Principal's Report

Welcome back to the routines of weekdays and school timetables!  I hope you all had a fantastic break with your families and children over the recent school holidays.  As I say to my staff often, whilst many of us need to do school work over the holidays, it is important to take a break during this time as well and recharge depleted batteries so that we can run from the start of the following term.  I know I thoroughly enjoyed a break with my family and friends during the start of July.  Whilst I’m somewhat jealous of all the Facebook photos I was seeing with familiar faces smiling from Queensland beaches, I took comfort in a nice warm fire at home – there is much that our local environment offers even during the colder months of the year.

It was put to be recently that third term is a bit like the ‘Premiership quarter’ of the school year.  Whilst I don’t want to necessarily use football parlance to describe student learning (I’m well aware this flys in the face of my last newsletter report!), it is an interesting way of viewing the next 10 weeks.  It’s the only term without a public holiday to break things up.  It’s just a straight stretch of school days with fewer interruptions and gives us the best chance of consolidating prior learning and building up new skills.  The ‘Premiership quarter’ (3rd quarter) sets up a football team for either the strong chance of victory or lost opportunities heading into the final term.  The same applies in schools and it all comes back to the attitude and the effort we’re prepared to put into our learning, for staff and students alike.  We can start this term running and continue to use this momentum to be proud of our growth, development and learning by the end of September.  This is of course what we want for every student in our care at Warrnambool College.

On the other hand we can let the darker days, the colder weather, the distractions of social media and countless excuses get in the way of being the best we can be.  If we feel ourselves slipping into this mindset, one of the best ways of correcting course quickly is to take the advice of Peter Pan – “Just think of happy thoughts and you’ll fly”.  At the start of this term in our tutorials we are focusing on gratitude.  Our staff and our students have been challenged to think about positive things they can look out for each day.  When you start looking out for certain things in life, it’s amazing how frequently you start to see them.  The same goes applies with positivity – look out for it and you’ll find it popping up everywhere.  And if you can use this to be positive yourself, you become more effective in pretty much everything in life, including learning.

I hope as we travel throughout this term you’ll able to find positive rays of light on a daily basis.  If you do, share it with someone else and let your positivity become theirs as well so that we can all bring warmth to the cold weather that Warrnambool serves up every July.

Kind Regards,

Dave Clift

Principal