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Dear parents, friends, staff and students,
Often when we hear the readings or the Gospel from Mass, there is something in them that is specifically pertinent for our lives at that moment in time. As churches and many workplaces (and schools) are locked down at the moment, there is a notion in both the second reading and Gospel this weekend that gives us hope. The Second Reading (Ephesians 2:13-18) begins with the phrase “In Christ Jesus, you that used to be so far apart from us have been brought very close”. The Gospel (Mark 6: 30-35) has the phrase “Then He said to them, ‘You must come away to some lonely place all by yourselves and rest for a while’.”
Both of these passages highlight the need sometimes for us to be away from others. At this moment in time, that need is for the safety and protection of those most medically vulnerable in our community and has been imposed upon us. Whilst in this isolation however, we should not assume that we are alone or that this is a lost opportunity. Over the last few assemblies and newsletters, I have spoken about the need for harmony in our lives but stressed the fact that harmony does not mean we give equal time to all aspects of our needs every day. Sometimes, we need to take more time in work and that should be balanced with more time in leisure at some other point in our week. We should also take time in prayer and silence to allow us to connect with God. As we endeavour to work during lockdown, it is essential that we use these principles to keep focussed. There will be opportunity and need for work and leisure as much now as at any other time. In reflecting back to the weekend’s readings however, we can take solace in the idea that as a people of Christ, we may be isolated but are never alone.
Today is the Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. We would normally have celebrated this with a whole College Mass and distributed student awards. This would also have been shared with the OLMC Parish with their celebrations on the weekend. Unfortunately, we are not able to do this this year, but I ask us all to reflect on the way Mary lived her life and how we might replicate this in our lives. Happy Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel.
During the current remote learning phase, please be aware that students are expected to check in each morning with their Pastoral Advisors. These check-ins are a roll marking requirement but also an opportunity for teachers to keep a welfare check on how the students are managing. Students should check-in during the morning Pastoral period and then be available during normal lesson times. Further in this newsletter, Mr Huntly (the Pastoral and Well-being Coordinator) will include a guide of what things to watch for that may help parents support your children. Please feel free to contact the College if there is anything that you think we may need to be aware of or any advice we might be able to give to assist you. Students have access to google classrooms and are undertaking zooms and being notified through Compass regarding ongoing work. I ask that you speak with your child about how they are going and encourage them to contribute their best effort toward their work.
As you would be aware, there are a number of Zoom sessions that are occurring in different lessons to assist the students’ learning. These Zooms may not be every lesson and may only be for a portion of the lesson, however students have been informed of a number of expectations around these. Students will not be admitted to Zoom lessons if they do not identify themselves with their name. Students who attempt to log on using nicknames or false names will not be admitted to the lessons. Likewise, as in any face-to face lesson, any student who is deemed to be disrupting the learning of others due to inappropriate behaviour, will be evicted from the zoom. I ask parents to please discuss this with your child as they have already been given these instructions.
Once again, a very big thank you to the staff, students and parents for your flexibility and ongoing support during remote learning.
Ite in Veritate
Mr Steve Lo Cascio
Principal
Earlier this week, the College circulated a Compass alert that invited parents to give pre-approval for their child/ren to be dismissed from the College to make their own way home prior to our normal finishing time should we be informed of a positive case. If this were to occur, students who have been given this pre-approval would be invited to leave the College grounds at the earliest possible opportunity. For those without pre-approval, parents would still be able to collect them in person, or of course they would be permitted to remain supervised on site until the end of the scheduled conclusion of the school day. For parents who are yet to give their pre-approval and would like to, please visit your Compass Events page to give your consent.
Finally, despite the overwhelming majority of students now working remotely for at least the next two weeks, I would ask families to please continue following our COVID recording procedures, which include:
- Informing the school immediately if your child is self-isolating or undergoing testing, and informing us of the result as soon as possible.
- Following sickness with flu-like symptoms, ensuring your child is free of symptoms and can present a negative COVID-19 test, before attending the College site for any reason.
All the best for the week ahead and my sincere thanks for your ongoing support at this challenging time.
David Cloran
Assistant Principal
16th Sunday in Ordinary Time
First Reading Jer 23:1-6 The Lord will appoint new shepherds.
Second Reading Eph 2:13-18 Christ removes the barriers between peoples
Gospel Mk 6:30-34 Jesus pities the crowd, sheep without a shepherd
Historical Context – Sheep and Shepherds
This gospel passage is one of many gospel references and even more Old Testament references to sheep and shepherds. It is an enduring image from the Bible.
Much of it stems from the shepherd-become-King, David. When a monarchy developed in Israel it was clear that the role of king was like that of a shepherd, caring for his flock.
Jesus applied the image to himself on several occasions, reinforcing an image of servant leadership.
The language continues today, with bishops referred to as shepherds of their diocese and carrying a crosier that is reminiscent of a shepherd’s crook.
REC Coordinator
Good afternoon everyone,
The adoption of remote learning and roll marking throughout the first week of the term has been very smooth. Thanks to all students and carers for your cooperation with this process. A reminder that students need to respond to the Google form no later than 10am each day in order to be marked present. If there are any issues regarding this process please contact your son or daughter’s Pastoral Advisor, Year Coordinator or the Front Office.
