Message from the

Head of Senior School

Term 3 Week 5

For virtually all of my life (and that’s now quite a long time!) I have lived out of town and on a property. I grew up in Hillston, 20 kms from the town, on a grazing property that my grandfather had been granted as a soldier settlement block after World War I. He had served at Gallipoli and on the Western Front; prior to that he had worked as a station hand on Oxley Station, so he knew the practicalities of living on the land. After my university studies and teaching for a few years I married an Orange orchardist, so was once again living on a property, albeit a much smaller one. It never occurred to me I would one day live within the confines of a ‘city boundary’. Nevertheless, as life has a way of doing to us, I found myself doing just that. I had feared that living on the Wolaroi site would be noisy and would lead to many interruptions of my ‘private time’ – weekends, evenings and so on. It has turned out to be a great and very positive experience and I’m grateful to have been able to live here for almost ten years now.

One of the things I have really appreciated is the opportunity to subscribe to a daily delivery of the Sydney Morning Herald – the real, paper copy comes to my door every morning, rain, hail or shine. It is such an incredible luxury to get up early and read most of the paper while I have my breakfast; I then head up to work and deal with all the ups and downs, joys and challenges of a school day. In the evening, it’s time to do the cryptic crossword as a way of unwinding. The SMH on Saturdays, however, is a particular pleasure, and chief amongst them is to read Richard Glover’s weekly contribution. One of his most recent columns really resonated with me.

The main theme of it was that we tend far too often to overestimate the bad; we are more willing to believe that things are worse than they actually are. Whatever the actual statistics are, we are more likely to think that crime is up, road accidents are more frequent, teenage pregnancies are on the increase, society is more violent etc than is actually the case. I am convinced that this approach is (sadly) often the case when it comes to teenagers. So often we hear that young people are disrespectful, unkind, bullying, lazy, too focused on their technology, not committed to their studies, unaware of what hard work really means and the like. It has become quite a chorus and is rarely questioned, either in the media or in educational circles. My experience does not bear this out, however.

I have worked with and had the pleasure of teaching what is now at least two generations of young people. They are, by and large, generous, thoughtful, respectful, hard-working, loyal and a load of fun. They see things as they are and are unafraid to ‘tell it like it is’. They are also vulnerable at times, hard on themselves, and sometimes unwilling to take risks – but how different is that from us adults? I urge you to appreciate your children for what they are and to encourage them to continue to be interested in the wider world as they grow through these (at times) turbulent years. Show them you have confidence in them while at the same time guiding their decision-making. Discourage them from taking the easy options, and, most importantly, lead by example: you are their most direct model of what it means to be an adult and a parent. And if you want a fantastic start to a weekend, read Richard Glover!

I wish you a great fortnight.

Bev West

Head of Senior School