After the handover assembly on April 5th the new Sports Captain – Emily, will be running this blog. My new leadership team is raring to go for this next year and we hope to grow and improve the blog, so watch this space!
The Sports Leadership Team of 2019-2020:
Saskia: Rowing Rep
Lucy: Hockey Rep
Emily: Netball and Cricket Rep
Robbin: Gymnastics Rep
Izzy: Tennis Rep
Grace, Year 8, looks at why maths is important in everyday life, and what happens when it goes wrong.
Maths is integrated into our lives. Whether it’s telling the time or looking at our budget for the latest gadget that we want to buy, we all use maths. But sometimes we use it incorrectly.
One example of maths going wrong is when in 1995 Pepsi ran an advert where people could collect Pepsi points and trade them in for Pepsi-branded items. Points could be collected through purchasing Pepsi products, or through paying 10 cents per point. For example, a T-shirt was worth a mere 75 points whilst a leather jacket was worth 1,450 points.
To end their campaign, Pepsi stated that the Harrier Jet, which was promoted in their advert, could be bought for 7 million Pepsi points. At the time, each Harrier Jet cost the U.S. Marine Corps around $20 million. Knowing its worth, a man called John Leonard tried to cash it in. This was an extensive task with particular rules, all of which John followed. His amount totalled $700,008.50 which he put into an envelope with his attorneys to back the cheque! Pepsi initially refused his claim, but Leonard already had lawyers prepared to take his side and fight. The case involved a lot of discussion, but eventually, the judges sided with Pepsi, even though Leonard v PepsiCo, Inc. is now a part of legal history.
Sometimes maths goes wrong on a big scale. For example, the Russian shooting team in the 1908 Olympics left with no medals because they turned up nearly two weeks late as the 10th July in Russia, was the 23rd July in the UK. The Russians were using a different calendar.
Another example is of human confusion with maths. A UK lottery scratch card had to be taken off the market within a week due to players having problems with negative numbers. The card was called Cool Cash, and had a temperature printed on it. If you scratched a temperature lower than the target, you won. But lots of people playing didn’t understand negative numbers… “On one of my cards it said I had to find temperatures lower than -8. The numbers I had uncovered were -6 and -7 so I thought I had won, and so did the woman in the shop. But when she scanned the card, the machine said I hadn’t. I phoned Camelot and they fobbed me off with some story that -6 is higher, not lower, than -8, but I’m not having it.” These players didn’t know how negative numbers worked, so looked for the numbers that were usually lower when they were positive.
Maths is important in everyday lives as we all use it, sometimes without being aware of it. However, it is important that checks are made to ensure the correct figures and calculations are used. After all, our lives may depend on it.
Ms Katie Butler, Performing Arts Assistant, looks back to our recent Musical Theatre Concert here at WHS, as well as how we can engage different age groups in this popular form.
This year’s Musical Theatre Concert featured a selection of solos, duets and group numbers, with the very on-brand Wimbledon High theme of “Imagine”. This enabled us to tie numbers together through a common thread, while still allowing us to explore all sorts of different styles and stories. We hired in professional choreographer Lily Howkins to help create more specialised dance numbers, along with a brilliant three-piece band who really brought the music to life. This concert showcases the singing and dancing talents of girls across the senior school, providing a chance for Year 7s to perform with Sixth Formers, and for younger girls to have a taste of solo singing without the pressure of a whole show.
After Lilly and Emma kicked off the show with ‘Pure Imagination’ from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, we enjoyed Year 8’s spectacular ‘Revolting Children’ from Matilda, featuring ten girls stepping out of their sensible Wimbledon High personas and into a rebellious, anti-Trunchbull mob, with ties tied around their heads and hockey sticks as weapons. We featured more Year 8 talent in the upbeat, energetic Hollywood party number ‘Someone in the Crowd’ from La La Land, with Lauren, Amelia, Phoebe and Alyssa combining pitch-perfect vocals with challenging choreography to their usual high standard.
Another choreography highlight was the tap-toed delight that was ‘Singin’ in the Rain’, with Melody and Lizzy’s vocals combined with the brilliant tap skills of Jasmine and Shangavi. Musical theatre stalwart Erin gave a convincing performance as Evan Hansen, showing real resilience and deftly taking on various characters throughout the night. Sweeney Todd’s ‘By the Sea’ and ‘Seventeen’ from Heathers were presented together, as despite the different musical styles and the twenty-five years between their creation, they explore very similar themes of women trying to convince murderous men to live a normal life with them. For the latter, Erin was joined by Lizzie, who also showcased her fantastic vocal versatility in the contrasting ‘I Feel Pretty’. All in all, it was a wonderful celebration of dramatic skill and musicianship from the entire WHS community.