As the COVID-19 landscape is continually changing, particularly with regards to the various measures that have been in place for the past three weeks or so, it is important for all of us to keep up to speed with the latest information. As each of the States and Territories are operating in different ways, the following link to the NSW Government Website is one way of ensuring that the most accurate and up-to-date information for NSW is available https://www.nsw.gov.au/covid-19.
As with last year’s experience during lockdown, many of us are confronted with a variety of challenges relating to remote learning. It is important that communication between home and the College is maintained as a means of support for all student learning and wellbeing. Alternatively, a variety of assistance lines, as previously shared in emails and newsletters are available for you. Below are some useful links which may assist students and carers during this challenging time.
Australian Parents Council - Screentime recommendations
Headspace - General Mental Health fact sheet for parents
Mental Health resources for families during remote learning
Pastoral Care
As we end our first week of remote learning, Pastoral Classes engaged in a variety of activities earlier this morning. Some of these included:
- Year 7- Pastoral Care and Wellbeing surveys
- Year 8 - Zooms, wellbeing surveys and semester one report reflections.
- Year 9 - Joint pastoral class zooms, report reflections and mindfulness activities.
- Year 10 - Subject selection question and answer time with KLA Coordinators.
- Seniors - Wellbeing surveys and time for classwork and assessment tasks.
These activities will provide students a valuable opportunity to reflect on their week of learning, set goals for the following semester and to assist Year Coordinators and Pastoral Advisors with identifying the wellbeing needs of our students.
Elevate Education
Elevate Education are continuing to provide parents of Mount Carmel Catholic College exclusive access to their Parent Webinar Series for Term 3, 2021. The webinars begin on Wednesday 21 July at 7pm. To reserve your spot, register for free below.
You can register by clicking here.
This term’s topics are:
- July 21 - Motivation and the role of parents in shaping mindset.
- August 4 - Technology devices and how to stay focused and balanced.
- August 18 - Note taking skills to help your child deepen their revision.
- September 1 - Exam Homestretch and how to support your child in the final weeks.
The webinar is run live online from 7pm – 8pm (AEST) where the presenter will share Elevate’s research findings and skills, and will conduct a live Q&A so you can ask them questions directly.
Should you have questions or would like to contact Elevate directly, their details are listed below.
Mr Simon Huntly
Pastoral Care and Wellbeing Coordinator
Remote Learning
Teachers are working diligently to create and deliver engaging and meaningful learning experiences for students while we are in this current period of remote learning. Students are encouraged to follow the expectations set out by their teachers in regards to the submission of classwork, so they can maintain the formative assessment and feedback phase of the learning cycle. Students are asked to contact their teachers if they have questions or are unsure about the requirements for a lesson.
Year 12 HSC Trial Examinations
The exam schedule has been updated. Exams will now take place during Week 5 and 6. Students are encouraged to maintain their learning momentum over the coming weeks to ensure that they maximize their outcomes in their last school based assessments.
Year 11 2022 Subject Selection
Students are to finalise their selections in preparation for Subject Selection Interviews on Wednesday 28 July. These will now be conducted via Zoom.
Key dates:
- Wednesday 28 July – Subject Selection Interviews (via Zoom)
- Friday 3 September – 2022 Subject Choices distributed to Year 10 students
Ms Chardy Miller
Acting Curriculum Coordinator
The ongoing situation with COVID-19 and the remote learning environment, calls for a particularly challenging and potentially exciting type of collaborative response. Parents and teachers are now working together even more closely to ensure that the education of young people continues in a rich and positive way. From a literacy perspective, teachers are ensuring that students are experiencing quality instruction and receiving helpful support and feedback which will ensure ongoing learning. The two most important things students can be doing at home at this time are reading and writing. Exposure to rich and engaging stories and regular writing opportunities will benefit them greatly.
I believe very strongly that our young people are in need of experiences of awe, imagination and authentic engagement. Reading is critical here. C. S. Lewis says that we read ‘to know that we are not alone’ and that stories have the power to ‘take us into other worlds and transform us.’ The ‘uniquely portable magic’ that Stephen King speaks of explains why at the end of a good story, we will not be where we were at the beginning. Stories provide imaginative engagement with readers beyond their immediate time and place. They help young people acquire important values which enable them to be human beings capable of love and empathy. A narrative imagination allows a reader to think what it might be like to be in someone else’s shoes, to be a perceptive reader of that person’s story, and to understand the emotions and desires that someone in that particular situation may experience.
