N o .126
T he T rusty S ervant
On leaving Win Coll
Oliver Normand (F, 13-18; Sen Co Prae)
gave a talk to prospective parents at an
Open Day in June:
When I leave Winchester in a few weeks’
time, I will take with me many fond
memories and, although the weeks in
question will be largely consumed by
some less-than-trivial exams, I thought
that some premature recollections would
help me illustrate why Winchester has
been such a special place for me. Some
of these are sporting, some academic and
others have been an extension of the
College activities during holidays.
It might sound unfashionable to say so,
but I think my strongest memories have
been forged in the classroom. This is
not surprising since the stand-out aspect
of Winchester’s individuality lies in its
academic reputation and traditions. On
the one hand, I was given free rein last
year to synthesise a superconductor,
something that has never been
completed before in a secondary school,
while on the other I shall never forget
a particular Div lesson, when a fellow
classmate, by marginally altering Caesar’s
final line to ‘Est tu, Brute?’ made it
sound as if Caesar was simply having
trouble recognizing his friend. While
we take public exams seriously and the
overwhelming majority of grades are
A*, I have never felt that exams have
constrained a broader academic learning.
Pre-Us, which we take instead of A
Levels, give us the freedom of a broad
syllabus and allow us to love our subjects
in their own right, rather than simply as
a means to an exam grade.
I mentioned Div just now, a uniquely
Wykehamical concept, and it deserves
some explanation. Think of it like The
Week magazine, whose strap-line is ‘All
you need to know, about everything that
matters.’ Change that to ‘All you need
to know about anything you want’ and
you pretty much have it. There are 51
divs in the school and although any one
Wykehamist can experience a mere 10%
of the available div dons in his five years
here, there is a huge range of enthusiasm,
knowledge and experience that a pupil
will come across outside his chosen
academic subjects. I have stumbled
my way through Beowulf in its original
Old English, dabbled in Aristotelian
philosophy, and held countless debates
on politics, history, and art. To be fair
and in contrast, I have been allowed to
8
give vent to the physicist in me and try
to explain quantum mechanics to Mr
de Bono and the non-scientists in his
div. I don’t think that Div alone makes
Winchester unique, but it is the structure
on which everything else here hangs and
the fact that particle physicists can rub
shoulders with Russian students while
discussing Renaissance art shows how
versatile a discipline it can be.
Clearly there is much more to life at
Winchester than just the classroom.