As a facilitator of these kinds of events, the challenge for me was to choose a programme that was varied, interesting, and age-appropriate, engaging all the girls. Appreciation of musical theatre, and indeed of all strands of the arts and storytelling deepens with age, maturity, and life experience, and personal development is particularly accelerated during these teenage years; it’s the reason that Year 11 can sob their way through Les Miserables, yet many Year 8s are twiddling their thumbs by ‘I Dreamed a Dream’, and I was keen to curate a concert that reflected this and provided something for everyone to enjoy.
While we had Year 12 Izzy performing the wistful ‘The Movie in My Mind’ from Miss Saigon, a ballad by a Thai showgirl during the Vietnam War dreaming of a better life, we also enjoyed Izzy from Year 8’s delicately beautiful rendition of ‘Jenny’s Piano Song’ from Howard Goodall’s little-known 2010 musical Love Story (an adaptation of the 1970 film), as well as Anna’s (Year 11) infectiously positive ‘I Can Hear the Bells’ from Hairspray.
The key to a successful programme is contrast – and so with powerhouse, belting performances like Anna’s and Eleni’s rendition of ‘Let Me Be Your Star’ from NBC’s Smash, we also had numbers like Anna’s (Year 13) genuine and engaging ‘I’m Not Afraid of Anything’ from Jason Robert Brown’s song cycle Songs for a New World, and Eleni’s other number, the vulnerable ‘When He Sees Me’ from Waitress, showing off her real versatility as an actress, and brilliant comic timing.
Other performances included the wittily staged ‘Show Off’ from The Drowsy Chaperone by Jasmine & Lilly in Year 12, and the always brilliant Musical Theatre Choir taking on an arrangement of Hamilton’s Helpless that even girls much older and more experienced would have found challenging. As Year 7 girls took to the stage with a lively Disney medley, featuring solos from Melina, Martha, Hannah and Sophia, it was clear that the future of musical theatre at Wimbledon High is in very safe hands. We ended the show with two more similar numbers: ‘The Life I Never Led’ from Sister Act and ‘Nothing Stops Another Day’ from Ghost, sensitively performed by Millie and Shangavi (Year 12) respectively, followed by a rousing ‘We’re All In This Together’ from the upcoming Year 9 & 10 production of High School Musical.
Having a concert solely dedicated to musical theatre, and particularly lots of different numbers from different shows, allows students to experiment with the differences between acting through song compared to acting through prose, and how despite the snobbery that often surrounds it, musical theatre absolutely provides as much opportunity to get stuck into interesting, complicated characters as straight theatre.
For next year’s concert, I’m keen to develop this further, delving into shows by writers like Sondheim that challenge these stereotypes better than anything else. As a writer of musical theatre myself, I’m particularly interested in using platforms like this to explore adolescent pastoral themes, and with shows like Dear Evan Hansen and Heathers featured, we were able to open up conversations about darker issues like mental health, bullying and violence in schools, performing songs from musicals that wouldn’t necessarily be appropriate as school productions, but that are absolutely worthy of attention and that many of the girls know and love.
I also hope that it introduced both cast and audience to some lesser-known shows, further fuelling their interest in and passion for musicals, and that it demonstrates the versatility of musical theatre as an art form, showing that it isn’t all jazz hands and happy endings, but can be a medium to explore all manner of themes, issues and musical styles.
We love this book by Bryony Mathews packed full of inspirational STEAM careers. Take a look to find about possible exciting careers from neuroscientist to civil engineer!
Take a look at this great competition. All you need to do is use your imagination and get drawing. Who knows what the future holds?
We are very proud of our Year 12 Engineering Education Scheme team who went to the ICBT STEM Festival at the BP Headquarters in Sunbury. They explained to the judges their design for an urban park structure, and all of the engineering considerations that they had made. They were delighted to be awarded the “Contribution to Business Award 2019”. Huge thanks to their mentors at Ramboll and to Saranya for all the support, and to BP for hosting the event. It was all fantastic practice for our future engineers!
