Ministry of Education Awards Rangi Ruru Students
Two Rangi Ruru students, Eva Wu and Vivien Guttman, recently received top academic awards from the Ministry of Education—despite the challenges of last year’s heavily impacted Covid-19 learning environment.
The 2022 Academic Awards Night held in Term 2 recognised top NCEA achievers from diverse ethnic backgrounds in Christchurch secondary schools. The awards recognised students who achieved highly in NCEA Level 2 for 2021, a year marred by disruption from the Covid-19 pandemic.
Eva and Vivien (both Year 13) received awards and were accompanied by their families as well as Assistant Principal of Curriculum, Juliet Collins, and Year 12 Dean and Head of Student Development and Leadership, Jon Kimber, to the event at Burnside High School.
Eva, who grew up in Shanghai and moved to New Zealand five years ago, says she is “honoured” to be recognised for her efforts—especially given the challenges of Covid-19.
She says encouragement from her mum and teachers helped her achieve results she was proud of.
“My mother was constantly encouraging me, although her English was not good enough to teach me academic things, she would cook delicious food for me and watch movies with me to relieve my stress.”
Eva says she most proud of her NCEA results in Music and Painting.
“I was a novice in music so I needed to learn a lot, but I was very lucky to have a good music teacher, Ms Kingsbury. She helps me a lot with music theory and revises my homework in her spare time. Last year’s Painting class was also a big challenge for me. I still remember that I changed my idea one week before the deadline of this assessment and want to thank my teacher, Ms Sheehy, who gave me a lot of inspiration and encouragement to keep me going.”
Vivienne, who moved to New Zealand from Austria when she was five, says “it felt great to know that my hard work throughout the year had paid off”.
“I was quite proud of most of my results in NCEA last year as I broke my dominant hand a couple of weeks before the start of exams. Because of this, I struggled to prepare myself for my exams as I was unable to use my usual revision methods and had to find new ways to revise. I was quite proud of myself when I saw that I had actually managed to do a lot better than I thought.”
Rangi Ruru’s Assistant Principal of Curriculum, Juliet Collins, says all schools were asked to nominate students from diverse backgrounds who performed highly in NCEA in 2021.
“It was an honour to attend the event to support Vivien and Eva as they received their awards,” she says. “Recipients were from a wide range of schools in Christchurch and the achievements, ambitions and intended study options of these young people was humbling to observe.”