Greetings to everyone,

As we look toward Easter, the most important time for Christians, I would like to re-share this prayer from the beginning of Lent.

Here is a message that I want to share which originates from Pope Francis....

1. Fast from hurting words and say kind words.
2. Fast from sadness and be filled with gratitude.
3. Fast from anger and be filled with patience.
4. Fast from pessimism and be filled with hope.
5. Fast from worries and trust in God.
6. Fast from complaints and contemplate simplicity.
7. Fast from pressures and be prayerful.
8. Fast from bitterness and fill your heart with joy.
9. Fast from selfishness and be compassionate to other
10. Fast from grudges and be reconciled.
11. Fast from words and be silent so you can listen.

I hope that you or your family may have been able to take up one or more of these actions sometime during the preparation time of Lent. 

Remember it's not too late to focus on one of them in the coming week.

The beautiful thing about these are they can be actions for the whole year!

Below is a summary of the readings for Holy Week.

Have a blessed and safe Easter!

Readings for Holy Week

Mrs Christine Meharg

Religious Education Coordinator

• 26 March – Yr 12 Academic Reports available to parents (COMPASS)
• 31 March – Yr 12 PTS Interviews 
• 1 April – 7-10 Tracking Reports available to parents (COMPASS)
• 26 April – NAPLAN Equating Test – Year 7 
• 27 April - NAPLAN Equating Test – Year 9
• 12 – 13  May – NAPLAN 
• 14 May – Yr 11 Academic Reports available to available to parents (COMPASS)
• 17 May – NAPLAN
• 19 May - Yr 11 PTS Interviews
• 18 June – Yr 7-10 Academic Reports available to parents (COMPASS)

CURRICULUM MATTERS...

NAPLAN

MCCC has been selected for NAPLAN Equating Tests. These will occur on Monday 26 April (Year 7) and Tuesday 27 April (Year 9). A small group (approx. 30 students) will be involved. More details and student lists will be shared next week.  

NAPLAN - 2021

Wednesday, May 12 - Year 7

Thursday, May 13 - Year 9

Monday, May 17 - Year 7 (period 1 - 2), Year 9 (period 3 - 4) 

 CLASS GROUPINGS – Student Movement 

MCCC class groupings are flexible, and support student movement where necessary, to provide the most appropriate learning environment for all students. Best Start data and PAT testing data will be used this week to support the movement of a number of students, particularly those in Year 7. As always, a complete review of student placement / class groupings will be completed towards the end of Term 2, which will involve teacher feedback and Semester 1 report data. 

Numeracy

The MCCC Numeracy fingerprint is being developed, which will highlight cross KLA opportunities for explicit numeracy intervention, teaching of numeracy skills, and possible cross KLA assessment experiences. The aim for this is to develop students’ numeracy skills that become transferrable across KLA’s and for many students,  lifelong skills. Watch this space for updates….

Ms Judith Tolomeo

Curriculum Coordinator

Good afternoon everyone,

Walking in Truth

In last week’s newsletter, reference was made to the launch of  “Walking in Truth”, our whole school approach to providing a Safe, Responsible and Respectful environment for our community. At today’s College Assembly, a short presentation was made to the whole community again outlining the initiative with explicit reference to how it should look on our College Oval during breaks. Below are two examples of some of the signage that has been created that will be placed around the site or contained in documentation relating to “Walking in Truth” . It is anticipated that through the publication and continued reference to these guidelines that we will continue to maintain and improve the safety and wellbeing of all members of our College. 

Image 1:  Example of general College expectations.

Image 2: Oval Expectations

Years Seven and  Eight Brainstorm Productions presentations

We have been fortunate to secure the services of Brainstorm Productions, an organisation who perform dramatic productions that address issues relating to a range of contemporary social and wellbeing issues. Last week they performed “Cyberia”, which explores the world of cyber safety, bullying and harassment and conflict resolution in a school context to our Year Sevens. They are returning on Monday March 29 to perform to Year Eight.This performance is explicitly linked to subject matter contained in the Year Seven and Eight PDHPE program, has elements with our RCS syllabus as well as a key focus for our pastoral teams. This will allow our Year Seven and Eight teams to reinforce and build upon much of the content matter contained in the presentation.

