News from Mr Grady
Hello everyone.
Well, following swiftly on the heels of World Book Day, (huge thanks to the English Department!) it is Science week. And whereas, with World Book Day I was on safe ground, you might be thinking that I’m on slightly less solid foundations if I want to talk about Science. In some ways you would be right, as my GCSE Science exams do feel quite some way off now. But on the other hand, given that I’ve spent several of these newsletters talking about the love of learning and discovery and the joy of curiosity, then Science, its separate disciplines of Biology, Chemistry and Physics (and scientific thinking and exploration) really is the subject for you!
As I stood watching Dr Brown do some unthinkable things to a Jelly Baby yesterday lunchtime, it was a joy to see the sheer pleasure taken, not just in the process of the scientific experimentation on Dr Brown’s face, but also the pleasure on the faces of the students (and on those of our technicians, Misters Roantree and Broderick!) as they made links to all the different things they’d learnt in Science to predict what was likely to happen, and after it had happened, explain why it had.
I didn’t know what would happen, or what the impact would be, but I was very aware that my response in the aftermath was “that smells just like Crème Brûlée.” I didn’t say it out loud, as I fear it would have been a complete betrayal of my working-class roots.
However: Just as we try and get our students to think not just about learning facts, but about making links between things, about applying what you’ve learned in different situations, I remembered that Brûlée means burning in French, that when you watch Chefs make it, they are crystallising the sugar sprinkled over a custard mixture, and that the reason the sugar burns is the glucose, and that’s what gives you the dark brown crisp topping. It reminded me that the more sugar you had in mixtures, the more careful you had to be about burning – again, without yesterday’s demonstration I would not have made the link that glucose being so high in energy levels would of course burn quickly, emitting huge amounts of heat and light. So, although I might not think of myself as a scientist, I had certainly been able to apply come scientific thinking! Something to bear in mind next time I’m making meringues.
Now, whereas my intellectual curiosity could cope with that level of Science – the EES (Engineering Education Scheme) projects students were taking to the Big Bang this week, were on a whole other level! Our students were presenting on a project (set them by GE) to come up with a method or to make a machine that would allow them to better measure the fillet radius on their steam turbine blades. I cannot even begin, in this short space, to try and explain this – but, the pleasure the students had taken in planning, researching and experimenting was absolutely clear in their presentations, and clearly impressed the judges. It makes me immensely proud of our Science department and the students themselves that they were not daunted by this task, but embraced it with an energy and an intellectual curiosity that was a pleasure to see.
Across Science week, there are a whole range of activities, demonstrations at lunch, (where we try, unsuccessfully, to keep a lid on Miss Gospel’s love of fire and explosions) quizzes, a science lecture for Year 7 on Friday, as well as our own students visiting local primary and Secondary schools to talk about Science at school, so having got dressed up to celebrate our love of and the importance of reading last week, we find ourselves getting blown up this week in the name of that most important of educational outlooks: Curiosity and the joy of exploration.
Mr Grady