A former Dunedin secondary teacher is helping students learn Pythagoras’ theorem out of a bomb shelter in Ukraine.
After a visit to Dunedin, former King’s High School maths teacher David van Zanten is today taking a train from Poland to Kyiv to return to his job teaching students at a British International School in wartorn Ukraine.
During his visit to his home town last week, he was working on a twin schools programme with King’s to help students in Dunedin connect with Ukrainian students.
Despite having to teach in a wartorn country, Mr van Zanten has no regrets about taking up the offer last year.
‘‘I’d been reading about the war for a year and a-half and the whole injustice of everything sort of plagues on my mind.
‘‘I feel the world should be better than that sort of stuff.’’
He saw it as a way for him to make a difference and went to Ukraine in August last year.
Moving to Ukraine had not been as big a culture shock as going to the Middle East or China — places he had taught in before.
There was curfew from midnight to 5am and there was no noise after 11pm.
The recent encounter between US President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the White House left him worried.
He said Mr Trump was ‘‘evil’’ and European leaders needed to ‘‘grow some balls’’, step up and ‘‘fix this s...’’.
A planned twin-school arrangement with King’s would involve having interschool debating competitions and chess tournaments as well as cultural exchanges such as livestreamed kapa haka performances.
The programme would take place virtually during the war and turn into an exchange programme when it was over.
The war kept everyone under stress in Ukraine.
‘‘All the kids have stress. All the parents have stress. All the teachers have stress.’’
However, the students were very on to it and managed to get on with it when it came to learning.
The school gave them a sense of security they did not get outside the classroom.
About once a day an alert for an air raid siren was sounded and they would have to go into the school’s carpark, which had been converted into bomb shelters.
Nearly everyone there knew someone who was either at the frontline of the war or already dead.
The phrase ‘‘keep calm and carry on’’ was always in use, he said.
‘‘If you panic, what’s the point?
‘‘We can’t change anything, so keep calm and carry on.’’
