English Student Chronicles

Welcome to the newly developed English Student Chronicles. 

In this series, we will hear from students about their experiences in English and how they can link their learning to their own life experiences beyond the classroom.

For our first edition, we hear from Charles Loorham (10 Aherne) and James Trotter (10 Jenkin), both in Year 10 English.

This week for the very first edition of the English Chronicles, we (James Trotter and Charles Loorham ) have been granted the luxury of writing about our experiences in English thus far. From the beginning of the Early Commencement Programme up until now, we have been studying the movie On The Basis Of Sex and have completed two assessment tasks. A personal response with direct correlation to the studied text, and a persuasive text with loose inspiration from the film. 

On The Basis Of Sex follows the protagonist Ruth Bader Ginsburg as she fights for gender equality in the law. We, as students, were required to respond to this by exploring how the events in the film linked to our personal experiences. This gave us the opportunity to reflect and learn from our own personal experiences. The topic of equality was enlightening to learn about as this study highlighted to students how far our society has come since the 1970s, and yet how far our society has to go to be truly equal. 

The insights that we gained from this study of equality have created a more reflective mindset around experiences where discrimination occurs. This mindset is essential to creating an equal society because it gets people to think about and prevent discriminatory events from happening. 

The one task that we are looking forward to the most this year is learning how to analyse and present an argument, as it will teach students to be more persuasive and critical in their thinking. We are sure that all of the students will agree with us when we say that we hope this will finally allow us to persuade our family into getting us those things that we have always wanted.

Among all of the analysis and assessments, we have also had some of the first English workshops. These included punctuation and grammar, sentence structures and a few game changers to take our writing to the next level. Next week there is one more session that is designed for us to ask any questions we want and have them answered in detail. These sessions were run by Mr Troy Edwards, the new Head of English, and Mrs Crickmore, a teacher of numerous high-level English classes that Girton provides.

Although there is so much more content that we have covered in English so far, this concludes the first edition of the English Chronicles. Next week there will be another edition of the chronicles.

Charles Loorham (10 Aherne) and James Trotter (10 Jenkin)

Mr Troy Edwards

Head of English