We were very excited to run a Primary IET Faraday Challenge Day this week for teams from 6 different primary schools including Wimbledon High. We welcomed teams of 6 girls from Corpus Christi Catholic Primary, West Wimbledon Primary, The Study Prep, Wimbledon Chase Primary and Coombe Hill Juniors. The engineering challenge involved designing and making a prototype lighthouse keeper transfer system, and presenting their product to the other groups at the end of the day. Each team worked together to plan their initial ideas, develop their final idea, and then make, test and improve what they designed. The teams were all fantastic, demonstrating a great deal of creativity, imagination, scientific knowledge and resilience, in what was a rather demanding task! The teachers’ team also worked very hard and were very competitive!
At the end of the day, all of the schools were complimented on the standard of their work. Coombe Hill Juniors won the prize for innovation with their ambitious motorised pulley system. West Wimbledon had a fantastic winder device and Corpus Christi Catholic Primary School were full of creative ideas and worked incredibly well together, with their impressive project manager, Cami at the helm. Well done to all our future engineers!
It may have been raining rather a lot, but year 3 had a fabulous time carrying out some scientific field work on their residential trip to Juniper Hall. They worked really hard to think about the adaptations of the animals and plants in the various habitats and took part in a great range of activities. They set humane mammal traps and were very excited indeed to find a vole or two. The voles ran away very quickly, but not before we managed to get a good look at them. Many invertebrates were collected using sweep nets, sheet traps and pooters in the meadows and under the trees. We were amazed to find that our invertebrate colour predictions turned out to be correct. It was great fun to then go pond dipping and look at what we found under microscopes. Thank you so much to the Field Studies Council – it was an amazing trip! Year 3 will tell you which of the teachers had the best invertebrate “moves”!
The second ever GDST Junior Science Conference was held at the Royal Institution on May 2nd. It was an incredible privilege to take over such an iconic building for the day, which over the centuries has been the workplace of such scientific giants as Michael Faraday and Humphrey Davy. Year 5 pupils from the GDST schools entered via the Grand Staircase ready for a day full of scientific excitements. They worked in the L’Oreal lab looking at the chemistry and physics of colour, took part in a workshop about the perception of colour, heard a talk from the RI Heritage team about the significance of the building and it’s scientists, and completed a quiz as they explored the building and the museum. It was a truly special day for the year 5 girls as they made new friends and were inspired by all they saw and took part in. Parents joined us at the end of the day for the Science Spectacular which with all the explosions and demonstrations was definitely spectacular! Mrs Farrer also got a very special treat… she gave a presentation in the famous Faraday Lecture Theatre, entitled “What does a scientist look like?”. Certainly a very hard moment to beat for a science teacher!
Isabel, Y10, explores the comprehensibility of Dmitri Mendeleev’s traditional periodic table and whether it would be more accessible for younger children and enhance learning methods if it were flipped around by 180˚.
The Periodic Table is an important symbol in Chemistry and since Dmitri Mendeleev’s discovery of the Periodic system in 1869, it has remained the same for 150 years; but could turning it 180˚ make important concepts easier to understand, especially in teaching younger children?
This year has been announced the Year of (Mendeleev’s) Periodic Table which has become the generic way of arranging the elements. However, some scientists like Martyn Poliakoff and his team have started to question the comprehensibility of it. After extensive research, they decided to flip the traditional arrangement upside down, so that the information is more understandable and intuitively ordered.
The research team argues that this presentation is more helpful and has many benefits. Firstly, when the table is flipped the properties of the elements such as atomic mass and proton number now increase from bottom to top therefore making more numerical sense. Secondly, it represents the Aufbau principal more accurately, which states that electrons fill up ‘shells’ from low to high energy. Finally, when young children are trying to learn from the table, the more relevant elements to them are located towards the bottom of the table, making its use quicker and more accessible. Therefore, in lessons, students will not have to look all the way to the top of the table to be able to find the right information.
However, when I compared the two versions of the periodic table myself, I found that the traditional form of the table made more sense to me for many reasons. For example, in both situations I found my eyes drawn to the top row of elements, so it did not matter that the elements that I use the most were on the bottom row. However, this could be put down to a force of habit, so I also asked my 10-year-old brother to look at the two perspectives of the table and see where he looked. He immediately pointed to the top of both and when I asked him the reason he said that from top to bottom ‘is the way you read’ so the properties make more sense going down from top to bottom. He also seemed to prefer the traditional table, commenting that it was like a ‘pyramid’ in the way the numbers were arranged and was a much clearer way to display the elements.
Whilst some may argue that the arrangement of the table is more effective if it were upside down, for me the traditional version of the periodic table works just as well. Testing this principle to a larger group will allow different models to be tried to see if it makes understanding the periodic table easier for younger learners.
Martyn Poliakoff et al, Nat. Chem., 2019, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41557-019-0253-6
