Witnessing five-year-old students develop into young adults had been top marks for Jeff Rowland in his 21 years at Tapawera Area School.
The veteran mathematics teacher, who also taught at Waimea College between 1983 and 2001, put the full stop on his teaching career on 29 June.
Jeff says teaching at an area school, with a current role of 181 students, has enabled him to witness students learn from age five to 18.
“To be able to watch them grow up through all their schooling and then kind of graduate at the end as year 13 has been a real pleasure,” he says.
“I’ve been a maths teacher all my life, maths is my passion… and when you’re trying to show [the students] something and then suddenly you see there’s a flash in their eyes and they say ‘oh, I get it now’, it’s that kind of thing which keeps you going.”
Jeff says he particularly highlighted teaching year 11 mathematics since it was his students’ introduction to NCEA, and it was when the subject became “serious”.
“I liked [teaching] the topic where they had to make a container to hold four golf balls and it wasn’t allowed to be a straight cylinder or a straight box.
“They had to use their imagination to try and come up with some kind of container with four golf balls, so there’s a lot of geometry involved in that.”
Jeff says he also treasured his involvement in the school’s co-curricular activities including its theatre productions and sports, activity, and themed dress-up days, including one with a Star Wars theme on 4 May.
“Being an area school with the primary and the secondary, we like to have different dress up days just to break out the work and give the kids a bit of fun, and it’s always quite fun for the teachers to do that as well,” he says.
“We’ve had purple days to support cancer and a rainbow day, a wig day, crazy hat day, basically if there was a dress-up day or mufti, the money that gets raised from that goes to a certain organisation.”
The 62-year-old says he celebrated his final school day with a morning tea with his colleagues.
“There were a few teachers that were sad, a few tears, lots of hugs, and the students presented me with a lovely card as well that had been created by them with Post-It notes inside,” he says.
“I’m going to relax… and just unwind and see where life takes me.”
