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The Cranbrook Chronicle From Studies Term 2 Assessments – Years 7 to 10 The Years 7 to 10 assessment periods start next week. Dates for tasks are on the Year group calendar, and specific advice about each task is located on the subject page. Don’t forget about the study tips advice on the Portal too: Cranbrook School subscribes to the ELES Study Skills Handbook. This online resource contains information and interactive activities. Access to the Handbook is available at http://www.studyskillshandbook.com.au User name and password on the Portal (Year group home page) Absence from assessment tasks: Departments arrange catch-up testing for boys absent – a reminder that boys must bring a diary note from his parent or guardian if in Yrs 7 – 8 explaining his legitimate absence (illness or misadventure); a doctor’s certificate is required for Yrs 9 and 10 students. Rules governing lateness and absence due to illness are in the relevant year Curriculum Outlines, provided in hard copy earlier in the year, on the portal, and referred to in the student diary (p 104) or portal/curriculum and assessment Term 2 semester reports Years 7 to 10 receive full reports at the end of term – attitude and achievement outcomes, performance grades and quartiles, teacher academic and pastoral comment, cocurricular information. Years 11 and 12, and Year 10/11 accelerants, receive progress reports - attitude and achievement outcomes, task ranks for those tasks held this term. HSC Trial Examination Timetable The Trials are held in Weeks 1 and 2 of next term, starting day 1. The timetable and rules governing assessments and examinations will be available on the portal next week. Boys must familiarise themselves with the rules covering examinations and assessment – the rules on the portal and those in the HSC Assessment Guide. Once published, any Year 12 student or Year 11 accelerant who has a problem with the timetable in terms of clashes, must see Mr Givney as a matter of urgency. Ronno’s RAve Esse quam videri Mr Ronaldson, Head of English (Special Programs) The Headmaster and staff are in the process of rethinking the School’s mission statement and in doing so have been discussing the significance of our motto. Courtesy of the magic of Wikipedia, I offer the following facts and then add some observations of my own. At one of the Headmaster’s recent staff breakfasts, called to facilitate the abovementioned discussion, I asked did anyone know where our motto originated. None of those present did, so a modicum of ‘research’ – the Internet makes research so easy that one hesitates to use the word – reveals the following: the phrase is found in Cicero and also in Sallust. ‘Esse quam videri is found in Cicero’s essay “On Friendship” (“De amicitia”, chapter 98). “Virtute enim ipsa non tam multi praediti esse quam videri volunt” (Few are those who wish to be endowed with virtue rather than to seem so). ‘Just a few years after Cicero, Sallust used the phrase in his “Bellum Catilinae” (54.6), writing that Cato the Younger “esse quam videri bonus malebat” (He preferred to be good rather than to seem so). ‘ Previous to both Romans, Aeschylus used a similar phrase in “Seven Against Thebes” at line 592, at which the scout (angelos) says of the seer/priest Amphiaraos: “ou gar dokein aristos, all’ einai theile” (his resolve is not to seem the best but in fact to be the best). Plato quoted this line in “Republic” (361b). ‘In “The Prince”, Niccolò Machiavelli reverses this phrase to videri quam esse (to seem rather than to be) with respect to how a ruler ought to act.’ Wikipedia, ‘esse quam videri’ Wikipedia lists something like 95 institutions and schools that have the motto as their own, including Darwin High School, Dubbo High School and Hermitage House at Geelong Grammar School. It is also the motto of North Carolina. We all know the obvious meaning: ‘it is better to be than seem to be’, and again, the moral seems obvious: ‘it is better to be honest/to have integrity than to be deceitful/ to be a hypocrite’. Yet these interpretations point to a question inherent in the motto: ‘to be… what exactly?’ We assume it means ‘to be honest’ or ‘to have integrity’ but these are assumptions. Cicero makes it clear that very few actually wish to be ‘endowed with virtue’; Sallust attaches the word ‘bonus’ – ‘good’. In Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’, Polonius makes the famous observation to his son: ‘to thine own self be true’ – and yet Polonius is a long winded, sycophantic buffoon. He is murdered while spying on the Crown Prince. So the question remains ‘to be – what?’ If, like Polonius, you are true to yourself ‘then it follows, as night follows day, thou canst not be false to any man’. But what if that empty moral category, one’s self, ‘being’, is evil or corrupt? Adolf Hitler was true to himself, so was Joseph Stalin. Hitler appeared to be a peacemaker: Joseph Chamberlain came back from Munich waving a worthless piece of paper with Hitler’s signature on it, proclaiming ‘peace in our time’. It was not long before the true ‘being’ of Hitler replaced the ‘seeming’. So, while there is undoubted virtue in honesty, the quality and nature of what one is honest about is surely equally if not more important. Then there is also the question of ‘seeming’. Plato wished to banish poets and artists from his Republic because they were two removes from the truth: there was God’s ideal truth; then the copy of this truth in ‘reality’; then the copy of this ‘reality’ in the work of the artist or poet. In other words he banned ‘seeming’. Wikipedia quotes Machiavelli as advocating seeming over being in his advice to Princes – deceptiveness is necessary in public policy. We see this every day in our modern politics; how often do politicians prevaricate, obfuscate, in short, lie? Good manners rely on ‘seeming’. I may suppress my true feelings or opinions in order not to hurt someone else’s. I may seem to be agreeable in order to survive and thrive in a particular social context. Plato’s idealism portrays our so-called reality as a form of seeming – to quote the King James Bible: ‘we see through a glass, darkly’. Many religions and philosophies see reality as a kind of dream or shadow, an illusion: a ‘seeming’. Existentialism sees ‘being’ as a void, nothingness. Civilisation is based on a striving to seem, teetering on the edge of the abyss of being. And Plato was right, surely: ‘seeming’ is of the essence in art. While the actor may strive for ‘truth’ in his or her performance, he or she is still acting, putting on a show, ‘seeming’. So while I admire and respect our School’s motto, I repeat – what is it that we want to ‘be’? And isn’t there are at least some merit in the practice of ‘seeming’? 4
Thursday, 30 May 2013 | Term 2, Week 5 FEATURE For the lads by Alexander Bogaty and Eddie Najm What most schools don’t teach – Code Yesterday I spoke to a twenty-year-old who told me of the time they first saw a touch screen at the age of fifteen. They said it was like magic. Today, a sixteen-year-old told me about their first encounter with a laptop at the age of ten. Tomorrow I will see another baby manipulating an iPhone before it can even say ‘iPhone.’ You now pay for your sausage roll and chocolate milk using a piece of coded plastic, lunch money no longer an incentive for the New Age cyber bully. And, just for your information, there is a full colour, high definition copy of this article on the portal. The world is changing fast, and it’s about time you heard about Code. A man named Lee Crocket (who addressed the Cranbrook Senior School staff at their Professional Development Day at the start of this term) has formulated a theory on the changing society of the twenty-first century. He believes that schools need to adapt their teaching methods to keep up with the exponential evolution of technology in recent years. In 1990 it was estimated that students could expect to have four to seven careers in their lifetime. Today, the American Labour Bureau of Statistics indicate that for our generation, we can expect not four to seven, but ten to seventeen careers by the time we are thirty-five. It is predicted that due to our rapidly changing economy, the top ten jobs that will be in demand ten years from now have not even been invented yet, therefore drastic changes in schooling must be made to prepare students to fulfil these potential new career paths. Code is one avenue we need to explore. ‘Everybody in this country should learn how to program a computer… because it teaches you how to think.’ – Bill Gates (net worth 66.3 billion). Coding is about using computer technology to solve human problems. Over the next ten years in America alone, there will be 1.4 million jobs in computer science, and only around 400,000 graduates will be qualified for those jobs. ‘Even if you want to become a race car driver, or play baseball or build a house, all of these things have been turned upside down by software’ – Drew Houston – created Dropbox (net worth 400 million, aged 30) Coders talk about the profound moment when they first made a computer – a lump of metal and plastic – spit out a recognisable piece of information, simply by typing instructions in sequence. Rather than being so impressed by a computer’s processing capacity, or the clarity of an iPhone’s retina display, we should give more credit to those whose imagination built the product. ‘Programing is the only thing in the world where you can sit down and make something completely new from scratch’ – Mark Zuckerberg – created Facebook (net worth 13.3 billion, aged 28) Coding is like playing Lego, only it is limitless in its potential. It allows the design of pieces on any scale; of any degree of intricacy. The combination of these pieces produces an interactive system, which can perform any and every task at the click of a button. The best coders are the ones who can structure their program to cater specifically for our needs and desires. ‘I first learned how to make a red circle and a green square appear on the screen’ - Elena Silenok – created Clothia (net worth 210 million, aged 31) The YouTube video – ‘What Most Schools Don’t Teach’ (directed by Lesley Chilcott) inspired this article – take a look at it. It explores some of the concepts described here and has an awesome segment on the reinvention of the Facebook office. Also on the video is a link to Code.org, a website which can teach you the basics of code. It’s really not as hard as you think. ‘The programmers of tomorrow are the wizards of the future’ – Gabe Newell – created Valve (net worth 1.5 billion). 5
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