From the Principal

The Students Who Came to Find Me

There is a particular kind of humbling that only schools and teenage daughters can deliver. 

This morning I was in a meeting, the kind that fills calendars and feels, in the moment, entirely necessary when there was a knock at the door. A small group of Year 11 students stood in the corridor, Advanced English folders in hand, with the patient, slightly amused expressions of people who have somewhere else to be.

"Dr Middleton, we think you're meant to be teaching us."

They were right. I had forgotten my 9am class. Richard III was waiting, and so were they.

I want to be honest about what I felt in that moment. Not embarrassment, though there was certainly some of that. What I felt, more than anything, was moved. Not because I'd made a mistake, mistakes are an occupational reality, because of what the students did next. They didn't complain. They didn't take the gift of an unsupervised period and disappear. They came to find me.

That says something about them. It also says something about what school, at its best, is supposed to feel like.

I have spoken before in these pages about connection about the belief that sits at the heart of everything we are trying to build at Pittwater House. That education is not primarily a transaction of information. That the relationship between teacher and student is the curriculum's living centre, the thing that makes content matter and learning stick.

This term, I have had the privilege of teaching this Year 11 group across several weeks. It has been one of the genuine pleasures of this role. There is something about stepping back into the classroom even briefly, even imperfectly that reconnects you to why any of this exists. The conversation that catches fire unexpectedly. The student who says something that reframes your reading of a four-hundred-year-old play. The laughter that breaks out over a passage of Shakespeare that turns out, when you really look at it, to be genuinely funny.

Richard III is, among other things, a play about manipulation, ambition, and the performance of self. Year 11 have been extraordinary company in exploring it. They bring sharpness, irreverence, and genuine curiosity, exactly the qualities the play rewards.

As Term 2 closes, I find myself returning to a simple conviction: the quality of a school is ultimately measured in moments like the one I described at the start of this piece. Students who feel enough ownership of their learning and enough regard for their teacher, to walk down a corridor and knock on a door.

Connection is not a programme. It is not something you can install with a policy document or announce in a newsletter. It grows in the accumulated texture of daily life: the class that runs long because nobody wants to stop, the student who asks a question that has nothing to do with the syllabus and everything to do with what they're actually thinking about, the morning a group of teenagers remind their principal that he has somewhere better to be.

I am grateful to them for that reminder. I am grateful, as always, to be here.

Have a restorative break. I look forward to Term 3.