Thanks again for your support throughout the first term. Have a peaceful and restful Easter.

Mr Simon Huntly

Pastoral Care and Wellbeing Coordinator

Lent is a period of penitential preparation for Easter. It is taken as a time of solemn observance in the lead up to the celebration of Christ’s death and resurrection. Throughout this Lenten period, we have turned to reflect on the sacrifices of Jesus Christ as well as our need for God’s forgiveness. Fasting, or giving something up is a common practice during Lent as it is a reminder of Christ and an opportunity to connect with God. 

Over the past weeks, Mr Pletikosa along with the assistance of the Youth Ministry Team and Spirituality Captains have put this idea of ‘sacrifice’ into practice through the ‘Meatless Friday Hot Chips Fundraiser’. Each Friday, at lunch, the team has been serving $2 hot chips to students as a way of encouraging sacrifice through abstinence from meat. In this way, students acknowledged Jesus’ forty-day sacrifice in the desert and were also reminded of those who are less fortunate.

However, Lent is not centred around sacrifice alone. The act of almsgiving — whether it be through giving money to the less fortunate or doing something for the good of others — is a way to respond to God’s grace, generosity and love. The ‘Meatless Friday Hot Chips Fundraiser’ recognises this idea of almsgiving as all proceeds made from the initiative will be donated to the Project Compassion Lenten Appeal. 

Lenten practices help us shed bad habits and exercise love through our actions. These religious acts purify us to orient ourselves more single-mindedly towards God. When we respond thus to the divine call—when we engage in such activities of sacrifice and almsgiving — we are made holy.

Sarah Russell and Eseta Malaesilia

Stories sear into the soul and can never be untold.

Dorothy Porter

Contemporary philosopher, Martha Nussbaum, says that ‘reading takes us on excursions of sympathy.’ Life writing texts have much to offer adolescents as they have a particular power which allows the reader to journey with the writer and to discover something about the nature of grief or love or time or memory or childhood. Last week we looked at memoirs by Anne Frank, Malala Yousafzai, Roald Dahl and Tim Winton. This week, we explore compelling texts by Elie Wiesel, Eudora Welty and Paul Auster. These stories most definitely ‘sear into the soul’ and, as a result, can ‘never be untold’. 

Harrowing, heartbreaking and brutal is the unforgettable memoir Night – the story of a teenage survivor of the Holocaust. Born into a Jewish family in Romania, Elie Wiesel was a teenager when his family were taken by the Nazis and transported by train to the death camp, Auschwitz and then to Buchenwald. Describing with immense power the murder of a people from a survivor’s perspective, Night provides rare insight into the darkest side of human nature. Yet, Wiesel’s account of this horror has the positive effect of communicating the enduring power of hope amidst the darkness. This may resonate with many readers across the world today. 

“Pressed tightly against one another, in an effort to resist the cold, our heads empty and heavy, our brains a whirlwind of decaying memories. Our minds numb with indifference. Here or elsewhere, what did it matter? Die today or tomorrow, or later? The night was growing longer, never-ending… My father had huddled near me, draped in his blanket, shoulders laden with snow. And what if he were dead as well?  I called out to him. No response. I would have screamed if I could have. He was not moving. 

The train stopped in an empty field. The abrupt halt had wakened a few sleepers. They stood, looked around, startled. 

‘Throw out all the dead! Outside, all the corpses!’

The living were glad. They would have more room. Volunteers began the task. They touched those who remained on the ground. 

‘Here’s one! Take him!’

The two ‘gravediggers’ grabbed him by the head and feet and threw him from the wagon, like a sack of flour. 

