On a personal note, I started at Glenaeon in 1994 with a Class One, in what is now the Class Three room in the Vera Jacobson Building. One of the children who made their way down the stairs from Kindergarten to the Class One room for me to meet them on an auspicious day in December 1993 was a little girl called Dillon Cross. She was a lively, imaginative girl who seemed to have the sun shining out of her on a permanent basis, such was her happy, joyful nature.
For the next seven and a half years it was my happy responsibility to teach Dillon and her many classmates (there were 34 of them in Class Five), to take them on a number of adventurous camps (Upper Allyn, Coolendel, Barrington River), to sing many songs, to do many drawings, and to share many stories, as well as all the rigorous tasks involved in delivering a meaningful and rich curriculum. It was a beautiful journey.
So it was a particularly pleasant moment when Dillon returned to Glenaeon a month ago to undertake her final Practicum before completing her Master of Teaching through the University of New England. While she is now Dillon McKendrick and the mother of two small children, she is as bright and sunny as she ever was.
She took the Geometry Main Lesson with Class Five, and made all the constructions that her own Class Five had done so many years ago, as Geometry is eternal and its laws unchanging. This Class Five main lesson is a remarkable introduction to Geometry, demonstrating that all quadrilaterals can be constructed by layering a series of circles on each other.
It felt like a circle in another way. My own son Robbie is in Class Five, and with Dillon teaching him what I had taught her, it really felt like a circle of life was being completed.
Parent Survey
Please complete the survey which has been sent out to all parents. You may need to check whether the emails from MYP Corporation have gone into a Junk folder. The survey is an important part of our review of the year past, and assists the school in preparing for the year to come. The survey is conducted entirely independently, and can take as little as 5 minutes or as long as you need for a more extended response. All responses are considered and valued as important feedback. The survey will close on Monday September 23rd so please take the time over the weekend and complete the survey.
Fortnightly Newsletter
Next term we will be trialling a fortnightly Glenaeon Newsletter. Weekly Newsletters hark back to a pre-digital era when the hard copy was the only form of regular communication. In these days of multi-channel communication, with email but one form of connecting communities, many schools now publish a fortnightly Newsletter in order to maximize reach and engagement, not to mention managing resources. We will begin this trial in the first fortnight of Term 4 and will be seeking feedback on the impact of this change.
- Andrew Hill