Woldingham School Remote Learning Issue 3

Teaching & Learning continues to thrive from our virtual Woldingham...

Mr William Bohanna Senior Teacher (Teaching & Learning)

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As we approach the end of the first full half term of virtual Woldingham, teaching and learning continues to thrive. This new approach has meant that as a community – students, staff and parents - we have had to learn and adapt to the current circumstances. Life has been challenging and we’ve all had to make changes. But this isn’t new. As St Madeleine Sophie Barat said, ‘Don’t be anxious about your interior storms; they are necessary, and the sea is calmer and more beautiful after the storm.’

In this teaching and learning round-up not only are we focusing on some more of the academic departments – English, politics, history of art, theology, media studies and chemistry - but also on the key message to keep going and embrace the learning. As Mother Janet Stuart said, ‘Effective learning means arriving at new power, and the consciousness of new power is one of the most stimulating things in life.’

English - Nature One of the features that we have all noticed since lockdown is the interest in the media in the sustaining aspects of nature at this time. Over the past few months many presenters on BBC Radio 4 have been reading poems which had sustained them through difficult times. It’s interesting how many of their choices had a focus on nature, such as Thomas Hardy’s poem, ‘The Darkling Thrush’.

Nature as a source of consolation in poetry is not a new concept and, indeed, is the very essence of the philosophy of the Romantic poets. Their belief was that nature could restore the human spirit and that it remained a constant in the face of turmoil in the affairs of men. It is worth noting that Wordsworth, an observer of the natural world, was also actually a witness to much of the horror of the French Revolution; so he too lived at a time of upheaval!

It is therefore quite gratifying that as a department we too recognised (and indeed anticipated) the need for poetry with a focus on nature at this time.

Early on in lockdown, we made the decision to change our rather sombre Year 9 poetry anthology, ‘Conflict’ to an anthology of poems reflecting the more uplifting features of the natural world. Mr Baker put together a scheme of work that we hope has offered some more positive focus during this period, while still covering the features of poetry that we would want to examine with Year 9 at this stage. Interestingly, he too chose Hardy’s ‘The Darkling Thrush’, well in advance of its appearance on Radio 4! The poem expresses Hardy’s own sense of disillusionment and loss of faith as the last few hours of the nineteenth century draw to a close. In the final stanza Hardy sees a glimmer of hope in the joyful song of the thrush that spreads out into the gloom. Along with this poem, the anthology includes poems by Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, Grace Nichols, Wendy Cope and Carol Ann Duffy.

As we move into the second half of term with Year 9, we will ask students to step outside and look at nature in their own environment as a stimulus to their own creative writing. We also intend students to undertake some transactional writing (such as letters and speeches) that will have a focus on the world of nature and issues such as climate change. In the meantime, we have included Hardy’s poem in the hope that it brings some cheer!

The Darkling Thrush I leant upon a coppice gate When Frost was spectre-gray, And Winter’s dregs made desolate The weakening eye of day.

The tangled bine-stems scored the sky Like strings of broken lyres, And all mankind that haunted nigh Had sought their household fires.

The land’s sharp features seemed to be The Century’s corpse outleant, His crypt the cloudy canopy, The wind his death-lament.

The ancient pulse of germ and birth Was shrunken hard and dry, And every spirit upon earth Seemed fervourless as I.

At once a voice arose among The bleak twigs overhead In a full-hearted evensong Of joy illimited; An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small, In blast-beruffled plume, Had chosen thus to fling his soul Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings Of such ecstatic sound Was written on terrestrial things Afar or nigh around, That I could think there trembled through His happy good-night air Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew And I was unaware.

Politics - Is democracy really the best form of Government?

Year 11 students have made a tremendous start to their politics A Level and are thoroughly living the Woldingham values, ‘through their actions, students make a difference to the world…Live as a generous and broad-minded community where awareness of and involvement in local, national and global issues are valued.’

They started their A Level with a big question: is democracy really the best form of government?

Firstly, students completed a game starting a society from scratch and deciding which system of rule works best. Can the people be trusted? Which system would you like to live under? Why? Secondly, they held a role play where they voted in a representative and explored if they were any good at doing what the people wanted to explore the difference between direct and representative democracy.

Subsequently they completed a live debate on the strengths and weaknesses of the democratic system by all typing in their ideas simultaneously. There were some nice rebuttals! More can be seen here. Later they made videos on the development of democracy over time. Below is a still from Kate F’s video.

Katie G was able to explain the Great Reform Act in under two minutes using brilliant political cartoons from the time to make her points.

My favourite session was one in which students discussed their research project into participation. They studied how knowledgeable members of their household or social media contacts were about politics. Then they asked how much those people participated in various forms of politics to see if there was any correlation. This was part of a wider debate about poor participation undermining democracy. Afterwards the students made presentations about the best thing that could be done to improve democracy in the UK.

Lily and Harriet were very convincing on the need for more direct democracy, and Hannah made an excellent argument for more e-democracy. Perhaps surprisingly, calls to lower the voting age were not well supported in our poll.

The students have even already explored some A Level exam questions. We are now moving onto researching the manifestos of the main UK and US political parties and debating the merits of their policies. Year 11 will complete the summer term with a project on pressure groups and a challenge to become an active participant. Politics is not only about learning but, as their studies have shown, it’s also about participating.

History of art - Virtual visits to galleries As the department of Leonardo da Vinci, Gustave Eiffel and Pablo Picasso, history of art ought to be at home with new technologies and innovations.

These are strange times, but if one of the things that art can do is to help take us out of our current situation and to see the world anew from different perspectives, then the technologies we have today only make that easier.

