The opening of this school year has certainly been one of the most difficult I can remember. The impact of Amanda Chapman's death has been huge on everyone in the school community, but the full effect has not yet, I think, hit us. Term has begun and that brings with it all those events and procedures that are urgent and which preoccupy our time and our energies to the point where there is no time left over to reflect fully on the events of the summer. In assembly this morning, the reading came from Genesis Chapter 1, the part where God, in effect, creates time by separating day from night. In the prayer, written by Laura Henry, we focused upon the great gift of time. It reminded me that so much of our time is taken up with the urgent and the immediate, and precious little is dedicated to the really important.
The beginning of the year brings with it new staff, new pupils and, generally, new beginnings - new courses, new teachers, new friends. This year is a little different, because we are thinking hard at the same time about an ending. We embark on a new phase of the school's history in the move at Christmas to Gransha Road and in doing so, say goodbye to College Avenue, so I am acutely conscious that this is the last term on this site after 106 uninterrupted years. Ends and beginnings are linked; one leads to the other and hope and expectation is inextricably mingled with regret.
As I introduce the new staff, most at or reasonably near to the beginning of their careers, I am conscious that this will be the thirty eighth year of my teaching career; as I look back, it does not sem anything like as long as the number suggests. My first post was a permanent one, a privilege denied to most young beginning teachers in these difficult economic times. As I introduce these young men and women, I am simply aghast at the stark reality that few have had the experience of a permanent job in a school where they can put down roots and really establish their careers. All are young
teachers of real quality and it is our good fortune to have appointed them but there is something
wrong when such talent is not allowed the time and the circumstances in which to flourish. I shall
introduce our new staff in alphabetical order, save for two, to whom I shall come in time.
Philip Cartmill is a graduate of the universities of Glasgow and Southampton and he has been appointed to teach PE and Geography, taking over from Mr Creighton. He taught for a year in BRA and comes highly recommended. He will bring much needed expertise in rugby, cricket and athletics.
David Graham joins the History Department to cover Mark Robinson's career break. He is a graduate of QUB with a PGCE from Cumbria University. He has left a full-time post as Head of History at the Newcastle School for Boys to return home. He also has considerable expertise in rugby, which he is employing in the services of the 1st XV.
Natalie Kinley-McCurry has been appointed temporarily to the History and Politics departments. She is a graduate of QUB in History, with a MA in Irish History and a PGCE from Durham University. She taught for two years in Giggleswick School, a distinguished independent school in North Yorkshire, before returning home to NI. Since returning, she has taught in both Hunterhouse College and BRA. She is also a graduate in Law from the University of Ulster, so she brings with her an impressive range of academic skills.
Katherina Nicholl joins the Modern Foreign Languages department in a part-time and temporary
capacity to teach all three languages, French, German and Spanish. She is a graduate of the University of Heidelburg and has been teaching for the last year in Regent House School. She is the
wife of our Head of MFL and has taken over a rather fragmented timetable at very short notice.
Jonathan Rea has become the full-time Director of New Irish Arts after a year's career break, during which his post was temporarily taken over by Claire Buchanan. Claire will shortly be taking
maternity leave and standing in for her we are immensely fortunate to have the very talented Paul
O'Reilly. Paul is a graduate of Ulster and Manchester Metropolitan Universities and the Royal
Northern College of Music. He has acted as temporary Head of Music in St MacNissi's College, St
Michael's Lurgan and Shimna, where his maternity leave contract was extended to allow him to
complete his teaching of the A Level classes. As a student he was a member of both the Ulster Youth Orchestra and the national Youth Orchestra of Ireland; more recently, he has played in various ensembles throughout NI and in television broadcasts.
He is joined in the Music department by Claire Phillips, who, after graduating from the University of Cambridge, taught in Victoria College and Belfast High School and, last year taught in our sister
school, Glenlola Collegiate. Claire and Paul have a particularly difficult job as we look ahead not
only to all our signature events, but also to the vast amount of work involved in the move to a new
school building.
I wish all our new staff every possible happiness and fulfilment in their new
Monday 3 September 2012
Friday 31 August 2012
Welcome from the Headmaster!