They were shouting: ‘Come on! Here’s another! My neighbour. He’s not moving…’

I wake from my apathy only when two men approached my father. I threw myself on his body. He was cold. I slapped him. I rubbed his hands, crying ‘Father! Father! Wake up. They’re going to throw you outside …’

The two ‘gravediggers’ had grabbed me by the neck: ‘Leave him alone. Can’t you see that he’s dead?’

‘No!’ I yelled. ‘He’s not dead! Not yet!’

And I started to hit him harder and harder. At last, my father half opened his eyes. They were glassy. He was breathing faintly. 

‘You see,’ I cried. 

The two men went away. 

Twenty corpses were thrown from our wagon. Then the train resumed its journey, leaving in its wake, in a snowy field in Poland, hundreds of naked orphans without a tomb. 

* * *

Eudora Welty’s memoir One Writer’s Beginnings captures an engaging portrait of her family and childhood. In the following extracts, love and empathy are privileged. 

“When I was young enough to still spend a long time buttoning my shoes in the morning, I’d listen toward the hall: Daddy upstairs was shaving in the bathroom and Mother downstairs was frying the bacon. They would begin whistling back and forth to each other up and down the stairwell. My father would whistle his phrase, my mother would try to whistle, then hum hers back. It was their duet… They kept it running between them, up and down the stairs where I was now just about ready to run clattering down and show them my shoes…” 

“I believe the guiding emotion in my mother’s life was pity. It encompassed the world. During the war (World War II), she heard on a radio broadcast that the Chinese, fearing their great library would be destroyed, took the books up in their hands and put them onto their back and carried all of them, on foot, over long mountain paths, away to safety. Mother cried for them, and for their books. Almost more than eventual disaster, brave hope that it could be averted undid her. She had had so many of those brave hopes herself. Crying for the old Chinese scholars carrying their precious books over the mountains gave her a way too of crying for herself, with her youngest child, who was serving with the Navy at the battle of Okinawa. 

She suffered perhaps more than an ordinary number of blows in her life. We her children, like our father before us, had to learn the lesson that we never would be able to console her for any of them…”

* * *

Paul Auster’s memoir The Invention of Solitude is currently read by Year 12 students. In this sustained contemplation of death and loss, Auster constructs a lament for his father and his grandfather which includes an explicit commitment to the discovery of meaning and consolation. The event which triggers Auster’s autobiographical writing is the sudden death the author’s father. The tremendous desire for the son to make the father present is fuelled by a determination to hold onto him and understand him. For Auster, life writing turns out to be a continuous engagement with memory where the redeeming force of love, and the necessary struggle with the ‘magic’ of language are at play. The book opens thoughtfully with the following:

“One day there is life. A man, for example, in the best of health, not even old, with no history of illness. Everything is as it was, as it will always be. He goes from one day to the next, minding his own business, dreaming only of the life that lies before him. And then, suddenly, it happens there is death. A man lets out a little sigh, he slumps down in his chair, and it is death. The suddenness of it leaves no room for thought, gives the mind no chance to seek out a word that might comfort it. We are left with nothing but death, the irreducible fact of our own mortality. Death after a long illness we can accept with resignation. Even accidental death we can ascribe to fate. But for a man to die of no apparent cause, for a man to die simply because he is a man, brings us so close to the invisible boundary between life and death that we no longer know which side we are on. Life becomes death, and it is as if this death has owned this life all along. Death without warning. Which is to say: life stops. And it can stop at any moment.”

Drusilla Modjeska states in her book Timepieces that ‘We live so intensely in time, so restlessly and speedily, pulled forwards, pulled backwards, worrying about the future, fretting about the past, snagged in the present, it’s very hard to know what meaning there can be for our lives; we can’t get a perspective on it from inside the rush.’ Yet Paul Auster’s beautiful memoir privileges love and connection as the elements which brace and unify the account of a life. ‘Perhaps this is what really counts: to arrive at the core of human feeling, in spite of the evidence.’

