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High Notes, Vol 24 No 35, November 10 2023

From the Principal

High Talent

A member of the public who works at Prince of Wales Hospital notified us that Matthew Ryder (7E) found a man on the ground in distress before school. He organised the ambulance, coordinated activities and kept the situation calm for everyone and was showing a level of maturity well beyond his years. Due to the severity of the man's illness and the fact that he is in stable condition now, it was believed that Matthew could very well have saved the man's life. What an impressive act of community service!  Well done Matthew!

Henry Lau (11S) recorded the second highest individual point scoring total in High history, putting in 44 points against King’s in a losing game. Congratulations, Henry. Congratulations to Kaden Kuang (SHS-2023) who has had his Design and Technology major work selected for consideration in SHAPE, for exhibition in 2024. ̽»¨ÊÓƵ Cadet Unit (SHSCU) wins 3rd place in CSIRO CyberTaipan 2023 Competition. CyberTaipan is an Australian youth cyber defence competition inspired by the US Air Force's CyberPatriot program involves teams of students analysing virtual images to find and fix vulnerabilities, strengthen systems, and maintain critical services. CyberTaipan is run by CSIRO and sponsored by the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD). Well done, boys!

Student Awards Scheme

Last points for the Student Awards Scheme for 2023 can be earned up to Thursday, 30 November. If you check your participation file and detect that something is missing, it is up to you to notify the MIC of the activity to have the text file of successful participants compiled and sent to the S Records participation file. Awards have to be determined and medallions/plaques ordered before the end of the school year so that they will be ready in time for our awards assemblies early next year. We are on a tight schedule. Medallions have to be tallied, ordered and names engraved on them. Workplaces start to wind down for the holidays from now on, so we need to be efficient with our process. The outcome is that all medallions and awards are ready in time for our Student Awards Assembly in week 4 next year. Don’t miss out on getting all the points you should! It is very important that individual students go to the Student Portal > My Details section to check up on their activities and points. If there are discrepancies, we need to know about them so we can contact MICs or program organisers, so everyone gets what they deserve. With our new system of recording Student Awards on Sentral, individual students will have quick and easy access to their categories and points earned via Sentral. Recording will commence on 1 December for the 2024 Awards.

Interpreting Year 9 Reports – Semester 2

Students in Year 9 should have collected their yearly reports by the end of week 5. There are often violent fluctuations in rank order as a few marks can determine the difference between a D and an HD.  Many boys have really taken to their electives and have achieved well in semester 2. Parents should be aware that boys who have decided to discontinue an elective after Year 9 for any reason, may have reduced their effort, with a negative impact on their overall result. Also, those who will not continue core subjects (such as history or geography) may lose motivation and not perform to their potential in those two subjects. Such actions can also result in large movements in the rank order. Encourage your son to maintain a high standard in the core subjects, english, mathematics and science, as these are compulsory in Year 10. An honest effort ought to be applied to all subjects while students are enrolled in them. ‘N’ awards may be issued in Year 9 for history and geography students as these are stage 5 compressed curriculum courses. Failure to resolve stage 5 warning letters may result in denial of entry into stage 6 courses.

Many boys apply for entry into acceleration courses. The procedure for entry is published on our website at https://sbhs.co/acc. Head Teachers consider applications and make recommendations to the Principal on the Individual Learning Plans signed off by parents and submitted by students. Students need to be in the top 100 students to qualify for acceleration and the ‘online learning elective’ (OLE). Be aware that students seeking acceleration have two different rank orders. The rank order is one used for dux calculations and is calculated using marks, not points as for the HD-D-credit-PM-P system (6-5-3-2-1). Mr Dowdell uses Z-scores to track the contribution of the results of each subject to the overall rank. We expect to see the subject that a student wants to accelerate in close to the strongest that a student is undertaking in Year 9. Students who are denied entry to an acceleration course have a right of appeal if they consider they have met the criteria for entry and they have the strong support of the teacher who is currently teaching them in the subject. We accept around 60 boys into acceleration each year. About 35 each year complete their HSC in their accelerated course. There is always an attrition rate. There is a safety net for those who, for whatever reason, do not go on to complete the stage 6 course. Students may be removed from the acceleration intervention if they do not meet the required standard by the end of Year 10 or sometimes, Year 11. Applicants and parents need to understand that acceleration is a differentiated intervention, managed by the Principal, to meet the learning needs of able, high achieving, autonomous and passionate students – it is NOT an elective.

Elective courses

Mr Kay is assigning Year 9 students to their electives and to their acceleration and online courses this week, based upon their submitted preferences. Parents should peruse the learning behaviours profile on their son’s report. We expect at least ‘usually’ if not ‘consistently’ for these behaviours. We aggregate these learning behaviours to produce a list of those judged by teachers as having too frequent ‘sometimes’ or ‘rarely’ ratings. Year advisers are made aware of these students at our report meetings. There is a high correlation between the names on the monitoring register for achievement and those on the learning behaviours list. We also have lists for the individual learning behaviours so we can target support more accurately.

Sentence Conscious Pedagogy:
The Multi Paragraph Blueprint (MPB)

Select a topic and identify the composition’s purpose and audience. Develop the thesis statement as a complete sentence. Write the main idea of each paragraph as a phrase or category. Write the supporting details as notes. The aim is to build a three sentence paragraph in the first instance. Develop the introduction by writing a general statement (G), specific statement (S), and thesis statement (T). Develop the conclusion by inverting the order of the G, S and T statements in the introduction and rewording them. [T-S-G]. Model the MPO for the whole class. Practise writing each type of sentence. Provide two types of sentences – ask them to write a third type. eg General statement and a thesis statement and have them create a specific statement. Write a thesis statement and have them write a general statement and a specific statement to go with it. Give students a topic and have them write a thesis statement for it. Giving them a G, S & T and ask them to add another S. Practise different ways of beginning an introduction: with an example, a question, a fact or statistic or a description.
Dr K A Jaggar
Principal