St Edward's 150 Years - by Nicola Hunter

Chapter 5 / Doorways and Gateways

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.

Chapter 5

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.

DOORWAYS AND GATEWAYS

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

A 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

Above right: School exams, 1903. Right: School Certificate, 1939. Left: The Computer Centre, opened in 1984.

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