I am delighted to welcome you to our new website which is launched as we prepare to move to the new school on Gransha Road. Its primary function is to post all the information about the School, which you may need as a pupil, parent, former pupil, friend, member of the wider community, geographical and educational, or interested bystander. I hope, however, that you will take some time to navigate your way around it to absorb some sense of the vitality, abundance and ‘variousness’ of our life and ethos. If you think that there is information which should be on the site and does not appear to be, please contact us and we shall endeavour to plug the gap.
My thanks goes to all who have worked hard over the last few terms to make this new site happen, especially our website administrator, Mrs Krystal Cunningham.
My thanks goes to all who have worked hard over the last few terms to make this new site happen, especially our website administrator, Mrs Krystal Cunningham.
Tuesday 21 August 2012
Friday 24 February 2012
Politics and Sports
It was the great journalist, Bernard Levin, who began his column in
the first Times newspaper after a year of closure caused by the
stand-off between Rupert Murdoch and the printing unions, back in the -
when was it? eighties?- with the words, "As I was saying..."
I feel rather the same way after a half-term of non-blogging. Not, I thought, that anyone had noticed. Not, that is, until I was inundated by a flood of concerned queries shortly after half-term. I say a flood; it could more accurately be described as two. One from a parent who sent in a sort of email headed more or less along the lines of "Wot, no Blogs?" - thank you, Micheal - and a colleague who mentioned the absence of the blog more as something to say than as a genuine and concerned inquiry. Well, if the statisticians can extrapolate from a sample, so can I and two, in my book, constitutes a flood. So, here I am, back again.
The six weeks between Christmas and half-term were extraordinarily intense. The weeks immediately following Christmas always are: A Level modules, mock exams, work experience, parental consultations, all combine in their own way to eat up time. The pressure was greater this year because of the financial environment and the detailed work on the budget to keep the number of impending redundancies to a minimum. Detailed work, I may add, led by the Bursar, whose coolness under pressure never falters. Throw into this mix the breaking of the news about Eddie Irvine buying the College Avenue site with the consequent media flurry - it was more of a flurry than a frenzy in the end - and the final decision about when we are actually going to move into the new school, and it all added up to what the media call a 'rollercoaster' of a term.
The decision to move in January has not been an entirely straightforward one, but in the end it is undoubtedly the best option with probably he least disruption to the School. We arrived at the date after an exhaustive review of all options and, curiously, selected the time that we had always thought was an impossibility. New year, new term, new school. A dignified farewell and an excited, breathless hello in 2013.
The reality, the belief, has crept up on me, incrementally day by day, until, suddenly, one morning, I woke up and the new school had ceased to be an aspiration or frustration or distant dream; quite quietly, the ground had shifted and I had never noticed ...
The highlights of the term so far. Let me single out two, both within a day or two of each other.
The first was the Politics Society's Questiontime with Steven Agnew, Jim Allister, Leslie Cree, Conor Maskey and Peter Weir answering a number of what I think were difficult questions. You'll notice that the names are in strict alphabetical order, if only to demonstate this headmaster's studious and careful neutrality. You will be pleased to know that school principals have no political opinions of any kind - well, not of the party political kind. Not, at least of the public kind. I had the pleasure of chairing the debate, sitting in the middle and observing, interested and engaged, but unable to indulge - a eunuch of the political kind. It taught me how supremely good a job David Dimbleby does, effortlessly managing the debate and mov ing seamlessly from subject to subject. It would, as they say, have done your heart good to see the politicians get to grips with each other tenaciously, courteously - well, for the most part - and maturely. There were five questions: three would not have been out of place anywhere; they were bead and butter political issues - prescription charges, recycling and the programme for giovernment - and the quality of the ideas flashing to and fro was high. Two hit the old constitutional nerve and yet, even here, the atmospherte was in an indefinable way, different. The question about how the panellists would celebrate the Diamond Jubilee didn't light anyone's blue touch paper as it might once have done. Perhaps it took a while to get fired up, but it wasn't until the last question which pushed the politicians to discuss the concept of political maturity and the potential for a movement away from the old fault lines of denomination and culture that the debate took off and even then, the change was apparent. It struck me that, for better or worse, and who am I to say, we were in a new world in which we were all, dare I say it?, intelligent people, passionate, angry and adult.
TUV, DUP, UUP, Green and Sinn Fein in Bangor Grammar School, around the same table, ten years ago? I don't think so.
