From the Principal

Last week I was invited to speak with Year 7 students at their weekly assembly. Their Year Advisor, Ms Ynson, asked if I could share some of my thoughts on the theme they are discussing in their Pastoral Care sessions this term – the theme of overcoming setbacks and working through challenges.

I commenced by outlining a few facts on this topic:

Life is full of setbacks and challenges
They will happen from time to time throughout your life
No-one can protect you from setbacks and challenges
They can occur in many contexts: within your family, with your friendships and with your school life.

After sharing two setbacks I have had in the past 13 years since I came to Redlands, I then shared my view that the most successful way to deal with setbacks and challenges is to become a resilient person. Using the example of a ball to demonstrate the ability to bounce back after a setback or challenge, I emphasised that while we are not born resilient, we can all learn to develop resilience.

I gave the example of Thomas Edison, the 20^th century American inventor, who made thousands of prototypes of the incandescent light bulb before he got it right. Edison was prolific inventor who was awarded more than 1,000 patents, so it’s easy to imagine him failing on a daily basis in his laboratory. In spite of struggling with “failure” throughout his entire working life, Edison never let set-backs and challenges get the better of him. All of these “failures”, which are reported to be in the tens of thousands, he regarded as learning opportunities; his failures told him what would not work and led him to think “why”. His resilience gave the world some of the most amazing inventions of the early 20^th century and his personal motto might have been “if at first you don’t succeed, try and try again”.

I concluded by suggesting some things that we can do to build our resilience:

have a positive image of our futures
look ahead rather than back and have personal goals, short-term and longer term, that we want to achieve
practise being empathetic and compassionate (one of our School values)
never think of ourselves as victims (thereby blaming others), but focus our time and energy on changing things over which we have control
recognise our strengths and our weaknesses, making good use of our strengths and seeking to strengthen our weaknesses
think smart: don’t batter our heads against a brick wall – try a different path
reflect and learn from our mistakes or misfortunes; don’t just quit.

I think that there will be some very interesting discussions during Tutor meetings as the theme for the term is explored with their Tutors. I encourage parents of our Year 7 students to continue the discussions at home with their children. The topic of resilience is a most important one.

This weekend the ISA Winter Sports Semi Finals will be held and I wish all those teams who have reached this stage all the very best and hope that we shall see teams striving to proceed in the Finals the following weekend.

Dr Peter Lennox

Photo caption: Physics, health, weather, genes, experiments, molecules and, most of all, fun were had during National Science Week.