the Gryphon - Issue 2

t h e
G R Y P H O N
Issue N o 02
Making
meaning

‘WOULD YOU
TELL ME PLEASE
WHICH WAY I
OUGHT TO GO
FROM HERE?’
12

Welcome
Issue N o 02
SPRING 2021
Welcome to the Spring edition
of our termly chapbook, the
Gryphon. We hope you enjoy
musing over this selection
of short essays penned
by our staff and students
about educational topics
that inspire them.
2
THE MAP IS NOT THE
TERRITORY
Charting paths and journeys to
uncover meaning, place and time.
4
At Embley every child is unique
and deserves the recognition
of that as they grow. We help
them achieve their ambitions,
encourage belief in oneself while
being mindful that the greatest
happiness is achieved by being
compassionate to others.
MAPPING THE WAVES
A tracking device for beyond
our sailing fleet.
6
CLOSING THE VOCABULARY GAP
Words, punctuation and paragraphs;
a fascination for language.
Embley Park, Romsey,
Hampshire SO51 6ZE
Main switchboard:
+44 (0) 1794 512206
Email: info@embley.org.uk
www.embley.org.uk
8
CAPABLE AND WHOLE
Using coaching to better
understand ourselves.
10
WELL ON THE WAY T O
INEXISTENCE, AS TO
ZERO THE INFINITE
The power of Beckett.
Carbon balanced print is produced by a carbon
balanced printer on carbon balanced paper.
This edition of the Gryphon:
73kg of carbon balanced & 51m 2 of land protected.
12
STATE OF MIND
Flags, statues and meaning.
1

The map
is not the
territory
BY CLIFF CANNING,
HEADMASTER
You will know the story of a
traveller in Kerry who stopped to ask
a local for directions; having mused
for a moment on the question the
traveller was told: “Well if I was you,
I wouldn’t start from here.”
The tourist and Alice are both lost but
perhaps the wisdom of the local echoes
some ideas shared by the grinning cat
with Alice:
“Would you tell me please which way I ought
to go from here?
That depends a good deal on where you want
to get to.”
It seems that both our protagonists are
looking for direction, the direction usually
afforded by a map, but this creates a concern.
The cartographic representation shares with
us nothing of the travails of travel.
The map is not the territory. A straightforward
enough proposition you might think and
perhaps banal? But I wonder? Korzybski had
an appreciation of a subtlety that imbues
this Gryphon and takes forward Alice’s
curiosity from issue one. The looking glass
becomes curiouser the more we gaze into it.
This Gryphon explores the relationship
between what we write or draw, effectively
the signs we make (the scratching and
scribbling) with the sense we make of them.
You reader are busily decoding the letters or
symbols I write; luckily for you type makes my
scratching intelligible if not comprehensible.
The arrangement of letters into words makes
thought intelligible. There is a school of
thinking that suggests this link is so profound
that one cannot think a thought for which
there is no word. We might come back to this
later or not at all.
If we consider the development of vocabulary,
the more words children have the more
thoughts they can entertain. In a real
sense their horizons expand and their
consciousness develops. They have the facility
to play with ideas and concepts that may
well be unthinkable to them without this
language - or at least allows them to encode
2

