STRONG MINDS,
GENTLE HEARTS
News from Frazer Rigby
Deputy Principal
Thank you to all the parents, carers and families for your continued support throughout the year; we look forward to working with you again in 2023.
I must also commend our students for the wonderful way that they committed to their studies. This focus and drive have continued right to our last week of lessons which is evidence of the serious approach they adopt to their studies and the enjoyment that they take from each school day. Thank you to our staff who committed themselves to positively encouraging the boys to finish strongly and who, being well prepared, had plenty of serious learning organised for the students.
Contact details
I ask all parents to ensure that if your contact details have changed this year or will change over Christmas and the new year that you update your details on the Parent Portal - It is essential that the College has up-to-date email, phone numbers, postal and residential addresses.
Preparation for 2023
- The 2023 term dates are on the Parent Portal.
- Please ensure that your son is prepared for a great start with due attention to hair and grooming. Guidelines for haircuts are on the Parent Portal.
Group Chats
Staying in touch with one another in the holidays is recommended, it keeps human connection alive. Group chats, however, can often be a breeding ground for negative behaviour, with bullying and sexting being high among negative experiences that adolescents may face. The most used group chat apps are WhatsApp, Snap Chat, Instagram, Discord, Kids Messenger and Facebook Messenger. All these allow individual and group communication. With most group chat activities happening at home, parents may be able to minimise the risk of bullying and other dangers to a child. As such, Safe on Social have a few tips for creating positive group chat experiences for your sons:
- Devices should never "go to sleep" with children. Normalise handing them over to parents and carers before bedtime or put them in another room until the next day so your children are unable to respond to messages at crazy times of the night and morning.
- Help your sons develop the skills to leave a group chat that is not helpful or is harmful. Teach them simple phrases to remove themselves from toxic conversations, eg: "Sorry guys, I’m not feeling comfortable talking about that," or "This is getting a bit nasty for me, I’m going."
- Remind your sons that they must always be kind, respectful and responsible while in a group chat. All it takes is for someone to take a screengrab of cyberbullying for interactions to become public and be used as evidence against them.
Finally, I encourage you to read the article below by our teacher Mr Chad Elliott about boys and short-term memory.
Short-term memory (STM) is a repository that receives long-term memories and sensory memories (Psych for Qld 3 & 4). STM has a limited capacity of 5-9 pieces of information and a duration of (approximately) 12-20 seconds (Psych for QLD 3 & 4). A conversation is an example of STM at work. During a conversation, short bits of information are transferred with limited amount of data over a relatively short time. The sensorial memories of STM are divided into iconic (visual) and echoic (auditory) memories. For an STM to be transferred to a long-term memory, maintenance rehearsal must take place.
You can participate in the following exercises to illustrate iconic and echoic STM.
Visual (Iconic) Memory Test: https://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/stm0.html
Auditory (Echoic) Memory Test: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVMBoBN2EOE
What does the research say about STM in boys?
Generally, research indicates that females perform better in memory tests. Comparing iconic and echoic STM memory test subsets indicates that teenage males perform better (i.e. transfer STM to long-term memory) with iconic memory tests and teenage females with echoic (Mittel, S., et. al, 2016; Pauls, et. al, 2013). In short, boys tend to engage and remember information visually better than information that is presented auditorily.
How might I use this at home?
Parents often ask teachers what they can do from home to assist their child with their education. Two strategies that could help boost short-term memory are games and visualisation. First, visually stimulating memory games assist STM in children, teenagers, and adults. Games such as Sudoku, Lumosity, crosswords and chess can assist in STM. Visualisation is the process where a reader is asked to imagine textual features (vocabulary, metaphors, etc.) in images. This imaginative visualisation can assist some boys in their comprehension of a text through connecting it to a like image.
References