The Importance of Micro-economy

By Emma Stoddart  – Biology Teacher and Careers Adviser – High School

If you visit the preschool playground on a Friday morning, you have probably seen our Kawakawa ākonga selling items ranging from coffee to cake to wooden boxes. This is a part of our timetable called micro-economy. The goal of micro-economy is for our adolescents to gain experience in the practical skills of accounting, marketing, Human Resources and business planning, as well as the oral and written communication that goes along with talking to members of our community. Above all, it is a controlled, social organisation for our adolescents, who are wanting to try out the real world and adult responsibilities. The Kawakawa micro-economy has grown from the original café group to now having a wide range of groups including those who make beauty products, Kawakawa flavoured tea, frozen fruit desserts, handmade cards and sewn items.

The Maria Montessori quote that best defines the idea behind micro-economy for me is, “…that something is produced which is useful to the whole society, and that is changed for something else.” For adolescents, that “something else” is money!

When a new micro-economy group starts up, they are given a loan to purchase materials needed to begin making their product. This loan is ideally paid back as soon as possible and any other money made here on in, goes back into that micro-economy. Montessori’s ideal micro-economy involved producing items from the land. This works well for farm based Montessori schools, but is a little more difficult for our urban based programme. Hence, many of the items we sell may not fit Montessori’s idea of “useful to the whole society” (except for maybe the coffee sold by Sarah-Jane’s group!).

As a teacher who works in both Kawakawa and Tawari, I see the ongoing benefits of micro-economy. Although there is no micro-economy in Tawari, these ākonga are now looking beyond school at getting themselves part-time and holiday jobs. When Tawari ākonga come and ask me for help with writing their CV’s, I encourage them to include their time in ‘Kawakawa Café’ or the money handling skills they’ve learnt in ‘Cute as a Button’. The experience they gain on a Friday morning selling is just as valuable and important as what they would gain in any other job. In this last week I was able to be a referee for one of our Tawari ākonga for a part time job they had applied for. When the employer asked me, “Would you employ this person?”, I was able to say “Yes!” and give specific examples of where I had seen this young person display the qualities I knew this employer was looking for. Fingers crossed they get the job.

Finally, a little plug for my own micro-economy group, ‘Cute as a Button’. We are planning on attending the Eastbourne Christmas market again this year. For sale will be our famous felt Christmas tree decorations, also a new range of baby hats and infinity scarves. See you there on the 10th December at Days Bay.

Tiny Seeds Flourish

By Stuart Mason  – Chemistry Teacher, High School

It was in the latter part of 2016 when two girls from a class in the primary school knocked on the door of the Tawari laboratory, full of senior chemistry students.  I was handed two folded paper envelopes that had been labelled ‘coriander’ and ‘silver beet’ in neat pencilled italics.  Yes, they were seeds and yes they were for me and no I didn’t owe them any money and goodbye, because they were off to continue their mission sharing seeds.

As negligence is my main gardening technique, I was never going to be up to the task of honouring the generosity of the giving, so the seeds were passed to the one with the green fingers in our household.  This picture shows Sonya’s success.

Silver Beet (1)The fact that I can only acknowledge the girls anonymously highlights for me, a challenge that can arise within our school despite community-wide events such as Matariki celebrations and Peace Day, as we spend so much time working within our own prepared environments, suited to the relevant plane of development.

The teachers in the High School particularly get asked questions about what goes on in Tawari, the 15-18 class.  Do they do NCEA?  How is it different from the other classes?  Yes, students do NCEA courses at Levels 1, 2 and 3 and in general they have been very successful.

The High School is a ‘School of experience in elements of social life’ (meaning the adult world).  There aren’t the same kind of materials on shelves, but the adults in the classroom are a part of the prepared environment and the students’ work is to test their adulthood.  By the second half of the Third Plane, the students in the 15-18 programme are moving away from the earlier investigation of identity and personal place within a community into an exploration of the roles they will play more specifically as they move out into further education and work.

The timetable gives students choices of NCEA subject classes and options for how to best use independent work time.  They meet together, alongside the teachers, to make decisions about how the community will run.  There is community work, seminar discussion and reflection time.  As in earlier years, the students take care of a ‘house’, and this experience is reflected well in a quote of an American Montessori High School graduate on her first university flatting experience with other, non-Montessori students: “Mom, these people don’t know how to live!”.  The Tawari class is still growing and is expected to reach a roll of 60 students within the next three years.

I gather the next step in the seed-sharing business is that I will harvest seeds from the silver beet plant and pass them on.  I will have to talk with Sonya about that.