AFTER many years of handing out gold medals and breaking up tussles in the playground, Patricia Mazur is looking forward to a lie in.
The principal of Wellington’s St Patrick’s School for the past 11 years will retire when the school holidays begin in December.
It will be a different start to the holidays from previous years, when Mrs Mazur’s children were fond of chiding her with comments like: “What? Another holiday?”
She knew they were only joking: “They know about the weekends that never happened and the hours that are involved.”
“It’s a really good job because every single day is a different day and you never quite know what it’s going to throw at you,” she says.
“Every morning when I wake up, I don’t leap out of bed, that would be lying, but I do want to come to work. I do enjoy it.
“Some days you see gold medals, silver medals, and some days you are giving out certificates and feeling quite pleased with what the children have done,” she says.
“Other days we have a bit of a fight, a bit of a tussle going on with the seven years olds and so you never quite know what’s going to happen.”
She knows what it is like for new graduates, having many student teachers work at St Patrick’s as part of their practical training.
A lot of recent graduates are heading off overseas to pursue their vocation and it impacts on the schools they train in around New Zealand.
“It is a lot of work. I don’t think people realise how much work that is.
“We often take beginning teachers and they’ll go overseas and so you end up being endless referees for all sorts of jobs like nannying, relief teaching. It can be on-going for a long time”
The number of student teachers coming out of their training and being unable to find work in New Zealand is also a concern for Mrs Mazur, though she has some advice to give for those that want to stay.
“I think the best way is to do relieving, to get your face out there and your capabilities known. It can certainly be hard.”
“You need a BA to work in the post office these days,” says Mrs Mazur.
“It’s just seems a little bit incredible that if you finish at Year 13 and unless you get a degree you have to keep on going. You have to do fifteen years or sixteen years just to get a piece of paper, just to get a job and not necessarily a career.”
When asked about her views on the recent uproar of parents and schools over the government’s plans to increase class sizes, Mrs Mazur says the Government did not quite connect the dots.
“If your goal is to have every child succeeding this was never going to work.”
“One of the hardest things is getting people to really appreciate the importance of being educated. I’m not patting our school on the back or myself on the back, but it is so important.”
St Patrick’s is a small school with a roll of only 76 but there are plans to expand and extend students learning beyond Year 6 by re-introducing Year 7 and 8 classes.
It is clear that Mrs Mazur loves her school and will be sad to go.
She plans to spend more time with her grandchildren, all 10 of who are dotted all over the world.
“I’m going to miss the place” she says. “I have enjoyed every single day. I don’t know what I’m going to do next year when I don’t have to get out of bed in the morning.”
Caption 1 for lead image: Retiring St Patrick’s School Principal Patricia Mazur and two of the students who recently won gold in the BP Technology Challenge for their bird feeder, Karina Soh, 8, and Divyesh Sharma, 8.
Caption 2 for right image: Gold winners from left to right, Divyesh Sharma, 8, Aoife Lake, 9, and Karina Soh, 8.
