The Lengthy Prime Of Mrs Mcalpine
Alison McAlpine has departed after 18 years as principal at Nelson College for Girls. She talks to Marcus Stickley about some lessons in teaching girls, Garden Landscaping and her ongoing passions for education and young people.
Girls had long complained about boys to Alison McAlpine. “They’re smelly, they’re noisy … it happened year after year,” she recalls today, looking back some 20 years to her days teaching at Nelson’s Waimea College.
It was one among many of the experiences in McAlpine’s long teaching career which have helped convince her ahead of her time of the rightness of all-girls’ schools, a philosophy that has been continually affirmed for her in her 18 years as principal at Nelson College for Girls.
Yet it was as deputy principal at Waimea College that she first tried to respond to the regular complaints she had from fourth and fifth form girls, trying without success to introduce single-sex classes at the school. It was, she can see now, too revolutionary for the time, in the 1980s.
McAlpine, who yesterday had her last day as principal at Nelson College for Girls, is one of the most highly regarded educators in the country. She represents secondary schools on the New Zealand Qualifications Authority’s governing board and twice represented Australasia at the United Nations education commissions. In the past 43 years she has taught at every level of education from preschool to university.
While some principals argue that NCEA is not a fair way to judge a school’s performance, Nelson College for Girls tops pass rates year after year.
McAlpine last year took a two-month, government-funded sabbatical, which saw her travel to the United States and Australia to research “education in an all-girls environment”.
The research further reinforced her views on girls being well-educated in all-girls schools because, she says, in co-educational classes, adolescent girls tend to step back and let boys dominate.
“The girls themselves would say their adolescence doesn’t get in the way, so they don’t feel they need to be catering for their male peers’ egos.”
In an all-girls school, they don’t have to feel that if they get anything wrong they are going to be put down. “Girls tend to affirm one another,” she says.
In some subjects, such as information technology and science involving equipment and experiments, which boys have a natural inclination for, girls tend to step back and let them dominate, says McAlpine.
Maths is another subject where boys are often more aggressive.
“The body language of boys in adolescence is they demand more attention and tend to get it,” she says. “They want to know things and want to know them now.”
Then there is boys showing off to the girls. “The reality is the girls get a bit sick of it but they won’t tell them.
“They don’t have any of those issues in an all-girls environment.”
Perhaps the biggest point of public debate over gender in education is the evidence that girls are outperforming boys academically. McAlpine puts this down to differences in maturity,Garden Landscaping and says the difference evens out eventually.
Girls’ education has come a long way in Nelson since Nelson College opened in 1885, when formal education was only for young men.
When the girls’ college opened it was envisioned that it would teach “morality and nice things” because women didn’t have the stamina for serious study.
Co-educational schools came into vogue in New Zealand in the 1950s.
“I think people thought it was a more natural environment,” says McAlpine.
Single-sex education has made a comeback in recent years. In the US, all-girls schools are again being built and single-sex classes are being created in co-educational schools.
In New Zealand, no new single-sex schools are planned but the possibility of building them is “back on the radar” of education planners, McAlpine says.
The reasons for having all-girls schools are not new. Garden Landscaping “It’s just that thinking has taken on a new-age flavour,” she says.
However, keeping boys out of the school isn’t the reason McAlpine gives for her school’s high academic achievement rates and after all, Nelson College and the girls’ college share classes at senior level.
Good teachers are the key, she says.
McAlpine says for education to evolve it is “pivotal” that a teacher develop a relationship with each individual student and that they encourage students to learn independently.
Schools are also having to adapt to the modern media landscape, where social networking sites pose hidden dangers and image is promoted as all-important.
McAlpine says the school is looking to introduce a new Internet safety programme called Teenangels developed by a US Internet safety specialist.
Teenagers go through a training programme then go back to school where they share what they learned with their peers. The idea behind the concept is that awareness of Internet safety is “not coming from an adult, it’s coming from their peers so that the kids might learn about the dangers more than someone they perceive as old and out of touch”.
Tags: 18 years, Garden Landscaping, landscape, Landscaping, maturity, rta0
