Week 3, Term 3

Kia ora koutou,

This week we saw one of our students on the TV series Brainbusters. Rhys Holyoake of Year 8 did a remarkable job making it all the way through to the final after a very impressive quiz round. Take a look at the video here. Also, our Year 12 and 13 Adventure Based Management students have spent the week honing in on their safety management and snow skills under the tutelage of Mrs Emma Don and parent Matt Riley - thanks to both of them for their efforts.

This term we are putting a great deal of emphasis on our school value of being caring or kia manaaki. 

A topical issue in society when we are talking about non-caring behaviour is the topic of bullying behaviour.  As we know this is essentially repetitive, deliberate, harmful and predominantly where one person is trying to gain dominance or power over another person. The term bully is an action, not a name or label.  We choose here at School to focus on the behaviour presented rather than labelling a person. 

Bullying behaviour occurs in many forms - a form of this behaviour recently discussed in the Year 7-13 assembly was that of name-calling. Name-calling is often one of those bullying behaviours of dominance and it can be hurtful. One of our goals as a School is to develop resilient and emotionally strong young people. Using some of the work and advice from Brooks Gibbs, school psychologist and resilience educator, we have been sharing two basic principles that can help when dealing with name-calling:

• Don’t get upset (Emotional Resilience)
• Treat them like a friend (The Golden Rule)

"Most youth aggression is non-criminal and consists of name-calling, social exclusion, rumours, etc. These behaviours are inevitable between siblings at home and peers at school. Despite the pettiness of these behaviours, they can do tremendous emotional harm to a student. Brooks teaches students how to protect their emotions from the effects of these behaviours through emotional resilience. He also communicates the genius of The Golden Rule. This social instruction teaches students how to make friends and also manage their perceived enemies. The Golden Rule takes advantage of the law of reciprocity, and as students learn to treat others as friends, this positive behaviour becomes the social norm."  An extract from https://www.brooksgibbs.com/

As always we strongly encourage students to seek adult intervention when they feel like they cannot handle the situation on their own.

To see the Golden Rule in action take some time to have a look at Brooks Gibbs working with young people in the following video series - https://www.brooksgibbs.com/viralvideos 

Ngā mihi,

Mike Hart
Principal