150 Years - Flipping Book v1

Chapter 5 / Doorways and Gateways

DOORWAYS AND GATEWAYS

cademic study does not make for the most vibrant of

pictures or the most compelling of stories – staged shots

of pupils staring at screens or teachers, or chewing their

pens while concentrating are not so interesting. Much academic

endeavour is concerned with gradual improvement,discussion and

individual effort and thought.Thus no attempt is going to be made

to illustrate the study of all the subjects on offer at the School today.

However, some OSE will be surprised perhaps by the wide choice

of subjects that can be studied compared with the more distant or

even the relatively recent past at Teddies. Alongside the Sciences,

Maths, Classics, English, History, Modern Foreign Languages,

Religious Studies,Art and Music, it is now possible to study Drama,

Economics, History of Art, Philosophy, Sports Science and, most

recently,as part of the International Baccalaureate (IB),Psychology.

In recent years the electronic revolution has made many changes

to the classroom, and the accompanying photograph, showing

the School’s first computer room in 1984, with teachers reading

their instruction manuals earnestly,

is in one sense more remote and old

fashioned than photographs of young

men walking across the familiar Quad in

the 1950s. From September 2013 all Shell

pupils will bring to School an electronic device to be used for

research in the classroom, and this is a major change. We are

here encouraging our youngest pupils to harness the computer

as one tool in their box for discovery and learning. While the

interactive whiteboard has not been universally embraced by

teachers, the School now requires all its Lower Sixth to complete

a substantial essay on a subject of their choice for either the

Extended Essay in IB or the Extended Project in A Level. Both

of these essays require a great deal of research, and it is the

ability to do the reading and background work to create a well-

structured result that we recognise as being a very important

element of education nowadays. We want young people leaving

the School to be confident in their skills to produce a longer

piece of individual work as well as having excellent subject

knowledge in the areas in which they have specialised in the

Sixth Form. Education at Teddies is not just about passing exams

well, necessary as that is.

We have included short pieces in this chapter on the IB,

on what is read by pupils in English classes nowadays, the

teaching of the Sciences, a piece about Kenneth Grahame and

the Kenneth Grahame Society, and Debating, before moving

to the more visual subjects of Art, Design and Technology,

Music, Drama and the purely extra-curricular activity of Dance.

Since the daily routine of the School revolves around where

we spend time and the familiarity of those places to pupils,

photographs of the entrances to the main buildings for study

have been included, as was the case for Chapter 3 on Houses

– life at Teddies revolves around the routine of visiting familiar

places and feeling at home in them.

THE INTERNATIONAL BACCALAUREATE (IB)

It is now five years since St Edward’s became an IB World

School and began teaching the Diploma Programme, the IB’s

qualification for Sixth Form study. Although based in The

Hague and Geneva, the initial concept of the IB was developed

Left: John Lennox, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford, and

seasoned debater with Richard Dawkins, came to St Edward’s in 2012 as the

inauguralspeakerof‘ReasontoBelieve’,anApologeticsCourseaboutChristian

Faith. His title was ‘Has Science Buried God?’, and in contrast to his relaxed

demeanourhisanswerstoquestionsfromtheaudiencewererazorsharp.Here

he is with Revd Kerr while discussions took place within the audience groups.

Above left: Will Gompertz, the BBC’s Arts Editor and St Edward’s parent,

invited by the History of Art Department to come and speak. His talk

recreated his Edinburgh Festival performance

What AreYou Looking At?

also the title of his recently publishedbook, subtitled, appropriately for this

publication,

150 years of modern art in the blink of an eye

. Here he is shown

with OSEs Claire Vainker and Hugo Wheeler beneath a portrait of the

Queen by OSE Izzy Collins, the final piece of her EPQ project. Izzy went on

to study at the Slade.

Below: Public exams, 2013.

Above right: School exams, 1903.

Right: School Certificate, 1939.

Left: The Computer Centre, opened in 1984.

Chapter 5