English Faculty

When you add it all up, we in the KHS English faculty have a combined total of 104 years teaching experience. That’s a lot. We’ve taught through wars, recessions, the invention of the touch tone phone, and something like thirty prime ministers. And still, none of us has ever experienced a year like 2020.

            Looking back on the year so far, it’s tempting to see it in terms of the things we haven’t been able to do. First we were forced to cancel our Annual Year Seven Storytelling Campfire. Then the debating competition got the kibosh. We lost hundreds of hours of face to face teaching time, and even had to - gasp – cancel some assessment tasks.

            But if there’s a silver-lined lipstick to the pig-cloud that is 2020, it’s been the way Kingswood High School – students and staff alike – have rallied to overcome the obstacles hurled our way. In the face of a year so bad that our grandchildren will accuse us of being senile when we tell them about it, the learning at KHS hasn’t stopped, and neither have the impressive achievements across all year groups. Whether it’s the awesome Year Eleven English Studies Documentary Film Festival (or YEESDFF for short), the highly talented winners of our Year Seven poetry competition, or 8D just being 8D (They’ll get angry at me if I don’t mention them at least once), no pandemic can stop the amazing things that take place in KHS English each and every day.

            Normally - y’know, in those years when the world isn’t on figurative and literal fire - we’d include some photos of the exciting extra-curricular activities our students had taken part in at the bottom of the page. But instead of boring you with a bunch of photos of hand sanitizer and the Zoom loading screen, here are some famous authors wearing funny hats: