really “learnt how to be a teacher.” Supply teaching, as relieving is known in the UK, took her into some of London’s lower socioeconomic schools and that was a real eye opener.

“(...) The government says ‘you need lots of money’ so they throw money at it, which doesn’t solve any of the problems,” she said. “Every classroom had a projector holder in it with no projector in it anymore, because they’d all been pinched the first day they’d been put in. [There was] one of those interactive whiteboards in every classroom, all destroyed. So, there was lots of money thrown around but none of the social problems had been dealt with.”

Watching her brother struggle with learning to read at school was what initially drew Emma White into teaching, as she saw how hard it was for him. Once she realised that completing her teacher training and teaching English as a subject hadn’t given her the specialist literacy skills that she required, she took herself back to university and completed a Master of Literacy Education.

Mrs White says that 25% of New Zealand students come to secondary school without the ability to be able to access the kind of reading material they are expected to be able to and that “25% is a lot." 

“I know that a lot of the time [students] come with negative feelings towards reading and writing because of their feelings of failure from previous schooling, and I want them to feel better about who they are, and know that literacy difficulties don’t mean that they can’t be the best person that they can be.”

She likens reading and writing to skills that are required in other fields, such as playing basketball, when talking about it with her students. “I played basketball but I’m no good at it because I didn’t practice and I didn’t learn the skills properly to start with. But if I went back, and was really dedicated to it, I know that I could.”

Mrs White is thoroughly enjoying her start at Nayland. She compares it to Freyberg High School in Palmerston North, both in terms of the H block and classroom layout and the ethos of the two schools. “I love it,” she said. “Through meetings that I’ve been to and watching different teachers interacting with students around the place (...) it’s a really positive place to be, a real focus on the positive. There’s a real heart.”

Outside of school, Mrs White is a very busy person. Her oldest child is five and she has three year old twins. They like to go on regular adventures outside as a family where they’re “making memories”, though a walk up the Grampians may take up half the day.