A History of the World 1997-2002

Graduated from the University in 1996 with a Degree in Geography/Education. Attempted to gain a teaching job in the town where I went to University for 1997 (population at the time 100,000), applied for a single job, along with 35 other applicants. Didn't get that, and went to Auckland (population 1,000,000 or so) where I applied for a job and was the only applicant. Taught at a decile 2/3 school for five a quarter years.

To summarize my time there - my ICT input was virtually nil. Within a term of starting I was asked to take over the sports at the school. My principal was a supremely canny motivator who challenged me to lead the school/students to sports coaching success. The school was part of a School Sports Organisation (35 Schools all up, 10 Intermediate Schools with over 500 students - we had three classes never more than 75 Intermediate students in total). While I was there we won thirteen 'Zone' titles in seven different sports and two Auckland titles where we beat everyone. In one particular stretch we had three years when we qualified for every second tier tournament in every sport. Since my departure in 2002 the school (as of 2009) had not won a single Zone title and had two years when they did not qualify for a single second tier event in any sport.

I found myself in 2001 trying to create a video highlights package of the year, and eventually gave up (although I remember from plans etc I was attempting to create a very early version of what I was going to do later with Moviemaker online on my class blogs) despite playing around with filming and presenting, back then it wasn't really possible to take all that footage and put it together, and then show it in a coherent format. Somewhere there's a bunch of tapes that don't make sense to anybody, if they ever find them!

Come 2002 our school role was falling, and staff needed to be shed. To cut a long story short (libelous edit required here) I opted to make a shift to one of our sporting nemesis and did so for the final school term of 2002. I opted for the other school because I'd found the students to be friendly and out going, plus relatively speaking they hadn't been successful in the past sporting wise and I thought that I could rectify that.