Thursday, February 16, 2017




Dear Parents, Caregivers and Friends of St Mary’s School,

Each week as I prepare to write the newsletter I do a lot of back ground reading and reflect on current events before putting pen or pencil to paper.

This week I was talking to a friend and he used the old phrase, ‘the acorn hasn’t fallen far from the tree’.

Moving away from the brilliant imagery that this phrase evokes the meaning is simple; be it nurture or nature we as parents affect how our children will turn out.

If it’s nurture then as parents, especially when our children are very young, all of our actions our values and our beliefs shape the people our children become.

We see this by the number of children who work in the same or a related field to their parents. We see it when we see the number of sportsmen and women whose parents played the same sport as them and we see it in the behaviour of children which is a mirror of their parents behaviour.

A number of years ago I had to call a father into school to tell him that his son was using a number of swear words at school and that we needed the parents to support us to ensure that this stopped. The dad looked me in the eye and said that he didn’t know where he got the swearing from but that when he got home he would be told in no uncertain terms to stop it. The shame was that every second word that the dad said was a swear word and he didn’t see his speaking like this was role modelling for his son exactly what not to do!

Have a great week,

Mike Brosnahan






Opening

Sunday, February 12, 2017




Dear Parents, Caregivers and Friends of St Mary’s School,
Yesterday was Waitangi Day, New Zealand’s National day. It is a day in which we acknowledge our history and the part that our past plays in our present and indeed our future.

Marcus Garvey wrote "A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots."

To know where you come from individually is a powerful way of ensuring a sense of belonging and self worth. But it is also important to know where we as a nation came from and how we were formed.

My father’s siblings and he were the first of our family to be born in New Zealand. His parents and siblings had left their home to ensure a better future for their families. But for many of them home remained in the country they had left.

My children see themselves as only New Zealanders, for them home is here.

That is good, but it is also important to know how home came to be.

History never changes, but how it is recorded and presented do. So it is important for us as ‘Kiwis" to keep learning about our past while we sail into the future.
Have a great week,

Mike Brosnahan