Community, Principal's Blog, Wellbeing @ MHJC

Transition

SPECIAL REPORT: Starting Year 7

Starting Year 7 poses many new challenges, but also offers exciting opportunities. It comes with a number of mixed feelings. Unfortunately for many Year 6 students, 2020 was marred with school closures and remote learning due to the pandemic and the overall impact of this is still unknown.

For many students regular orientation activities at the end of 2020 were less than ideal. Therefore, many students may be feeling a little bit more anxious than usual about their expectations of starting Year 7. Grasping new skills and establishing new study practices can quickly become daunting and overwhelming.

During this time of transition, parents and carers need to be supportive, but also realistic in their expectations. This is an important milestone in your child’s life. There will be feelings of exhilaration, but also the fear of the unknown. Therefore it will be important for parents and carers to be vigilant in monitoring their child’s mood and mental health during this time. They could easily become overly anxious or even depressed.

In this Special Report, there are a number of strategies offered that can make this transition period smoother and start things off on the right foot! We hope you take time to reflect on the information offered in this Special Report, and as always, we welcome your feedback.

If you do have any concerns about the wellbeing of your child, please contact the school for further information or seek medical or professional help.

Here is the link to your special report https://mhjc.nz.schooltv.me/wellbeing_news/special-report-transition-high-school

Principal's Blog, School News

Welcome back!

Kia ora

Just a brief welcome message from me to our new and returning staff and students. I trust this year will be a fulfilling one for you all as you continue your journey of growing your greatness.

Hopefully we will be able to follow a normal start up to the year with Admin Day on Tuesday 2nd February. Should the lockdown levels change, owing to COVID, I will inform you as soon as possible by email, web site and facebook.

This message from the Ministry of Education is particularly relevant as we must remain vigilant and follow the regular reminders we received last year:

We continue to have a large amount of control over how we can prevent the spread of COVID.

For our school we will:

display QR code posters for the NZ COVID Tracer App

keep our visitor register, attendance register and timetables up to date

be monitoring for illness and asking anyone who is unwell to remain at home, or to go home

encourage people with relevant symptoms to seek medical advice through Health Line or their GP and get tested for COVID if recommended to do so

reinforce the importance of good hand washing and drying

reinforce good cough and sneeze etiquette

we will continue to regularly clean all parts of our school.

Best wishes to you all.

Nga mihi

Ian Morrison

Principal

School News

Sad news

We regret to inform the community of the passing of Veena Vohra, foundation Principal of Mission Heights Primary School after a serious illness. Mrs Vohra was instrumental in establishing the unique shared vision of our two schools and we send our thoughts and best wishes to her whānau.
There is a remembrance book in Reception which parents may sign.
Kia kaha
Community, Principal's Blog

This month on SchoolTV – Raising Boys

Many parents will attest to the fact that many boys are active, loud, rambunctious and prone to rough play, but this should not affect how a parent acts towards their son. Be careful not to pigeon-hole your son into gender specific behaviours or gender roles. The male brain is distinctly differently in its development. A boy’s physical maturity is often at odds with his mental and brain development.

Societal beliefs about how to raise boys can sometimes influence their adult carers. Although we are not determined by our biology, it is a factor. It is important to support boys in their natural tendencies and nurture their strengths and abilities. Teach them the skills they need for their future and to develop a healthy identity. It is important for boys to have a role model they can connect with and acknowledge who they are. One of the most important determinants for a boy’s development is how secure they feel growing up.

In this edition of SchoolTV, adult carers will gain a better understanding into some of the more complex issues relating to raising boys. We hope you take time to reflect on the information offered in this month’s edition, and we always welcome your feedback.

If you do have any concerns about the wellbeing of your child, please contact the school for further information or seek medical or professional help.

Here is the link to this month’s edition https://mhjc.nz.schooltv.me/newsletter/raising-boys

ICT Blog

The Social Dilemma

There’s a recently released Netflix documentary called “The Social Dilemma” that’s been going somewhat viral and has made its way into Netflix’s list of trending videos.

The documentary is more or less an attack on social media platforms (mostly Facebook) and how they’ve steadily been contributing to tearing apart society for the better part of the last decade. There’s interviews with a number of former top executives from Facebook, Twitter, Google, Pinterest (to name a few) and they explain how sites have used algorithms and AI to increase users’ engagement, screen time, and addiction (and therefore profits), while leading to unintended negative consequences (the rise of confirmation bias, fake news, cyber bullying, etc). There’s a lot of great information presented, none of which is that surprising for data scientists or those who have done even a little bit of research on social media.

In a way, it painted the practice of data science in a negative light, or at least how social media is unregulated (which I do agree it should be). In spite of that, I think it did an awesome job of distilling this crisis for non-tech folks and illustrating how the ‘models’ and profiling works. Even then, most people have a knee-jerk reaction to the insinuation that they could possibly be vulnerable to these exploitative designs that are explored in this documentary.

There’s no magic bullet here. Healing the damage would require a dramatic education overhaul of some sort; more universal literacy in computer history and science, more care for mental wellbeing and attention to emotional intelligence and more literacy in the methods of persuasion and product design. A large portion of the Mission Heights’ digital passport is dedicated to some of these areas, but of course, more can always be done.

I highly encourage everyone to watch it. One of the guys featured, Tristan Harris, heads the Centre for Humane Technology and runs a popular podcast called “Your Undivided Attention“. In this podcast, he discusses more in-depth potential solutions to the challenges presented in the movie.

The home of Mission Heights Junior College, Auckland, New Zealand