The View From My Study – 17th March
Can a bee sting a bee? Why do cats always find their way home? How are dreams made? And where does ‘good’ come from? I stumbled across these questions when I picked up a book on my daughter’s bedside table: Big Questions from Little People and simple answers from Great Minds. A fascinating read, the questions in this book show me how naturally inquisitive children are, how eager they are to enquire and make discoveries.
In passing this week, I asked a Year Seven pupil how his work was going and he reported things had got a lot tougher this term and with a smile he said, “but that’s really good.” That was music to my ears. Our pupils should be challenged by the work – what is the point in it always being easy? What we need to equip them with, though, are the skills to not give in when the task is tougher; the skills to think through a problem and find a resolution; the skills to think expansively.
Bees can sting other bees by the way. No-one really knows how cats do it but, like other animals with a homing instinct, it is probably to do with the Earth’s magnetic field. In dreams we go back over things we’ve missed, imagine stories about what we’d love and explore the fears we normally put to the back of our minds during the day. And this often leads to the concept of ‘good’ which comes from responsible and sensible thinking about the effect that our thoughts and acts have on the world around us. Think big everyone!
Some children who have been thinking big are our academic scholars and we were delighted to receive news that four pupils have been offered Academic Scholarship awards by Rugby School. This means that, in total, 26 awards have been offered to our 6th Form pupils from twelve different schools across the academic and co-curricular fields: sport, music, drama and DT. This is an excellent collective achievement and testament to the hard work of the pupils and the teachers who have guided them.
HM’s Bacon Butties will be served tomorrow morning for the last time this term. If I don’t see you there, or at the Easter Eggstravaganza, I wish you all a very good weekend and Happy Mother’s Day!
Gareth Jones, Headmaster
