You have posed a fundamental question for any teacher. It is a testing one too.

In 1974, when I first started teaching in New Zealand, I was sitting drinking tea in the school’s staff room when the games master, Jack McManus, walked in. He had two rugby balls under each arm and one in each hand, and he sported a smile from ear to lug.

He walked up to me and said, “I’ll put you down for the 4Bs.” I smiled and nodded and thanked him. Little did I know that he intended me to coach the 4B rugby team. I’d never played rugby and I knew nothing about the game.

The next day, Jack fronted up to me with a fistful of books on schoolboy rugby. I took them home and studied them up, for I knew that on Thursday of that week I’d have to be out on the rugby field coaching 30 little rascals how to enjoy the game.

I coached rugby in that school for four years before I became the cross-country coach and had to relinquish my position of rugby coach. They were four interesting and exciting years. I attended the major rugby matches in Wellington. I watched the rugby matches on TV. I attended all my team’s matches both home and away.

When I took up a position of head of department in a nearby girl’s high school, I missed the coaching. But my interest in going to rugby matches simply wasn’t there, and I stopped watching rugby on TV. I’ve never taken an interest in rugby since then.

That experience taught me where my interests really lay – not with rugby – not with sport – not with fitness. It lay with kids and what it was to engender enthusiasm in young minds for an exciting contact sport that I had no interest in what so ever.

Ka kite
from Middle-earth