t h e
G R Y P H O N
their thinking such that others may make
sense of it. If words function as vehicles for
thinking then the more robust and expansive
our vocabulary the more that is thinkable
and therefore knowable to us as humans.
Language development allows children the
most effective vehicle not only to map the
territory of what is thinkable but to actually
cross it in real time.
Just as you will read later, Jack’s tracking
project allows us to plot and navigate. It is
not a representation of the experience of the
Solent chop nor of the biting wind, it is an
approximation of place and time, the map is
not the territory. This is surely something he
has in common with Beckett?
The artificial territory of the stage suggests
an aperture through which we can examine,
explore and develop what it means to be
human. Books may be a mighty bloodless
substitute for life, but they provide a space
wherein life might be considered, priorities
set out and ideas tested if not for veracity,
then authenticity. In “zeroing the infinite”
by emptying the stage and reducing (or
enriching depending on your perspective)
performance to an interplay of words and
character, is he not refining the map? Is he
not replicating the essentials? Stripped of
cultural context, of the baggage of place and
the burden of historical influence or bias, he
is extemporising the essence of our condition.
The heavy and weary weight of historical
significance has recently been played out
through the very public display of antipathy
toward the monuments and iconography of
the past. Serious and compelling questions
are to be raised about our flag waving and the
true colour of what this level of representation
means for today. No one can look on without
interest as statues in the American south and
along Bristol’s quays are deconstructed. The
significance they celebrate is now rejected.
“Out out brief candle…” Macbeth ruminates
on the frailty we are all heir to. Faulkner
picked up on the “...sound and fury” in his
retelling of the demise of an American family.
All things pass, this too will pass. There are
two ideas here. The transience of misfortune
should allow us to hold very gently the
travails of this day, but so too must it caution
us against the arrogant possession of success
or contingent truths held not for their own
sake but that of contemporary convenience:
all things pass. You might be forgiven for
then asking what is it that remains? If all our
yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty
death, is Shakespeare right? Is life:
“a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”
The reality is that no one finds the answer for
everyone. The interplay between individuals
and the questioning that characterises
the most effective coaching allows us the
opportunity to make sense of our own
experience and to set our own goals. What do
the signs and symbols that we build our lives
around really signify? In the juxtaposition
of language and meaning, in its surrealism,
Alice challenges us to be authentic, to see the
relationship between the world and things
and thereby to be the best version of ourselves.
So where do we want to get to? If the
destination is a life well-lived, the cat is
right and wrong at the same time (apologies
to Schrödinger): it may not matter which
way you go, but how you cover the ground
does matter and matters most. Regardless
of our GPS, whatever tracking device we
determine, the map is still not the territory,
but it and they offer direction, points on the
compass, cartographic landmarks. They don’t
describe the nature of the journey, only the
individual traveller experiences that. The
destination is defined and in fact conditioned
by how we travel, the signs and symbols are
only meaningful representations when our
destination is embodied in our journey. There
is no map for that territory.
E: headmaster@embley.org.uk
3

MAPPING
THE WAVES
Captain of Sailing at Embley and
Sixth Form student, Jack, explains why
he’s developing a tracking device for the
school’s sailing boats for his EPQ.
4

t h e
G R Y P H O N
The Extended Project Qualification (EPQ)
is a qualification that Sixth Form students
can choose to take in addition to A Levels,
usually just for one year, making it equivalent
to half an A Level. You work on an independent
project unrelated to your other studies, that
can be in the form of a design, performance,
report, dissertation or artefact. Currently, I am
four months into my project and have chosen
to do the latter, an artefact.
The basis of my project is to research how
boats can be tracked, to analyse and evaluate
different trackers, and then install
the tracker that best suits
our needs on one of our
keelboats which can
display live data on the
school website. The
project came about
from my passion for
keelboat sailing, which
Embley introduced me
to a couple of years
ago. Having started
on Thursday afternoons
during my Games sessions
just for fun, I’ve now moved on to
the keelboat race team, competing in the 2019
Round the Island Race and have recently taken
on the role of Captain of Sailing at Embley. I
also love programming, so why not combine
the two for my EPQ?
But why install a tracker on one of our keelboats
- what’s the point? I believe there are many
benefits to this, not only to the keelboat race
team but to the wider school and community.
It’s undeniable how useful a GPS tracker,
plotting to a map, can be to analyse the
performance of a sail. Let’s say we were sailing
King George, one of our Etchell 22s, from
Embley’s base at Lymington to Cowes on the
Isle of Wight at high water. This isn’t ideal as
the tide is flowing at almost two knots against
us out of the Solent. If we were cruising at six
knots through water, that’s only four knots
over ground, due to the tidal streams flowing
against us. A journey that would normally take
two to three hours has instead taken three to
four hours. We can compare our route recorded
by the GPS tracker to tidal stream maps that
allow us to see where water is flowing and at
what speed at any given time. From this, we
can opt to hug the northern coast of the Isle
of Wight, as there is very little tidal flow
there, if we were to sail from
Lymington to Cowes at high
water again.
It’s not just students
in the keelboat race
team who can benefit
from this. Parents of
students who sail on
the school’s keelboats
can track where their
children are in real-time
whilst they are out on the
water. It also offers an insight
into how seriously we take keelboat
sailing at Embley, and hopefully will attract
current students who haven’t tried keelboat
sailing before to give it a go! The installation
of a GPS tracker and the subsequent inclusion
on the school website helps to make parents
of young sailors feel more included in the
keelboat sailing programme and makes it
seem like a more worthwhile programme to be
involved with.
So, when the next keelboat sailing season
comes round, take a look at the live tracker on
the school website (not available yet) whenever
your child is enjoying their time aboard one of
our keelboats, out on the water!
5

