Senior School Report

by Director of the Senior School, Mr Hamish McCrum

Last week we held our parent/teacher/student interviews.  I encourage our students to use the feedback positively from these interviews and to take up the challenge to increase or decrease particular behaviours so as to improve their learning and ultimately themselves.  Should you have been unable to attend or obtain a meeting with a teacher and wish more feedback than you can currently obtain from PAM, please send the teacher an email seeking further clarification or suggestions for improvement.

When students don’t perform particularly well on a task, it is important how they react and are encouraged to react.  While it might feel good in the short term to blame somebody else or a set of circumstances, those who recover the best from a poor result take ownership and view the result as a valid assessment of where they are now, and take from it what they will need to do to improve.  It remains important to focus on the effort students are making; if we focus too heavily on the results many students will only choose easy tasks/subjects so they will get good marks and not “look stupid”.  They will then miss out on the growth and development that a more challenging subject will give them.  (Within reason – students do need to be realistic e.g. not take on Year 12 Chemistry if they have only been able to achieve 40% on the Year 11 exam.)

The football is back with us which is great.  However, with every football telecast comes a bombardment of betting advertisements.  Their target market includes our students.  Please spend a minute with your sons considering how the cost of these expensive prime time ads are paid for by these gambling companies.  Some individual gamblers win and lose each week, but the gambling companies win every week.  The mobile phone can easily have gambling apps added to it and these apps will keep many young men poor from their teens until who knows when, and will destroy marriages and families.  These apps are designed to be addictive. People with betting apps who go a few weeks without making a bet receive special deals and “free money” to get them started again, sent to their phone.  The betting agencies have spent big on advertising, through television, google and paying commentators to spruik for them.  The hundreds of millions they have spent they get back and more from the ordinary people they have sucked in.  Please do your son a favour.  If he is over 13, check his phone for gambling apps, get him to close his accounts down.  He does not want to be the sucker of the betting agencies from now into his thirties.  Better luck next time Blues, at least they don’t encourage me to bet on them.