Mrs Clare Murphy

English Coordinator and Literacy Instructional Coach

Mount Carmel has a transition of preparing its students for success after graduation. The College offers Vocational Training (VET) for students who wish to transition to trades or tertiary education.  

Students who undertake study in a Vocational framework at Mt Carmel are required to undertake an industry-based work placement. This work placement is arranged in our region by an external organisation MWLP. MWLP is very active in providing realistic and valuable placements for our students and wants to supply the Australian Industry with quality trainees. They formed the view that in order to encourage students they would work with their partner businesses to identify and rewards student who performed exceptionally well at their placement.

Through 2020 MWLP contacted every business after a placement occurred and gathered feedback. If the student performed well the host was asked if they liked to nominate the student. If the host employer felt the student deserved this their nomination was assessed by a panel and interviewed. The best applicants were then determined and the finalist’s list was drawn up. A very rigorous process.

The College had six students nominated with one student, Declan Doyle of Year 12 Construction being a finalist. Wednesday 24th March all finalists gathered at Oran Park High School to be acknowledged and for the winner to be announced. Declan was in one of the strongest categories with many outstanding nominations. Declan had a genuinely surprised look on his face when he was announced the winner. Congratulations to Declan and his teacher Mr Andrew Medway. The interview panel was impressed with his interest and understanding of construction and his host employer commended his knowledge of construction and his proactive approach to working on site. Well done Declan.

The Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute is one of the most respected heart research facilities in the world. Internationally recognised for the quality of its discoveries, the Victor Chang Institute is also a centre-of-excellence in cardiovascular research training, and in the rapid translation of discoveries into new diagnostics, preventions, and treatments of cardiovascular disease.

The Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute School Science Award was established to foster an interest in science among secondary school students, with the view of encouraging Year 10 to 11 students to pursue their passion for science at university and beyond.

In 2020, two students from Mount Carmel were nominated by the Science Faculty in recognition of their hard work, academic achievements, innovation and creativity in Science at the College.

Congratulations to Elisha Sailago and Alisa Thephavong on being the joint recipients of the 2020 Victor Chang Award.

Both Elisha and Alisa are recognised by their teachers as being very capable, hard-working, excellent problem solvers and extremely methodical during first-hand investigations.

Both their positive work ethics, willingness to improve and being inquisitive about the world we live in, shows worthy qualities to receive the Victor Chang School Science Award.

Mr Greg Mackney (Assistant Science Coordinator)

“We adore you, O Christ, and we bless you, because by your holy cross you have redeemed the world.”

On Thursday 25 March the Station of the Cross was held down at our Lady of Mount Carmel Parish.

This experience was one filled with passion and devotion to Christ ahead of Easter. This is generally done only as a community on Good Friday, however this was done as a small group of about forty so that we can celebrate as a school community to share our faith and passion.

It was a wonderful turnout of both junior and senior students. This small setting meant that this was a very personal and a great bonding experience for all students and staff involved. All of the Youth Ministry Leaders came along as role models to younger peers and the Spirituality Captains were in attendance leading this rich tradition of our Catholic Church. 

Parent, Carers and Spectators

This week we received an update in relation to Parent, Carers and Spectators for all Diocese of Wollongong Pathway sporting events. (reviewed and changed for upcoming events). Parents/carers and spectators are PERMITTED to attend CEDoW Sporting pathway and representative events held at external/outdoor venues from Friday 5th March. The ratio and allowance of spectators/parents will be determined by venues ratio and capacity to maintain appropriate adult social distancing. Parents/carers and spectators will be required to follow the COVID Safe plan and precautions set out by the event coordinator. 

MISA Sport 

During Week 9 we had students participate in the MISA East Zone Finals. Of the four teams that were competing for a 1v2 position we had 3 teams win the grand final match. Congratulations to the students in each of these teams. 

