Year 7 have been playing with light and colour in the STEAM space to capture intriguing and colourful photos to launch their art project. The girls have been explaining their photographs using their physics knowledge and experimenting to find out which equipment might help them create fabulous images. A great example of STEAM injecting some physics into art and some art into physics!
A new theatre at the Natural History Museum has been unveiled for the award-winning drama The Wider Earth.
Join 22-year-old Charles Darwin on HMS Beagle’s daring voyage to the far side of the world, and discover the gripping story behind one of the most important discoveries in history. Find out more here.
During Tomorrow’s Engineers Week junior and senior girls found out more about careers in engineering. The special #EngineerOnAMission resources profiling engineers can be found here. One activity that took place during the week to raise the profile of the variety of engineering careers was #Lottieontour. STEM Lottie dolls could be seen engineering all around the country via social media. The Wimbledon High Lottie dolls could be seen engineering with mentors from Ramboll with the year 12 EES project, involved in some transport engineering with year 6 on a trip to Westminster Abbey, as well as in many other engineering exploits during the week!
Sophie Robertshaw, music teacher at Wimbledon High School, looks into the forms of address for female staff.
There are a huge variety of ways of addressing a woman in a school context. By contrast, men are addressed only as Mr or Sir. Having worked with children as a teacher and music tutor since I was a teenager, over the years I have been addressed in a wide variety of ways, ranging from a casual first name greeting to the somewhat unexpected “ma’am” (rhyming with palm).
I would expect adult learners to address me by my first name – anything else would seem condescending. However, in a school context, I feel that it is important for pupils to use a more formal mode of address as I believe it promotes discipline and respect for those in authority; skills which are in vital in success within a workplace. This brings me to the issue of what exactly I should be called in a professional context – am I a Miss, Mrs or Ms? Or perhaps something else entirely?
The problem is that all these traditional titles have particular connotations about my marital status, as Dr Amy Louise Erickson of Cambridge University explains: “The ubiquitous forms of address for women ‘Mrs’ and ‘Miss’ are both abbreviations of ‘mistress’. ‘Mrs’ did not describe a married woman: it described a woman who governed subjects (i.e., employees or servants or apprentices) or a woman who was skilled or who taught. It described a social, rather than a marital status.” However, unlike Mrs, which has changed from a social to a marital meaning over time, Miss always indicated an unmarried woman.
Why does this matter? As a young, recently qualified teacher I feel that it is unnecessary for my pupils and their parents to know whether I am married or not. My marital status has absolutely no impact on my ability to teach. As a “Miss” I occasionally feel that there can be negative connotations in the minds of some students and parents – that I am less experienced, less mature, less qualified. A “Mrs” on the other hand conjures images perhaps of an older woman, with children of her own, who has greater experience and expertise and is therefore an inherently better teacher than her unmarried childless counterpart. “Ms” is to my mind an unsatisfactory halfway house.
So, what then is the solution? Should an address include education and qualifications details? Should the whole system of Mrs, Ms or Miss be replaced? Or expanded in favour of gender-neutral titles in support of equal rights not just for females, but individuals within the LGBTQ+ community?
Back in 2017, Stuart Barette, a transgender project manager at HSBC, announced the expansion of gender-neutral titles within their banking systems to include “Ind” (individual meaning free of gender), and “Mre” (mystery). An article published in the Independent in March 2017 goes on to explain that within the title section, “Mx” is listed as an option, but that the bank will also allow nine other new titles, including “M”, “Misc”, “Msr”, “Myr” and “Sai”.
Whatever the answer, Wimbledon High School has high aspirations for all its students to become highly educated, confident and articulate young women, capable of great success in their career and life choices and they should not find themselves limited in any way by the title society chooses to address them by.
Congratulations to Leslie in Year 12 for winning the Nancy Rothwell Award in the 15 – 18 age category, for her stunning anatomical drawing of a dromedary camel.
Read the full story on the Royal Society of Biology website here, and do pop up to the Biology corridor to see her fantastic drawing in all its glory!
Anna (Year 13) looks back to our earliest beginnings as a civilisation in the Indo-European world, discovering that there is only one route to the reconstruction of Indo-European culture that offers any hope of reliability and that is language.
Swedish, Ukrainian, Punjabi, and Italian. To many of us, these languages are as different and distinct as they come. But it has been discovered that, in the same way that dogs, sheep and pandas have a common ancestor, languages can also be traced back to a common tongue. Thus, Dutch is not merely a bizarrely misspelled version of English and there is more to it than our languages simply being pervaded by the process of Latin words being imported into native dialects in the Middle Ages.
In the twelfth century, an Icelandic scholar concluded that Englishmen and Icelanders ‘are of one tongue, even though one of the two [tongues] has been changed greatly, or both somewhat.’ He went on to say that the two languages had ‘previously parted or branched off from one and the same tongue’. Thus, he noticed the common genetic inheritance of our languages, and coined the model of a tree of related languages which later came to dominate how we look at the evolution of the Indo-European languages. We call this ancestral language Proto-Indo-European, a language spoken by the ancestors of much of Europe and Asia between approximately 4,500 and 2,500 B.C.
