Celebrating Success - Bishop Thomas Grant School

Stars Poetry WeekMr Parchot writes:Thursday 4 October was designated National Poetry Day 2012,but here at BTG we did one better, holding a Poetry Week.Many staff as well as students got involved with a range of events,celebrating poetry and creative writing. Teachers were invited to submittheir favourite poems with an explanation about why they had chosenthem. Over fifty poems were submitted, reproduced as posters to festoonevery corridor in the school. Ms Bevans chose ‘The Road Not Taken’ byRobert Frost:Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,And sorrow I could not travel bothAnd be one traveller, long I stoodAnd looked down one as far I couldTo where it bent in the undergrowthFor Ms Bevans the message of the poem was: “I don’t have to follow thesame path as everyone else and it is good to take risks.” About six teachersselected ‘If’ by Rudyard Kipling which begins with the famous lines “Ifyou can keep your head when all about you / Are losing theirs..” and endswith ‘Yours is the Earth and everything that’s on it, / And – which is more –you’ll be a man my son!’.Mr Myton loves this poem because it tells us that “to be a success you haveto put yourself in a position where you can fail and that makes successeven sweeter”. Mrs Connolly finds the poem “beautiful and elegant” aswell as “inspirational and motivational, providing a set of rules for grownupliving”. I chose ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’ by Oscar Wilde:Yet each man kills the thing he lovesBy each let this be heard,Some do it with a bitter look,Some with a flattering word,The coward does it with a kiss,The brave man with a sword!Equal First Prize was awarded to Francis Read in Year 9 for‘Stars’ and to Ethan Laurent in Year 10 for ‘Cold Fascination’.Here is a verse from each poem:Stars by Francis ReadHe had a dream. Keen, brightEyes staring deep into the nightSky at the white blinks thatFlickered andBurst, sending shining sliversWaving across the dark blanketOf the raw night that whistled aBare tune.Cold Fascination by Ethan LaurentThe pure white scene is all I seeAnd the flurrying wind will findSnowflakes falling from high above begin to bury my feet;My cold fascination entices me and amazes my workingmind.Equal second places went to Romy Patrick in Year 8 for ‘Night’s Silver’and the poignant ‘A Star So Special’ by Gabriella Emery in Year 7:Night’s Silver by Romy PatrickBeacons of colour lighting the darknessGleaming silver studs in night’s raven black hairPearls suspended in shadow,Guiding the weary traveller.A Star So Special by Gabriella EmeryWe were told we were special,We were the selected few.We wore the Star of David,To show we were the Jews.First and second prize winners received WH Smith Vouchers of £20 and£15 respectively and seven other students received £10 Vouchers for theirpoems. Sarah Ritchie from Year 7 wrote ‘My Little Baby Ignatius’ whichmoved all of us:At the going down of the sunand in the morning,We will remember them.Mr Parchot writes:On Sunday the 11 November the Nation commemorated theend of the First World War in services of Remembranceacross the land. It is also a day when we remember thesacrifice of both combatants and civilians in wars thathave happened since then and wars, such as the conflict inAfghanistan and in Syria, which, sadly, are still ongoing.The Remembrance service at Bishop Thomas Grant School began withstudents entering the hall in sombre mood to the poignant strainsof Barber’s ‘Adagio for Strings’. This was followed a dance piece tomodernist music, ‘Different Trains’, presented by Year 7 students andchoreographed by Ms Keville. It depicted bodies colliding with oneanother and being pulled apart, symbolizing the fragmentation of humanlives that is wrought by war; it was aptly called ‘Chaos’.George Kyriacos delivered a dramatic and moving rendition of RupertBrooke’s ‘The Soldier’:If I should die think only this of me:That there’s some corner of a foreign fieldThat is forever England.It has become fashionable to dismiss this poem as patriotic nonsense butthere is an alternative reading, which some modern readers miss. Giventhe horrific scale of the loss of human life the poem can be seen as adialogue between the living and the dead, providing some consolation tothe bereaved, helping them come to terms with their loss, believing thattheir loved ones had not died in vain. Is that such a bad thing?We were then brought closer to the present day when Sam Woodham,Kianna Cummings and Martha Ewas presented a powerful reading ofa poem called ‘Vrbana Bridge’, which dramatises the story of a youngcouple who died in the siege of Sarajevo during the Balkans conflict inthe 1990s. Bosko was a Serb and a Christian, and Admira a Moslem.Both only twenty-five, and had been sweethearts since secondaryschool. They were betrayed and shot by a sniper as they tried to escapeover Vrbana Bridge and their bodies lay in an embrace for six daysbefore being removed by their families. A true modern day Romeo andJuliet, their “only love sprung from their only hate”.Towards the close of the assembly the school choir sang a hauntingmelody based on Wilfred Owen’s poem‘Greater Love’ which celebrates the manyacts of heroism and sacrifice that emergefrom extreme and horrific situationssuch as War. Let us contemplateOwen’s poetic words drawnfrom scripture, which readlike a prayer:Christ is literally in NoMan’s Land. There menoften hear his voice:“Greater Love hath noman than this, that aman lay down his lifefor a friend”.AmenThis poem is a favourite of mine because it reveals the feelings of a manwho had everything, wealth, fame, glamour, yet lost it all and so speaks tous about the tragedy of the human condition.Throughout Poetry Week poems were recited by teachers over thetannoy and each morning at staff briefing a colleague read out a favouritepoem. However the most important event in the week was the PoetryCompetition, open to all students in the school.The main theme was ‘Stars’, and we allowed this to be loosely interpreted.There were over one hundred and fifty entrants. Two evenings were givenover to poetry readings in the library. It was a very difficult and protractedprocess adjudicating the prize winners of the competition, but we finallycame to the following decision:My little twinkling starWhy did he have to die?Why did he have to die that night?I never said goodbye.On a lighter note we all enjoyed hugely Kacper Mielniczuk’s (Year 7)submission ‘Ball of Gas’ in which he addresses a star as if it is a friend.Hello Ball of Gas!We meet again,In the normal place,The starry, starry night.Thanks everybody, students and colleagues, who participated in PoetryWeek and made it such a successful event. Next year we plan to hold apoetry evening to which parents will be invited to listen to studentsreading their poems and to join us in celebrating the deep well ofcreativity here.Jane Eyre onScreenThe Editor of Nuntius, Mr Richard Wilcocks, is a pastchairman of the Brontë Society, which is based at Haworthin Yorkshire, at the nineteenth century parsonage where theBrontës once lived. He is particularly interested in film andtelevision versions of Charlotte Bronté’s great novel, and inNovember gave a talk on the subject illustrated by slides tosixth form students.Mia Wasikowska played Jane in the latest film version of Charlotte Brontë’s famous novel4 5