Year 12 HSC Trial Examinations are underway, the official opening of the new Rawdon Middleton VC Sports Complex will take place on Wednesday followed by the South West Festival only a few days later. This wonderful new facility will be open for business on the Festival day; I would encourage you to come and take a tour of the facility sometime across the day. A variety of sport focused activities culminating in a high-level exhibition futsal game in the main stadium have been planned, This new complex marks a new phase of College life that will allow us to explore some exciting new initiatives, enhancing sporting opportunities to benefit our students and ultimately our wider community.
Regardless of all these busy activities just mentioned I am still amazed at all the ongoing activities happening in every corner of the College. A few days ago I took a walk across the College and in a short timeframe I saw musical items being prepared, wonderful timber creations being constructed, drama items enthusiastically being workshopped, essays being drafted and redrafted, speeches being prepared, new mathematical concepts being taught, commerce ideas being put into action and a whole range of activities used to engage and challenge students in their learning. Thomas Hassall Anglican College is far from boring, but it can be very challenging.
Our theme this term is focused on ‘learning’. Part of this theme is to consider the question, 'what makes an excellent learner?’ It is important to hear that the best learners are not those students that have the highest IQ or those that we typically describe as ‘Brainiacs’! Good learning can be very challenging; it requires discipline, perseverance a capacity to work through the disappointment of getting ‘things wrong’. That’s right, failure and difficulty are very important aspects of the learning process. If we never experience struggle and failure we may never develop the stickability required to become a resilient learner. Indeed, I will go so far to say that if we never struggle or come against a real challenge then we will not develop our full capacity to become ‘excellent learners’. Our ‘best learners’ are typically those students that have been prepared to work through the challenges and to overcome the obstacles. These same students have learnt how to deal with failure and develop skills and attitudes to build momentum towards mastery of difficult concepts or alternatively they have found ways to complete the ‘impossible’ task. Giving up is not an option for the best learners. History is marked by many such examples; Thomas Edison famously said, “I have gotten lots of results! I know several thousand things that won’t work!”. Edison was one of America’s greatest inventors and patented many ground breaking ideas including the electric light bulb.
As teachers or parents our role is to refrain from doing the task for the student, but instead to support and encourage students as they work through these challenges in their learning. We really appreciate your support in this process of training and practice and struggle and more practice towards mastery.
“Diligent hands will rule, but laziness ends in forced labour” Proverbs 12:24