Closing
the
vocabulary
gap
Language excites me.
Semi colons are powerful.
Paragraphs create drama.
The world of reading
and writing is one which
I have been fascinated
by from a young age,
explains Sheina Wright,
Head of Prep.

t h e
G R Y P H O N
From refusing to get out of the car, when
I was reaching the end of The Twits, to
excitedly scribbling notes about the symbolism
of weather in my copy of Wuthering Heights.
Books and reading make me happy.
My dad adores books and passed that love on
to me. Vocabulary, therefore, was prioritised
and part of my world from a very young
age at home as well as beyond the school
gates. Vocabulary is learned
implicitly and incidentally
as well as explicitly and the
vocabulary gap can appear
from a young age. Unless
addressed it begins to widen,
and in turn, so does the
attainment gap.
In ‘Closing the Vocabulary
Gap’, Alex Quigley explores
the challenges that the
vocabulary gap presents and
ways to address it. His writing
has underpinned some of my
thoughts in this article. He
asks: What is the percentage of words known
in a text to ensure reading comprehension
- 50% 65% 80% or 95%? It is a massive 95%, just
one example of the importance of cultivating
and developing vocabulary growth.
Literacy is everyone’s responsibility. Being
word poor can impact on a child’s learning
across the curriculum, throughout school.
An ability to break down questions and
understand key vocabulary is a skill required
in ALL subjects.
Let’s use this History question as an example:
A tower in the inner part of a castle where
stores were usually kept and where defenders
would retreat to as a last resort was called…?
Literacy is
everyone’s
responsibility.
Being word poor
can impact
on a child’s
learning across
the curriculum,
throughout school.
This is a literal question which requires a
one word answer. However, if pupils don’t
understand ‘defenders’, ‘retreat’ or ‘resort’ then
they can’t answer the question.
In Mathematics children can come across
the same issue in problem solving questions.
These can be vocabulary rich multi step
problems, which rely on an ability to break
down a question before you’ve even begun to
figure out how to apply your
maths skills.
So how do we improve
this vocabulary deficit
as teachers. Across the
subjects we make sure that
vocabulary is ‘taught not
just caught’. It is planned
in and explicitly taught. We
use diverse vocabulary in
our talk. We value it and
use a structured approach
and academic language.
Alongside this we encourage
independent reading of
quality texts, so that children can experience
more sophisticated sentence structure and
more complex vocabulary.
The explicit teaching of vocabulary helps
to offer children strategies so that they can
increasingly unlock more challenging texts
and therefore gain pleasure from reading texts
which will make them word rich.
So next time you are studying a subject
in school or are hard at work consider the
language of your subject, discuss it with those
around you or when you get home. Make a
conscious decision to be word rich and mind
that vocabulary gap.
E: sheina.wright@embley.org.uk
7

