From the PDHPE classroom to history, science and beyond, teachers at Queenwood School are working to raise the bar in discipline-specific writing skills – and an instructional framework is paving the way.
Reflecting on our contemporary pandemic, Year 12 student Alexandra Harrop, investigated the cultural memory and legacy of the Spanish flu, which coincided with World War I. In her fascinating and thought-provoking essay, Alexandra asks important questions about how and why we remember and value some tragedies over others, and what this means for the cultural legacy of our own experiences during a pandemic.
Every parent I know would like their child to be an avid reader. Who doesn’t want their child to have better vocabulary, comprehension, writing, general knowledge, conceptual ability and even, in the case of reading fiction, greater empathy and better interpersonal skills? But making that aspiration a reality is hard, and getting harder.
I have the clearest memory of watching my two-year-old son exploring the back garden. A very thin twig was poking out from the hedge. He picked up a rock about the size of my fist and slowly, with infinite care, he held the rock gently on the top of the trembling twig… and let go. The rock thumped to the ground, and my son learnt something about gravity and the relationship between the diameter and strength of a tree branch.
It is dangerous to generalise about boys and girls because there are children everywhere who defy the stereotypes. Nevertheless, one tends to have specific conversations with boys or girls over and over again.
With the school's own research showing almost a third of Year 7 and 9 girls read for pleasure less than once a week, there was a "sense of urgency" to stem the decline, Ms Stone said. So from next year, the whole school will spend 20 minutes a day reading for pleasure.
The Build-Your-Own (BYO) Scholarship seeks to identify uniquely gifted and talented students who may otherwise go unrecognised.
There is a tendency in education for apparently logical solutions to backfire. The NAPLAN system is a case in point.
We are presently grappling with some unsettling phenomena. One of these is the rejection of expertise.
In principle it is hard to object to minimum standards for literacy and numeracy in the HSC.
Like most schools we have many ways of providing public recognition, but we do need to be judicious in how, and how much, we do it.