Good People, Good Neighbors, Good Family: Citizenship with Centennial Middle Teacher Waru Ngatai

October 29th, 2024 /
Spencer Tuinei /
Centennial Middle, CTE, News, Secondary Schools, Teaching and Learning

Waru Ngatai, a Career and Technical Education (CTE) teacher at Centennial Middle School, focuses on more than just career skills. “Getting kids into good jobs and teaching them career skills matters, but citizenship matters, too,” Ngatai shared. For Waru, education goes deeper than content, deeper than civic duty—it involves doing good and developing their community.

It’s a pedagogical stance he’s garnered from personal experience. As with so many great teachers, their role model for good teaching was, of course, a teacher. This was a teacher who took the time to help Waru through math, a challenging topic for him:

“I had a math teacher—he was a student teacher—who made a difference. I was never good at math, but with him, it clicked,” Ngatai recalled. “When I moved up to another math class, I struggled again, so they brought that student teacher back for me. That’s when my grades started improving. The same thing happened in college. I struggled with math, but I had a great professor who made it make sense. But that student teacher in high school made a difference for me. I try to do the same for my students.”

Ngatai’s journey into teaching started at BYU Hawaii, where he took a leap into Computer Science with no prior experience—a bold move for the time. Encouraged by Farrer’s principal to pursue teaching, he eventually worked at Slate Canyon Youth Center, a correctional facility where he helped students earn certifications in Microsoft Office and Excel.

Any who’ve worked or associated with correctional facilities know that there is a unique need for strong, stable educators to aid students facing uncertain and challenging circumstances.

At Slate Canyon, Ngatai built a community of tech-savvy learners. His students earned valuable certifications, from Microsoft Office to Excel, regardless of their correctional setting. He even introduced film and broadcasting projects, where students created and edited television-style advertisements. These ads were so popular they were played during school assemblies.

One student, who initially resisted learning, later returned to thank Ngatai: “The kid used to complain all of the time, saying, ‘this is a waste of time. I’ll never use this.’ He fought it every day. But he got his certifications. Five years later, he came back. ‘Thank you,’ he said, ‘because it was your class that pushed me into network engineering.”

Now at Centennial Middle School, Ngatai continues to develop learning experiences that prepare students for a rapidly changing world. “The world is constantly changing. If you don’t keep up with the times, you get left behind. There are videos on AI learning on YouTube—all free. There are jobs that haven’t even been invented yet, but the skills and tools to create them exist. I make sure I stay up on that stuff—and that the kids are, too.”

Ngatai stays ahead of industry trends to prepare students for a changing world. On a professional development trip to Adobe, Ngatai heard from developers that many job applicants lacked a key skill: “the ability to work well with others.” This insight drives his classroom philosophy, where collaboration and interpersonal skills are just as important as technical expertise.

This insight has become a core part of Ngatai’s classroom philosophy. “I make sure my kids collaborate all the time. You need to work with others and get along.”

We love that Waru Ngatai puts academic success hand-in-hand with kindness and citizenship, and are grateful for his example as a good teacher, good neighbor, and good person.

As he put it, “More than anything, I want my students to be good. Be good people. Be good to your neighbors, be good to your teachers, be good to your family.”