Andrew Chisholm
Assistant Principal
Dear Parents and Students,
As we reach the end of term 2 it has been pleasing to see some of the outstanding achievements of our students. Three of our students are representing Australia in the International Young Physicists Tournament in Warsaw Poland over the holidays. Congratulations to Amitav Madav, Praneel Chugh and Angad Singh. In the recent computational and Algorithmic Thinking Competition, two JMSS students received perfect scores. Congratulations to Jonathon Purcell in Year 10 and Amitav Madan in Year 12.
Reports
As we reach the end of term two, our students and teachers have been exceptionally busy finalising assessments, participating in the exam process, reflecting on assessment grades and beginning semester two subjects. Students do need to appraise their individual efforts over the past month to ensure that they have learnt from the successes and failures of first semester, and use the holiday break to refocus their energies in a directed fashion to ensure they can achieve their personal best in second semester.
All students in all year levels will have a semester report published on compass from early July. This report will be a summary of the grades students have achieved over the semester. As all subjects apart from Instrumental Music have been using the Learning Management System Canvas to provide continuous feedback, then the semester reports will not contain the traditional comments related to student achievements and areas for improvement as these have already been published in Canvas.
Semester reports are accessed on compass via the parents login. If you have lost your login you can contact the school on info@jmss.vic.edu.au . Obviously the reports provide an excellent basis to assess the progress of your son or daughter in each of their subjects in relation to their own learning goals, their performance on assessment tasks and their organisation. Please take the time over the holidays to have a conversation with your son and daughter about what teachers have written about their progress to this point of the year.
Supercomputing Conference in Denver Colorado, USA
Thanks to the generosity of the faculty of Computer Science, we are once again able to send four students to this year’s supercomputing conference in Denver. Many students have written excellent applications to take part in this exciting opportunity and the team to represent JMSS will be determined early in early term 3.
Upcoming events in Term 3
All of our staff will be participating in professional learning activities on Friday 20th of July. On this day Year 11 and 12 students will not required at school. Year 10 students will be required at school on this day as they will be participating in an IT immersion day in the Monash University IT faculty. This is the first time a day like this has been run for our students and special thanks must be made to Dr David Albrecht and Dr Marc Cheong from the IT faculty for making this opportunity possible.
One of the major events that the entire school will be involved in in Term 3 is the selection of courses for 2019. For year 12 this means VTAC preferences for university entry and for our year 10 and 11 students, the selection of subjects for the following year.
There are some major changes to how our current Year 12 students will receive information about which courses they are successful in accessing for 2020, with an early offer system being put into play in Victoria for the first time.
The dates and locations for each of the Course Selection sessions and tertiary information sessions are listed below.
Year 10 to 11 Information Night for current year 10 Students and Parents is Tuesday July 23 in South 1 lecture theatre.
Year 11 to 12 Information Night for current Year 11 Students and Parents is Thursday July 25th at JMSS
Year 12 VTAC Information session for current Year 12 students and parents is Tuesday August 13 at JMSS
Final details around timings and when course counselling interviews will be occurring will be communicated in the next newsletter.
Science Immersion Day
Last Friday I was privileged to join the Year 10’s for their science immersion day at various locations around the University. Organised by the schools of Biology, Chemistry, Mathematical Sciences, Biomedicine, Physics and Astronomy and Earth, Atmosphere and Environment and coordinated by Dr James Driscoll, students rotated through a range of activities that exposed them to cutting edge research and state of the art facilities. Thanks to the many academics and PHD students who made this day possible. Pictured are students who participated in an activity measuring Cane Toads from different locations in Australia to make some conclusions about the evolutionary journey of these pests. The photo of the Cane Toad on the left shows a Western Australian Toad whilst the one on the right shows a Cane toad from near the original release point in Far North Queensland. Big size differences!
Year 10 and 11 Formal
The year 10 and 11 formal held at Quat Quatta this week was a great event and very well attended by both staff and students. Attached are a couple of photos from the night.
I wish all members of the John Monash Community a restful and safe holiday break and safe travels to the 6 staff and 43 students participating in the sixth reef and rainforest trip to Far North Queensland. I am very fortunate to be accompanying Jasmine Junawan, Matthew Yau and Cally Ferguson with teacher Caitlyn Ryan to the Korean Science Academy Science Fair in Busan, South Korea where they will be presenting their research related to skin cancer and machine learning and also stem cells.
Andrew Chisholm
Assistant Principal
(Curriculum, Pedagogy and Operations)