From the Head of Secondary 28.09.2019

On Wednesday we had our first Leadership Assembly of the year and we celebrated all of our Secondary students who have been elected or who have volunteered to participate in the various committees and teams this year. In preparation for the assembly some students answered the question “What is leadership?” There were some recurring themes in their answers and it was noticeable that students did not shy away from the idea that sometimes a leader had to be the one to make difficult decisions, hopefully bringing a whole team together for a shared common purpose. Jimin in Year 12 had an original idea when she said that “being a leader is like being the spine of a book”…..interesting imagery that certainly struck a chord with the student body. We are looking forward to a wonderfully productive year with all of our student leaders: Student Council, Charity Committee, Eco Warriors, Library Cadets, House Captains and Vice House Captains and Prefects.

Congratulations to Dean, Cassidy and Dania. They will be leading three teams of prefects [more news about that in next week’s newsletter].

House Captains and Vice House Captains

Our newly selected House Captains and Vice House Captains also came up to wild applause to receive their badges in the assembly.

We can expect a truly exciting year with lots of fun and competitive activities organized by our House Captains and Vice House Captains. We mustn’t forget though that all of our teams will work together, especially on large whole school events and also with Primary leaders.

Eco-Warriors 

We were also introduced to our Eco Warriors in the assembly: 

Hope Wu 

Maxine Moore 

Tiggi Mornington-Sanford 

Celeste Chung 

Christian Wiesenreiter

Mrs Davis reminded us that we all have a responsibility to help save the planet. We mostly know what we can do but sometimes we simply forget. The Eco Warrior team will be there to remind us! 

A few reminders……

International Day! We are all looking forward to next Thursday and International Day, especially the parade, the food and the fun and games. We would like as many Secondary students as possible to wear national dress or perhaps their country’s colours. School will finish at 2pm on that day for all and ECAs will be cancelled, so please make arrangements to pick up your child earlier than usual. 

Student emails. All students now have a KIS email and they all need to get into the habit of regularly checking it for important message, perhaps from their teachers. Once a day would be a good habit to get into so we do ask parents to remind their children to do this. Many thanks for your support.

Lateness. We do have a few students who are regularly late for school. All Secondary students should be within the premises by 7.40am. Those who arrive late have to sign in twice, at the Security gate and also at the Secondary office. There is rarely a good reason for being late for school and it is important that students learn the importance of punctuality at this stage of their lives before they venture out into the wider world.

Year 10 discover a mathematical pattern, but not the way they thought they would …

During a fairly routine Y10 maths lesson this week on compound interest calculations, students were given the following sequence and asked to find the 10th term:

1804,  1930, 1960,  1974, 1987, 1999,  2011 ……………

Students knew straight away that the above numbers are actually dates, so the hunt was on to find their significance, but a certain bewilderment prevailed. Blind alleys were traversed, red herrings were offered, but we finally realised that they are the dates when the world population passed landmark values of 1 billion, 2, billion, 3 billion and so on. Students then understood that the original question was really asking for the date when the world population would reach 10 billion.

Here is where that routine lesson on compound interest proved its worth! If we can use this fairly straightforward formula

A = P(1 + r/100)T

to calculate how much money we’ll have in the bank some years in the future, surely we can adapt that formula to model the population of the planet?

Students immediately suggested that we need the current population to go where the P is, and the current annual population growth rate to go where the r is in the formula. We got these values (7.73 billion, and 1.08% respectively) from what we believe to be a reliable website, fired up the calculators and came up with the answer 2043. 

That reliable website I mentioned is actually predicting 2057 for the 10 billion landmark, largely because the annual growth rate is falling (if we repeat the calculation in a couple of years’ time, we might use 1.07% rather than 1.08%, and that makes a considerable difference, thanks to the compounding process). 

Students were, rightly, very pleased with themselves – they had adapted their knowledge quite skilfully in order to solve a different problem. However, when they realised that they will be sharing the planet with 10 billion other people by the time they are in their forties, a different type of bewilderment took over….

Mr Davis 

Head of Secondary Maths