Gifted and Talented
The purpose of providing gifted and talented programmes is to maximise young students' educational outcomes. While it is a goal at St Andrew's to provide challenging and enriched curricular for all students, the needs of gifted students require appropriate curriculum modification and provisions which take their particular characteristics into account.
Gifted and Talented takes PHLITE!
Understanding philosophy as expressed through literature from Socrates to Shakespeare, to de Borges, to Sartre and Camus, is the newest enrichment programme to be launched by the Gifted and Talented Department this term. Called PHLITE, to represent the combination of literature and philosophy and the soaring of the enquiring mind, it is available for students in Years 10 and 11. Jonathan Hall is PHLITE's presenter. A former teacher at the School, he has just returned from Cambridge where he completed a PhD on understanding American philosophy through an examination of American literature. He has designed a wonderful course which, places the different blossomings of thought on a time line. My desire as Coordinator in initiating the course was to encourage students to think afresh. By discovering a whole raft of thinkers in chronological order, they can then understand how it is possible to depart from the norm of the day and bring about exciting changes in attitudes and ways of perceiving - just as they can do in the future!!
The course is incredibly valuable because it affects all their other subjects including science, history and literature. What was thrilling was when the course was first canvassed with the students, 45 of them responded, saying they were interested in attending. There are less in the class now, as other demands weighed in on some of the students, but it is obviously an area of interest to our young. It is held outside usual classes on a Thursday, during a combination of Administration and lunchtime.
Jonathan is also leading What's Up Doc?, a philosophy club for students in Years 7 and 8. It is held at 8.00am on a Thursday morning. There was great enthusiasm as students puzzled over whether Theseus' boat, which returned home after several years away, was the same boat if every section of it had been replaced along the way!
PHLITE and What's Up Doc? complement the other extension programmes such as CHAOS, the programme devoted purely to experimental science run by Kathryn Topp, a marvellous scientist who married on the last Sunday of Term.
EROS has commenced with two classes taken by Carolyn Brehaut, a historian who last year returned from Oxford where she completed a Masters Degree. The ongoing class will study the Trojan Wars from the perspective of a variety of writers, including "The Iliad" by Homer. The new class will study Homer's "The Odyssey". The classes are small and intimate and with a combination of students from Years 7 to 11 in the one class there is a lovely intimacy and shared excitement in their increasing knowledge of the Classical Pantheon and their outrageous deeds.
SMACS the maths enrichment programmes is led by Professor Terry Gagen whose great love is number theory. Students from Years 9 and 10 combine at midday on Wednesdays.
Finally, The Breakfast Club held every few weeks before school encourages staff and students to read and react to the classics. The next three books include A Day In The Life of Ivan Denisovitch by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Waves by Virginia Woolf and Cloudstreet by Tim Winton. And then there is Inklings a group for those interested in writing. Next term we will be looking at literary competitions and preparing material to send to them.
These programmes are apart from acceleration of remarkably able students and Independent Research Programmes for those who have a vivid desire to explore an area of interest that may be peculiar to them.
If I had to select a word that is common to all these programmes, it is passion expressed not only by the students in the groups they have selected, but most importantly by the presenters themselves, who are ardent in their preparation and in their delivery.
Ms Deirdre Macpherson
Gifted and Talented Coordinator
