MIDDLE SCHOOL NEWS

Simon Scoullar

Middle Sub School Leader

Careers Week

A big thank you to all the Year 10 students for participating in Careers Week. Students visited a TAFE and University, listened to industry speakers, participated in practical sessions run by industry professionals and selected subjects for their individual pathways. We want our students and parents as informed as possible and a huge amount of work goes into this week. It is also really beneficial for students to now have a specific goal and aim. Even if you don’t know what you want to do, Careers Week leaves doors open, rather than a narrow path and one dark door.

Year 10 Camp

Hoping all the Year 10 students on camp in Gippsland don’t get hypothermia, they all left safely this week.

Morrisby Testing

Year 9 students completed Morrisby testing this week. This is a strengths based test which identifies individual students strengths and then careers linked to particular strengths. Thanks to all the students who have brought notes back. Notes will be available during our course counselling this week. The notes give permission for our Year 9 students to meet with a professional from the Department of Education for thirty minutes, to receive one on one guidance and explore all the career opportunities available to them based on Morrisby results.

Julie Elkin

VCAL Teacher

Year 9 Community Engagement

Week 2 of the Youth Justice Education program saw the students visit BATForce (Barwon Adolescent Taskforce). Here they listened to Leigh Bartlett speak about our digital tattoo. She relayed, in an often humorous manner, the perils of being online in this day and age. She reiterated the need to be mindful of what you post, and to understand that once you hit ‘send’, it’s ‘out there’ forever. She covered the fact that many employers ‘google’ or Facebook ‘stalk’ prospective employees, with the warning to check privacy settings and make sure things you post are not offensive in any way.

Probably her most important message was to ‘disconnect’ every now and then. Disconnect when people speak with you, when you are eating dinner, when there are others around to talk with. She did not mean entirely cut everything off, but put down the phone, pay more attention to things happening around you – it’s amazing what a difference it could make to the well-being of young people.

Week 3 was back at the Geelong Courts in a small VCAT Hearing Room. Here we were treated to the stories told by two speakers from the Centre for Multicultural Youth. Steve Petrovski talked about the role of CMY and one of its programs – Shout Out speakers. He then introduced Lamourette Folly, who started as a Shout Out speaker and moved in to a full time position as a Youth Director at CMY. She spoke of her journey to Australia from Africa and how she managed to get through her schooling here, even though she knew no English when she arrived and she was constantly bullied. She was bullied so much that she did not want to keep going to school, but her mother stressed the importance of an education in reaching goals and she found the strength to get out of bed and keep going. One thing that caught my ear was when she said how well her people in Africa treated white visitors, showing them around and treating them as VIPs. She found it strange that these sentiments and actions were not reciprocated when she arrived in Australia!

Next week we are back at the Courts and we will have one of our ex-College Captains (Angela Bijimba) addressing us, in her role as a Shout Out speaker.