From the Principal
During my recent visits to the Pre-Primary and Primary School classrooms, I have been warmly greeted by the students and have been privileged to observe their real energy for learning. While walking down the colonnade the same afternoon of my visit, I asked one of our younger Primary students how the day had been, to which he responded, “I wonder what it would have been like to drive all the way from Sydney to Perth”. It was his genuine response that really struck me. Fostering that sense of wonder in all students is so important when striving for deep understanding.
It is of course expected to a certain extent that, as children age, the world becomes more familiar, so their experience of wonder can be less obvious. Greater effort can be required to see how extraordinary the world is, as familiarity can dull one’s sense of mystery and wonder. Perhaps the real challenge, then, is to defamiliarise the familiar.
There is no doubt that already this Term every effort has been made to do just that. Whether it be Year 3 students visiting Claremont History Museum, Years 4 and 5 students working with a Magma artist in Japanese, Years 5 to 12 students competing for the title of College Chess Grandmaster, musicians preparing for the upcoming Autumn Soiree, Years 11 and 12 Politics and Law students participating in a Politics Q and A, the Year 10 Food Technology students preparing meals for their food trucks or the Year 10 interested in a trade visiting the Construction Futures Centre.
As I mentioned to staff during our Staff Day to start the Term, if we truly believe that we are called to prepare our students for life’s inevitable challenges, so they can go out into the world and make a positive difference and be people for others, which is, of course, our mission, we need to ensure our students are appropriately skilled to do so.
We have to prepare our students for their future as opposed to our past.
What is their future? In a word…changeable. It has been previously described as a VUCA world, a world that is Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous. And it is certainly changeable.
To be well prepared for their future, our students need to critically think, be creative, communicate and collaborate and the development of these skills needs to start as early as possible. One of the blessings of our K-12 College is that we can ensure our students are taught how to develop these skills from a very young age. We can have a powerful influence on our students’ preparedness for the VUCA world.
So, we come to College to be more than we are; we attend lessons to strive for understanding in a complex world; we play sports, we row, we swim, we run to push ourselves beyond what we know we can already do; we perform on stage to defeat the fears that hold us back; we paint and play music to discover beauty; and we seek at Mass, communion that is infinitely greater than ourselves.
Effort in these domains makes for a great education: it is intellectual, physical, cultural, social and spiritual in its dimensions.
Perhaps being open to wonder can make us more aware of what we don’t know and don’t understand. Perhaps it can even sustain or revive our interest in the familiar, creating room for alternative possibilities and different ways of thinking about the world. Now that’s real learning.
An Ignatian Gratitude Prayer
Creator God, in a spirit of gratitude, we celebrate with family and friends.
We give thanks for those who are good to us.
We give thanks for those who comfort during trying situations.
And we give thanks for those that remind us of your presence.
Amen
Lastly, thank you to all those able to attend our Mothers’ Day Mass on Thursday and I hope all mothers and motherly figures are suitably pampered on Sunday. We also keep a special prayer in our hearts for the families for whom Mothers’ Day is especially challenging and difficult.
Daniel Mahon
Principal