the wellington college year book 2010/2011
the wellington college year book 2010/2011
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roll-call of world-class speakers, the regular
conferences, the Master’s lectures, the daily
visitors from a vast array of fields all help to
create a vibrant academic community. All
students, from the Third Form upwards, are
given lectures in Philosophy, in Planetary
Sciences and Astronomy and in the History of
Art. They are encouraged to think on a broad
canvas: to have open minds and open hearts.
Debating is flourishing; students do remarkably well in national Mathematics and Science
competitions; students’ excellent work is in
the foreground, perhaps best exemplified by
publications such as South Front, the outstanding annual anthology of Wellington writing,
and the remarkable Science society magazine
which is conceived, written, edited and published entirely by students.
If you walk around the school and glance into
classrooms you will notice other, significant
changes. Gone, from many, are the rows of
desks. Gone are the teachers’ desks at the
front of the class. In their place are large, oval
tables. These ‘Harkness’ tables, modelled on
those used in American schools such as Phillips
Exeter, are beautiful pieces of furniture. They
are also symbols of a pedagogical revolution.
Around a Harkness table there is no room to
hide; with their teachers, students interrogate
the ideas generated by their preparatory
reading. The catch-all ‘prep’ is revived in its
original incarnation: students prepare for
class knowing that they will be challenged
intellectually and anticipating an expectation of
deep understanding. The Harkness classroom
experience is an exploration of what has been
prepared and what has been read: these tables
have catalysed an extraordinary shift in the
way students read, prepare, think and debate.
The classroom may never be the same again.
It can’t be, because technology is now
an unavoidable feature of all of our lives.
Continuing the school tour, we put our
heads around another classroom door and
a remarkable thing is happening: all of the
students in the class are connected wirelessly
to the internet. All Wellington students
are expected to have a laptop but many are
using tablets and other portals. The internet
is in the classroom and the students have
During the October Half Term, Alice
Richards, Slava Kinebas and Harry
Randall participated in the Third Annual
Chinese Bridge Competition.We spent a
few days in Beijing travelling and then
headed South to Chongqing for the
competition stages, lasting two weeks.
Initially, they had to perform a short
presentation in Mandarin (coming third
equal with Sweden behind U.S.A.Team ?
and Singapore, a great performance and
this was the only performance broadcast
on local Chongqing tv to millions in its
entirety !). The following performances
involved a series of television challenges
(e.g. matching up Chinese Characters to
pictures, talking for a minute on one of
these and then encouraging support from
the audience in Mandarin) and the ?nal
competition was a ‘Supermarket Sweep’
equivalent designed to use Mandarin in
a real-life situation. It was a relentless
three weeks, but incredibly rewarding.
Whilst we did not rank in the top ten
overall, Harry won a prize for the best
individual speech. All three have also
been awarded a semester’s scholarship in
a Chinese University of their choice. Big
congratulations to them for representing
bothWellington College and the U.K. in
a worldwide competition of ?? di?erent
teams (??? students).
immediate access to boundless knowledge
and information. These technological seachanges are inescapable and the academic life
of Wellington has shifted inexorably because
of them. The challenge is to embrace the
changes, to use devices smartly, to combine
old and new in creative and academically
rigorous ways and to be the masters, not the
servants, of the technology. Fear of change
holds back many; Wellington is in the vanguard
of embracing technological innovation and the
academic life of the College is stronger for it.
Some have argued that the constant
buzz of the electronic world is destroying
our ability to concentrate and to focus for
sustained periods. Wellington has not shied
from this challenge. Reading is firmly back on
the agenda. The academic life of a Wellington
student is not put on hold for two months
every summer. All are expected to read widely
over the holiday period. The expectation is
that they return for the new academic cycle
refreshed, stimulated and eager to talk about
their holiday reading. But reading is changing
too. Not in its fundamental aspects, but in
terms of the reading platforms we choose.
In America, Amazon now sells more ebooks
than traditional paper copies. Wellington’s
ambition is to synthesize the best of the old
and the best of the new.
Nowhere is this more important than in
the new library. It will open in the Spring
of 2012 and will herald the next phase of
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