CAPABLE
&
WHOLE
8

t h e
G R Y P H O N
Capable and whole. It is what we
all want to be, isn’t it? Moreover, it
is how we all want to feel. Therein
lies the premise for coaching,
suggests Rebecca Thomas-Snell,
Director of Sixth Form.
Despite what every American rom-com
may try to have us believe, no one
knows you better than you know yourself.
We humans are funny beasts and every day
collect feelings and views like tiny trinkets
that we then surround ourselves with. If
we were to explore this through cognitive
science, we may delve into the world of
emotional schema with the ‘slot-filler
structures’ (Seel, 2012) exploring why and
how we form our opinions on people and
events. However, coaching diverges from this
fixed mindset and it centres on working out
who you are: what is fundamental to the root
of you? Where do your values lie? What does
successful look like? And, ultimately, what
shape does happiness take for you?
We are adaptable and able to change (though
these would have made less catchy lyrics for
Gloria Gayner and Shirley Bassey). Coaching
holds a mirror up to what we do well and
what we need to be more open to. Being
actively cognisant of our strengths and
weaknesses can help us to stretch ourselves
and better understand our situational
behaviour. Simultaneously, it can help us
to understand who we are beyond other
people’s perceptions.
The equation related to coaching is
Event + Behaviour = Result. Rarely can we
control all aspects of an event, but we can
control our behaviour; therefore, we do have
control over the outcome. Of course, there
will be situations which are challenging,
upsetting, or even downright unfair; but if
we are able to use this equation, we can stop
ourselves from feeling disempowered or
disenfranchised.
Coaching is a tricky word which can polarise
groups. Some may see it as something set
aside only for the sports field, or it may
raise images of inspiring slogans plastered
across walls that lack any form of substance.
The reality is quite different: the reality
empowers us to better understand ourselves
and to make pragmatic, evidence-based
decisions.
E:rebecca.thomas-snell@embley.org.uk
9
3

Well on the way
to inexistence,
as to zero the
infinite
Samuel Beckett is my favourite playwright,
writes Elaine Morgan, Assistant Head
Co-curricular and Head of Drama.
10

t h e
G R Y P H O N
once set out to try and articulate what it is
I that I love about Beckett’s plays and why they
have such a profound effect on me.
Beckett explores cosmology and ontology in
a unique way. He eliminates external factors,
fragments the self, de-territorialises the world
of his plays and pushes all the time closer to
inexistence in order to explore the nature of
existence.
His characters and worlds are ‘well on the
way to inexistence’. And this is his means of
knowing more: ‘as to zero the infinite’. I feel
that this quote encapsulates Beckett’s creation
of theatre because zero has no quantity and can
be a factor that negates something, which is
what Beckett does to the external influences in
his plays. And this leads him to the infinite, to
all the possibilities in the universe.
Beckett explores and intensifies the relationship
between character and spectator by creating
characters that have within them the need to
be perceived in order to exist, and giving the
spectator the power to bestow existence upon
them, by perceiving them, which is an idea
Beckett derived from Berkeley’s philosophy, ‘to
be is to be perceived’.
By fragmenting the self of his characters,
Beckett breaks down body and mortality,
mind and voice - driving his characters towards
inexistence, and through this the very essence
and truth of the character prevails.
Mirroring the creation of his disembodied
characters, Beckett de-territorialises the worlds
of his plays, thus offering more freedom to
explore metaphysically the boundaries and
freedoms within space and time. The thinking
behind cosmology is that the world is a result
of all the phenomena of space and time. In
most theatrical settings, space and time are
harnessed and defined in terms of a given
territory - the where and the when in which
it occurs. By ‘de-territorialising’ his theatrical
settings, Beckett breaks down the limitations
of territory and enters a place where he can
explore space and time beyond these limits and
in terms of the universe rather than the world.
Beckett’s minimalistic theatrical style is his
trademark. Instead of adding to his worlds in an
attempt to find out more, he reduces all that can
be reduced. From Waiting for Godot onwards,
he has never specified any setting for his plays
and no exact location could ever be determined
from the texts, due to the unspecified realms in
which they are set.
Though Beckett removes the limitations of
territory, in terms of space and time, there is one
element of territory that he doesn’t completely
remove. This element is the sense of someone
or something having a governing power within
this existence.
Samuel Beckett uses the medium of play
writing, and the tools of the theatre in his
search for metaphysical knowledge, by bringing
his subjects to the brink of inexistence. And
it makes his work unique, timeless and
profoundly enthralling.
E: elaine.morgan@embley.org.uk
11

