General News
Let's face it, here is something a bit different
The other day I heard someone say, in the past few years, when you thought about what you imagined your future would look like, did you ever think we would be living and attending school under the conditions we are? The COVID-19 has impacted us greatly, affecting so many things about our life and how we live it.
One of the most obvious changes has been the relatively recent requirement to wear a masks when out of our homes. So with this in mind, we thought we might put our students to the test.
Follow the link below to take you to a page of our 'Masked Staff Members". Students are asked to read the conditions of what they have to do and then submit their answers to Mr Butler via Teams. Prizes are to be awarded for each Year Level category. How many will you recognise?
Monash Scholars Program 2020
Monash Scholars is a prestigious program for high achieving secondary school students. The program is offered by Monash University to give high potential students a unique head start into university life. It provides opportunities for personal and academic development, as well as, giving students the knowledge, skills and confidence to make the right study choices. It also enables them to expand their network of like-minded peers.
Each year, Nossal is able to nominate ten applicants for the program from our Year 10 cohort. We select these students based on their academic achievement in the first half of the year. Once nominated, students must complete a lengthy application process to gain access to this highly competitive program.
This year, six out of our ten student applicants were successful in gaining entry to the program – a remarkable result! So it is with great pleasure that we congratulate
Beste Cifci, Jazlyn Yap, Lola Sargasso Minsandi Jayalath Mudiyanselage, Riddhi Gopinath and Shashini Kandamulla on gaining entry to the Monash Scholars Class of 2020.
Mr Angus Clark
Director of Curriculum and Pedagogy
Parents reaching out to others
We are naturally focused on the wellbeing of our students during this period of remote learning, but what about our students families?
Please read the story on the PFA page of this newsletter for more information.
PESA Awards
Attending the PESA awards on the August 14 was unlike anything we had ever witnessed before – not only was this year’s VCAA event held entirely online (which was quite an amazing effort), it allowed us to be present for a multitude of incredible speeches given by students our age.
Prachi preparing to deliver her prepared speech at PESA 2020
Prachi preparing to deliver her prepared speech at PESA 2020
Nossal student and friend, Prachi Beniwal was a state finalist this year, and throughout both the prepared speech and impromptu performance, she definitely made us and the school community proud. Speaking on racial stereotypes and biases, Prachi held herself extremely well within an incredibly stressful situation and despite not proving victorious, showed us and the adjudicators what it really means to ‘embrace the challenge’. Her speech was wonderful and the excitement that came from supporting her was unparalleled. We are so proud of her achievements and her performance on the day.
The entire event was quite remarkable – not only were the six student speakers quite supportive of one another and confident within themselves, but a live musical performance was also provided throughout the day and was quite impressive. All speeches from the final could be held at the highest standard, the passion and knowledge of each speaker easily recognised in their speeches which were wonderful to witness.
Overall, being an audience for the state final was a rewarding experience – we could reflect upon our own public speaking skills and we learned some new ones too – and the culture of the entire event was one of support, awe, and respect. We highly recommend the PESA awards to any student willing to promote and encourage their public speaking skills, as well as students like us that wish to be an audience and support for their friends and fellow debaters.
Brooklyn Featherstone,
Shakthi Senthilkumar
Year 12
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Did you know?
Did you know our newsletter can now be translated into a number of different languages? This is a relatively new feature of the software program we use and can be turned on or off using the language selector in the lower left corner of each page.