Feature
Choose your own adventure: pathways in Middle School Meredith Plaisted Deputy Head of Middle School – Student Learning
There are a few common questions sometimes feel unanswerable and can create a sense of uncertainty: What do you want to do when you grow up? School is more than an ATAR, why don’t you become more involved? Do you know that you are likely to have a variety of part-time jobs? And that you’ll probably have about 17 different jobs across five different careers? What are you interested in? What makes you happy? There’s a lot of pressure to know all this by the time students finish school, but some of us will be trying to find the answers for the rest of our lives. What we do know, though, is that our students have exciting pathways ahead of them. They will need to be great decision-makers, they need attitudes and values that will empower them to be in charge of their wellbeing, and they will need to be able to call on a huge range of skills. The Middle School Elective and Core Enrichment program is one of many ways in which we prepare our students for their future and help them figure out the pathways they might want to take beyond school. Every Year 8 and 9 student spends the equivalent of one day per week studying some of over 35 of these ‘free choice’ subjects. Taking a stroll around Middle School during these elective blocks brings all sorts of surprises. 24 | Torch
Top left: Investigating chemical reactions in Science. Top right: Programming robots in Creative Silicon Chips. Above: Building games in Product Design and Technology: Wood. Opposite: Analysing the elements in light in Astro-science.