The other highlight? Unquestionably the second half of a very fine Schools' Cup fourth round tie against Dalriada, when the boys played with a commitment, intensity and skill, I don't think I have seen before this year. They played as a team; it's such a trite cliche, but I have never before seen it exemplified so gloriously, the whole greater than any individual, the collective will absorbing and re-creating the single efforts to produce a force which was in the end too strong to be defied.
I had better stop. First because I am writing on the eve of the quarter-final; and secondly because the language I'm using seems all too resonant of something else, something much too inappropriately political...
I feel rather the same way after a half-term of non-blogging. Not, I thought, that anyone had noticed. Not, that is, until I was inundated by a flood of concerned queries shortly after half-term. I say a flood; it could more accurately be described as two. One from a parent who sent in a sort of email headed more or less along the lines of "Wot, no Blogs?" - thank you, Micheal - and a colleague who mentioned the absence of the blog more as something to say than as a genuine and concerned inquiry. Well, if the statisticians can extrapolate from a sample, so can I and two, in my book, constitutes a flood. So, here I am, back again.
The six weeks between Christmas and half-term were extraordinarily intense. The weeks immediately following Christmas always are: A Level modules, mock exams, work experience, parental consultations, all combine in their own way to eat up time. The pressure was greater this year because of the financial environment and the detailed work on the budget to keep the number of impending redundancies to a minimum. Detailed work, I may add, led by the Bursar, whose coolness under pressure never falters. Throw into this mix the breaking of the news about Eddie Irvine buying the College Avenue site with the consequent media flurry - it was more of a flurry than a frenzy in the end - and the final decision about when we are actually going to move into the new school, and it all added up to what the media call a 'rollercoaster' of a term.
The decision to move in January has not been an entirely straightforward one, but in the end it is undoubtedly the best option with probably he least disruption to the School. We arrived at the date after an exhaustive review of all options and, curiously, selected the time that we had always thought was an impossibility. New year, new term, new school. A dignified farewell and an excited, breathless hello in 2013.
The reality, the belief, has crept up on me, incrementally day by day, until, suddenly, one morning, I woke up and the new school had ceased to be an aspiration or frustration or distant dream; quite quietly, the ground had shifted and I had never noticed ...
The highlights of the term so far. Let me single out two, both within a day or two of each other.
The first was the Politics Society's Questiontime with Steven Agnew, Jim Allister, Leslie Cree, Conor Maskey and Peter Weir answering a number of what I think were difficult questions. You'll notice that the names are in strict alphabetical order, if only to demonstate this headmaster's studious and careful neutrality. You will be pleased to know that school principals have no political opinions of any kind - well, not of the party political kind. Not, at least of the public kind. I had the pleasure of chairing the debate, sitting in the middle and observing, interested and engaged, but unable to indulge - a eunuch of the political kind. It taught me how supremely good a job David Dimbleby does, effortlessly managing the debate and mov ing seamlessly from subject to subject. It would, as they say, have done your heart good to see the politicians get to grips with each other tenaciously, courteously - well, for the most part - and maturely. There were five questions: three would not have been out of place anywhere; they were bead and butter political issues - prescription charges, recycling and the programme for giovernment - and the quality of the ideas flashing to and fro was high. Two hit the old constitutional nerve and yet, even here, the atmospherte was in an indefinable way, different. The question about how the panellists would celebrate the Diamond Jubilee didn't light anyone's blue touch paper as it might once have done. Perhaps it took a while to get fired up, but it wasn't until the last question which pushed the politicians to discuss the concept of political maturity and the potential for a movement away from the old fault lines of denomination and culture that the debate took off and even then, the change was apparent. It struck me that, for better or worse, and who am I to say, we were in a new world in which we were all, dare I say it?, intelligent people, passionate, angry and adult.
TUV, DUP, UUP, Green and Sinn Fein in Bangor Grammar School, around the same table, ten years ago? I don't think so.
The other highlight? Unquestionably the second half of a very fine Schools' Cup fourth round tie against Dalriada, when the boys played with a commitment, intensity and skill, I don't think I have seen before this year. They played as a team; it's such a trite cliche, but I have never before seen it exemplified so gloriously, the whole greater than any individual, the collective will absorbing and re-creating the single efforts to produce a force which was in the end too strong to be defied.
I had better stop. First because I am writing on the eve of the quarter-final; and secondly because the language I'm using seems all too resonant of something else, something much too inappropriately political...
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