The Indo European Family Tree
But what actually is it? Well, let me start simply. Consider the following words: pedis, ποδος (pronounced ‘podos’), pada, foot. They all mean the same thing (foot) In Latin, Ancient Greek, Sanskrit and English respectively. You will notice, I hope, the remarkable similarity between the first three words. English, on the other hand, sticks out slightly. Yet, it has exactly the same root as the other three. If I were to go back to one of the earliest forms of Germanic English, Gothic, you may perhaps notice a closer similarity: fotus. Over time, a pattern emerges: it is evident that the letter p correlates to an f and a letter d to a t. This is just one example of many: it is these sound laws that led Jacob Grimm to develop his law.
Grimm’s law is a set of statements named after Jacob Grimm which points out the prominent correlations between the Germanic and other Indo-European languages. Certainly, single words may be borrowed from a language (like the use of the words cliché, from the French, or magnum opus, from Latin), but it is extremely unlikely that an entire grammatical system would be. Therefore, the similarities between modern Indo-European languages can be explained as a result of a single ancestral language devolving into its various daughter languages. And although we can never know what it looked like, we can know what it sounded like. This is because, using Grimm’s Law, we can construct an entire language, not only individual words, but also sentences and even stories.
In 1868, German linguist August Schleicher used reconstructed Proto-Indo-European vocabulary to create a fable in order to hear some approximation of PIE. Called “The Sheep and the Horses”, the short parable tells the story of a shorn sheep who encounters a group of unpleasant horses. As linguists have continued to discover more about PIE, this sonic experiment continues, and the fable is periodically updated to reflect the most current understanding of how this extinct language would have sounded when it was spoken some 6,000 years ago. Since there is considerable disagreement among scholars about PIE, no single version can be considered definitive: Andrew Byrd, a University of Kentucky linguist, joked that the only way we could know for sure what it sounded like is if we had a time machine.
The earliest version read as follows:
(The audio of a later version, read by Andrew Byrd can be found at the following link: https://soundcloud.com/archaeologymag/sheep-and-horses)
Here is the fable in English translation:
Though seemingly nonsensical, it is definitely exciting, and when you take a metaphorical microscope to it, you can notice similarities in words and grammar, particularly that of Latin and Ancient Greek. What is the point, though, in reconstructing a language no longer spoken?
Firstly, the world wouldn’t be what it is today had it not been for the Indo-Europeans. If you’re reading this article, chances are that your first language is an Indo-European language, and it’s also very likely that all of the languages you speak are Indo-European languages. Given how powerfully language shapes the range of thoughts available for us to think, this fact exerts no small influence on our outlook on life and therefore, by extension, on our actions.
Secondly though, as a society, we are fascinated by our history, perhaps because examining our roots (to continue the tree metaphor) can help us understand where we may be headed. Although many archaeologists are hesitant to trust linguistic data, by gaining an insight into the language of the PIE world, we can make inferences about their culture and in turn learn more about our own. One such example of this is Hartwick College archaeologist David Anthony’s discovery of a mass of sacrificed dog and wolf bones in the Russian steppes. By consulting historical linguistics and ancient literary traditions to better understand the archaeological record, he and his team found that historical linguists and mythologists have long linked dog sacrifice to an important ancient Indo-European tradition, the roving youthful war band (known as a ‘koryos’ in reconstructed PIE). This tradition, which involved young men becoming warriors in a winter sacrificial ceremony, could help explain why Indo-European languages spread so successfully. Previous generations of scholars imagined hordes of Indo-Europeans on chariots spreading their languages across Europe and Asia by the point of the sword. But Anthony thinks Indo-European spread instead by way of widespread imitation of Indo-European customs, which included, for example, feasting to establish strong social networks. The koryos could have simply been one more feature of Indo-European life that other people admired and adopted, along with the languages themselves. We can learn about the customs of our prehistoric ancestors and so Indo-European studies is relevant because as powerfully as it has influenced our modern social structure and thought, there are also many ways in which the Indo-European worldview is strikingly different from our own. Studying it enables you to have that many more perspectives to draw from in creating your own worldview.
National Historical Museum Stockholm: A bronze Viking plate from the 6th century A.D. depicts a helmeted figure who may be the god Odin dancing with a warrior wearing a wolf mask.
A huge well done to our year 8 team that represented Wimbledon High School in the IET Faraday Challenge Day 2018. Maria, Zoe, Maddie, Cordelia, Priya and Alisha competed against teams from Tolworth Girls’ School and Hollyfield School to creatively solve a problem posed to them by the challenge day leader. As other schools are yet to compete in the challenge the exact nature of the task is top secret, but it was all to do with the James Webb Telescope. Well done to all involved – it was a fabulous day and a great opportunity to work with girls from other schools and develop teamwork and problem solving skills.
The Natural History Museum is now hosting the Wildlife Photographer of the year exhibition. Find out all about it here.
Since October a group of Wimbledon High year 12 students have been joined by students from Tiffin Girls’ School to take part in the exciting Twinkle ORBYTS project. We have been working with scientists from UCL and Imperial College to explore exoplanets and their atmospheres. It has been fascinating to find out what is involved in scientific research, work alongside the space scientists, and to have the opportunity to gather data using robotic telescopes from around the world. On 28th March students from both schools the will visit UCL to present their project findings to the UCL Physics department and the other Twinkle schools. Watch this space to find out what they discover! Huge thanks to Dr Will Dunn for all his encouragement and to Jana and Sian, our visiting space scientists.