States
of mind
Dr Thomas Sebrell, History teacher, considers
how flags and statues are no more than
symbols, rooted in ideas and values.
12

t h e
G R Y P H O N
Growing up in Virginia, I found myself
surrounded by reminders of the
American Civil War (1861-65). This was
hardly surprising, as the state served as
the capital of the shortly-lived Confederate
States of America and the largest theatre of
the war. Additionally, it was the birthplace
of the Confederacy’s most legendary
generals – Robert E. Lee, ‘Stonewall’ Jackson
and J.E.B. Stuart. It was impossible to drive
anywhere without encountering some sort
of a memorial to them – statues, plaques,
street names or school names. Most
notable, and loudest, was the frequency of
seeing Confederate flags flying in front of
houses, at memorials, scattered throughout
cemeteries, on pick-up trucks, and in
state and local government buildings. In
kindergarten we were taught the differences
between the American and Confederate
flags, as the latter was seen as often as the
former. This could be tricky for a five year
old – both are red, white and blue, one has 13
stripes, the other with 13 stars.
Growing up as a white male, I had no
negative thoughts about it. I was taught
that the Civil War was fought over states’
rights (individual states losing power to
an aggressive, Washington-based federal
government), and not the future of slavery
in the United States. When you saw a
Confederate symbol, you only thought of
your own personal pride of being ‘American
by birth, Southern by the grace of God’.
You were taught in school that General Lee
owned no slaves, was actually anti-slavery,
but made the honourable decision in
refusing to fight against his home state of
Virginia, and so led the Confederates on the
battlefield. This is what historians now call
‘Old South Mythology’.
With each higher level of education, it
became harder to ignore the truth of this
historic war – it was caused by and entirely
about slavery. In high school, it was more
than noticeable that black students became
upset, sometimes angry, at the sight of the
Confederate flag. Arguments about the
symbol became frequent and intense.
My interest in the subject saw me
pursue it at both undergraduate and
postgraduate levels, by which point I had
lost pride in my Confederate heritage. Not
all white Southerners had experienced
transformations. Change, however, was
demanded after the shooting of nine
black worshippers at a Charleston, South
Carolina, church by a white supremacist who
frequently posted pictures of himself on
Twitter holding a Confederate flag. Within
weeks, the symbol of the pro-slavery flag was
removed from public spaces.
Although the flag became absent in public,
another prominent symbol was targeted –
Confederate statues. After the 2020 death
of George Floyd, and the sharp increase
of support for the Black Lives Matter
movement, protesters across the South
pulled down and desecrated statues of
heroes of the Old South. Most noticeably,
there was little resistance to this.
Flags and statues are nothing more than
symbols. They resonate loudly and are
rooted in ideals and values.
Clearly, the majority of Americans no longer
feel that Confederate symbols represent
who they are now.
Image courtesy of The Washington Post.
E: thomas.sebrell@embley.org.uk
13

“That depends a good
deal on where you want
to get to,” said the cat.
“I don’t much care
where,” said Alice.
“Then it doesn’t matter
which way you go,”
said the cat.
Embley Park, Romsey, Hampshire SO51 6ZE
Main switchboard: +44 (0) 1794 512206
Email: info@embley.org.uk
www.embley.org.uk