Virtual visits to galleries around the world have been created with the ability to wander their corridors and explore works of art to a degree of detail that would be impossible with the naked eye. The new Year 11 cohort have been able to zoom in to see the National Gallery’s Wilton Diptych at a molecular level and use this to unravel the secrets hidden in the fabric of the painting.

On a macro scale meanwhile, Lower Sixth students have time-travelled to sixteenth-century Istanbul, where they coupled online tutorials and videos with their own knowledge to understand why an Ottoman Sultan would enter a building competition with a long-dead Byzantine Emperor as they compared the ‘Suleymaniye Mosque’ with ‘Hagia Sophia’.

Theology - online discussions and collaboration The virtual Theology department has embraced wholeheartedly the new challenges and opportunities that have arisen through our move over to Teams.

Year 10 have been starting lessons with quickfire questions giving their responses via the chat facility in their class. The teacher has then spent time encouraging them to read from the set texts of Mark’s Gospel sharing ideas via live discussion through Teams. Just like in the classroom students have been able to exchange ideas and participate in class discussions. Microsoft Forms has been used to encourage active participation, recall of key terms and learning from the previous lesson. By the time of publication Year 10 will have undertaken their first Theology end of topic test through Teams.

Year 11 students began their A Level studies with an introduction to moral decision making. They have been able to work in small groups by calling each other up to discuss a range of ethical issues including responding to the question of what the world would look like with no morals to guide our behaviour. Most recently they undertook a study of Aquinas’ Natural Moral

Law using a shared Word document to engage in a live sharing of ideas to critically evaluate the ethical theory. They began by identifying strengths of Natural Moral Law and then worked together to offer critiques and rebuttals to produce a collaborative piece of work that will be invaluable when they come to write their first essays on the topic.

REthink, the Theology discussion group, has continued to flourish in the virtual Theology department with live participation via Teams on topics ranging from Jewish Orthodoxy to considering the question ‘Do we control technology or does technology control us?’

Of course, nothing can quite replace the experience of being in the classroom but students have been given many opportunities to excel in their learning through Teams.

Media Studies - Amusing Ourselves to Death Brilliant: of light or colour (very bright). The large and small screen have for decades been referred to as the bright screen. Brightness, the glitter of the screen that attracts the human eye to this illusion of movement, is our bread butter in media. Humans are irresistibly drawn to its flashing illusion of movement. It is our job to probe and dissect its illusions. By the end of the first year media students begin to understand its construction and also its immense power.

We teach Neil Postman’s book, ‘Amusing Ourselves to Death’, which criticises how television can never communicate complex ideas. He said it was like trying to communicate Plato’s Republic with smoke signals.

Television always tends to the short moment, the neatly packaged, the concentration of most amusing elements. He traced how politics has descended into no more than another wing of the entertainment industry.

This is something that he also noticed in education.

He noticed how teachers became more like television presenters as students became more used to arguments being delivered in short, glossy and brightly presented packages for an audience that were always being called on to watch something else. This is where we now find ourselves as we are driven on to the very screen that we, in media studies, criticise.

Education now takes its place next to the million other packages that are available to distract. This is where we should pause. The importance of education is that it draws out from us that which is inherent in us, which most people

believe is goodness. That goodness needs encouragement and cultivation.

Schools provide the concrete interaction cultivation needs. In our modern media-driven world things are different. The freedom we possess allows us to feed ourselves a constant diet of advertising that encourages the vice of intemperateness, or in a more colloquial word, greed. It appears our free world needs intemperate consumers and offers to them ever more brilliant images to encourage the vice. When we go to school, we are cutting ourselves off from that for a short moment. We see another way of life. Now that we have all moved online we may find it ever harder to offer something different.

However, Plato thought that writing was the worst thing that had ever been invented, some think that television is worse. They had probably never spent a long grey day in England being too tired to read and finding that watching North by Northwest for the fifth time just fitted the bill perfectly.

Chemistry - Theoretical and mathematical chemistry Year 10 chemists have their calculation hats on and are finding the relative formula mass of compounds from home! Led by Mr Currie, Mrs Barnes and Miss Kelly, they have been focusing on the theoretical and mathematical side of the chemistry course. In their most recent lesson they used their problem solving and analytical skills to decide if Mr Currie had cheated when recording his experimental data and were asked to justify their response. Detective work at its finest!

Year 11 chemists have started the AS content and are accurately determining measurements on both the atomic and macroscopic scale using the same unit of measurement, Avogadro’s number. This became possible for the first time when American physicist Robert Millikan measured the charge on an electron.

The charge on a mole of electrons had been known for some time and is the constant called the Faraday. The best estimate of the value of a Faraday, according to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), is 96,485.3383 coulombs per mole of electrons. The best estimate of the charge on an electron based on modern experiments is 1.60217653 x 10-19 coulombs per electron. If you divide the charge on a mole of electrons by the charge on a single electron you obtain a value of Avogadro’s number of 6.02214154 x 1023 particles per mole! Now that’s a lot of particles!

Lower Sixth students are immersing themselves in A2 Kinetics and AS Organics. They are linking the economic importance of understanding orders of reactions. Focusing on how increasing the concentration of a certain reactant affects the overall rate of the reaction, and therefore why understanding the orders of each reactant will save time, money and vital chemicals when producing your desired yield!

Chemistry Society has continued in our #Virtual Valley, and Lower Sixth chemists have been presenting remotely on topics of their choice, such as the chemistry of chocolate and the Maillard reaction. They have also been debating ethical topics such as animal testing and the use of vaccines.

Woldingham School, Marden Park, Woldingham, Surrey, CR3 7YA T: 01883 349431 E: info@woldinghamschool.co.uk woldinghamschool.co.uk