Teaching Special Needs Students A Calling For Euginea Fernandes

“Teaching people with special needs is a very rewarding job for me. Maybe not financially, but within my heart, that’s the satisfaction that I feel.”

It is hard not to get caught up in Euginea Fernandes’ positivity. The mother of four (two girls, two twin boys) is consistently smiling when talking about her decision to expand her career potential by moving her family to New Zealand, in order to study the Postgraduate Diploma in Applied Professional Studies - Adult Teaching at Toi Ohomai Institute of Technology.

Toi Ohomai has helped me to broaden the scope of my teaching and achieve my dream.

"As a teacher, my dream is to teach as many people as I can. While initially in India, I was a special educator only for children, since taking this adult teaching course, I can now teach mature students as well.”

Currently employed as a Teacher Aide at Kea Street Specialist School in Rotorua, New Zealand, Euginea helps cater to the educational needs of a range of physically disabled and mentally challenged students, through a variety of relief teaching duties.

“The students are lovely, and really quite amazing, however, they can often do the unexpected, so there really has to be two teachers in a class at all times. This allows me to help the individual student with writing, making connections and helping to motivate and encourage them to do things better and better."

“They are not the privileged ones, I am the privileged one to be at their service.”

Inspired into educating the physically handicapped by a calling she felt whenever she passed a school for the disabled in India, Euginea says she didn’t want to leave her homeland only to remain teaching children. Taking her husband’s motivation to take her talent international, she looked for a new challenge.

“Initially my oldest daughter was a bit nervous because she missed her friends and as a growing teenager, needs her peer support. However, now she has made friends here and she is involved in so many community activities, she – as well as my other three children - are all enjoying life here in Rotorua."

“Teaching can give you tips for parenthood and I can even take some tips from parenthood to teaching. Yet it is thanks to my proud and supportive family that I can easily juggle between the two.”