2021 MISA Interzone Finals - Week 10

Good luck to the following teams and their coaches who will be competing in the MISA Interzone Finals this week. 

• Years 7 - 9 Indoor Cricket (Girls) 
• Years 7 - 9 Volleyball (Boys) 
• Years 10 - 12 Basketball (Boys) 

Parent spectators are allowed to attend this event. Please refer to the details on the student permission notes that were distributed this week for locations and venues. 

MISA East 1st Place - MISA Basketball 10-12 Boys (coached by Mr Harpley)

MISA East 1st Place - Indoor Cricket 7-9 Girls (coached by Mrs Jones)

MISA East 1st Place - MISA Volleyball 7-9 Girls (coached by Ms Vidovic)

MISA East 2nd Place - MISA Volleyball 7-9 Boys (coached by Mr Daniels)  

MISA East 2nd Place  - MISA OzTag 10-12 Boys (coached by Mr King)

MISA East 3rd Place - MISA Basketball 10-12 Girls - 3rd place (coached by Ms Abra)

2021 College Cross Country 

Date	Thursday 1 April (final day of term)
Location	The event will be held on the College grounds. The Cross Country Track runs through the ovals as well as the paddocks behind the school.
Key Details	This is a compulsory school event and a normal school day therefore all students are required at school by normal time.  Parent spectators are allowed to attend the event and will be asked to remain in a designated area on Oval 1 (towards the parent car park. Pastoral class will commence at 8:40am on the day. The day will conclude at 2:00pm. Students may be collected at 2:00pm. Supervision will be available for those students who need to wait until regular buses.  Students are to wear their full sports uniform to school however may add appropriate house colour accessories when they arrive.  Please ensure that students bring a drink bottle with them and food for the day as the canteen may not be operating.  A schedule of events and approximate times for each event will be posted to Compass and will be visible to students/parents on Monday.

NSWCCC Sport Registrations 

NSWCCC Sport Registrations 2021 for pathway sports opened on 1 February.

Individual Registrations for the following sports to attend a NSWCCC Selection - AFL, Baseball, Basketball, Cricket, Diving, Golf, Hockey, Netball, Rugby, Softball, Tennis, Triathlon, Volleyball, Water Polo Registrations for the following sports is through a Diocesan/Association Selection - Athletics, Cross Country, Football, Swimming, Touch, Rugby League

For instructions on how to register go to - https://csnsw.sport/help/help-guide-for-parents 

Term One Individual Nominations Sport Registrations

CLOSING DATES FOR NSWCCC SELECTIONS  TERM ONE

• Water Polo  - Closing date 11 March  Selection 15 March at Ryde
• Triathlon - Closing date 15 March  Selections 30 March at Penrith
• Hockey - Closing date 15 March  Selections 22 March at Moorebank
• Diving – Boys & Girls – 29 March – Close 19 March

For further information visit https://csnsw.sport/

Diocesan Update 

Students are NOT to register for the teams listed below as they need to be selected in the Wollongong Diocesan team prior to any registration. Sports where Diocesan teams are selected and students DO NOT register until they are officially selected in the Diocesan team include: 

• 15's Touch (B&G)
• Opens Touch (B&G
• 15's Rugby League
• Open's Rugby League
• Open Football (B&G
• Swimming
• Cross Country
• Athletics

Representative Pathways 

• MISA Website https://www.misaonline.org.au/ 

• Diocesan Sport News - Updates and news on Wollongong Diocese sport events and trials can be viewed at https://www.dow.catholic.edu.au/sport/diocesan-sport-news/?ref=quicklinks

• NSWCCC/CSNSW Sport News - Higher level MacKillop and CCC trials and events status can be monitored at https://csnsw.sport/news 

• SCHOOL SPORT AUSTRALIA SPORT NEWS

More School Sport Australia information can be found at

http://www.schoolsportaustralia.edu.au/

Miss Sarah Bowen

(Acting College Sport Coordinator -  bowens01@dow.catholic.edu.au)