As promised over the holidays, I read Mark Twain’s 1884 novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – for the fourth time. It had been fifteen years since I read this book and I was keen to see what might unfold with this new reading experience. I was not disappointed! As I mentioned in my last Literacy Links article, the reading of a book is a collaborative process which sees the reader co-author the text by bringing to the words on the page their own life experiences, beliefs and assumptions. The fifteen years of life in between encounters with this book, has afforded me the opportunity to bring an enriched set of expectations and knowledge of the world to this particular reading experience. Even in most recent times, we have had bushfires, the Black Lives Matter movement and, of course, COVID-19. These events and situations in themselves can have a considerable impact on one’s mindset and perspective – as does age and time. Consequently, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was such a ‘new’ and enthralling encounter. I couldn’t put it down. Each morning I would eagerly continue where I had left off the day before and soon found myself laughing out loud one minute and then reeling in horror the next. Twain’s writing focuses, repeatedly, on universal aspects of the human condition. And while physically constrained by COVID’s lockdown restrictions, I found myself travelling with Huck Finn down the Mississippi River, experiencing new adventures and meeting very different people along the way.
‘Mark Twain’ was the pen-name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens who was born in the American state of Missouri in 1835. At the age of 11 his father died, which ended his school education and began his education in life. After a number of jobs, including writing articles for newspapers in New York, he embarked on a career as a riverboat pilot. ‘Mark Twain’ are the words that the leadsman on a boat would call out to signal that the steamboat was in two fathoms of deep water and therefore safe. Piloting a riverboat could be dangerous work as river waters and currents shifted and swirled. In fact, Clemens’ younger brother was killed doing just that. The Civil War put a stop to the steamboats for a time. Clemens joined the Confederate Army and then later tried his hand at silver mining. When he didn’t find his fortune as a miner, Clemens went on to gain fame as a writer and soon became known as the ‘father of American literature’. He received the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters of the University of Oxford in 1907 and died in 1910.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is Mark Twain’s most famous novel. It tells of the adventures of a young boy, Huck Finn, who travels down the Mississippi River on a raft with a runaway slave, Jim. Twain’s father and uncles had owned slaves and, as a child, he had spent time playing in slave quarters and listening to their songs and stories. He captures cleverly the dialect of Jim and the speech of the South in his book, and has been praised for creating an American literature that is heard as well as read. Huck and Jim meet many colourful characters on their journey, with whom they have all sorts of adventures. Although Huck doesn’t seem to learn a great deal along the way, the readers undoubtedly do. We are treated to a powerful moral commentary and witty satire on the American South in the late nineteenth century.
The central idea of Twain’s novel of a physical journey of adventure, with new worlds to explore and experiences to be encountered, is at the heart of the ‘American’ quality of the book. The journey of the adventure represents the idea of life itself as an adventure, full of challenges for the young. This is associated with the optimism which inspired the opening up of the North American lands in the nineteenth century, to the south and the west. The youthful character of the story suggested in the name of the narrator, ‘Huckleberry Finn’, captures this sense of new life, adventure and discovery. Huck’s journey, through time and space, is focused on the image of the Mississippi River, which flows through the book, as a symbol of freedom and security. Throughout the journey, Twain explores the complex nature of moral decisions and the challenges of leading a thoughtful and good life. Twain is a critic of hypocrisy, particularly of the religious kind where people claim Christian ideals but fail to live up to them in their actions and lives. On the other hand, he celebrates the innate good nature of several of his characters, such as Jim and Huckleberry himself, while realistically acknowledging their faults as well. The developing bond between Huck and Jim unfolds in the course of the journey and the trip northwards, away from the slavery of the southern states, gives an historical and political dimension to the concept of journeying to freedom.
Over the years, I have kept a reading journal close by whenever I have read a really good book. If some word or phrase or reaction catches my attention, I enter this into my journal as a record of my appreciation for the ‘magic’ of the expression or the concept captured in the ‘grab’. These ‘magic grabs’ have filled many, many reading journals over the years and are a source of great delight when I revisit them. One of the magic grabs I included in my latest reading of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn captures the joy of freedom and travel when Huck says, ‘You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft’. Another grab highlights Twain’s wit when he has Huck decide that ‘I reckoned, that with her disposition, she was having a better time in the graveyard.’ Beautiful description is evident in the river being described as ‘lonesome’, the steamboat as ‘coughing’, the leaves ‘shivering’ and the lightning as ‘whimpering’. Some quite profound statements were made in the following grabs: ‘It was enough to make a body ashamed of the human race’ and ‘Human beings can be awful cruel to one another.’ I could go on… But I will leave you with an extract which caught my eye with its message.
It made me shiver. And I about made up my mind to pray; and see if I couldn’t try to quit being the kind of boy I was, and be better. So I kneeled down. But the words wouldn’t come. Why wouldn’t they? It warn’t no use to try and hide it from Him. Nor from me, neither. I knowed very well why they wouldn’t come. It was because my heart warn’t right… it was because I was playing double. I was letting on to give up sin, but away inside of me I was holding on to the biggest one of all. I was trying to make my mouth say I would do the right thing…but deep down in me I knowed it was a lie – and He knowed it. You can’t pray a lie…
Mrs Clare Murphy
English Coordinator and Literacy Instructional Coach
Tuesday Recreational Sport
During remote learning, students are to ensure that they access the Sport Memo that is posted to Compass each Tuesday morning. This will include a range of physical activity options that will be important in supporting student wellbeing during this time.
Please be advised of the following postponement and cancellation of upcoming sporting events. We understand that this news will bring significant disappointment to many students and empathise with this. Decisions have been based on the current restrictions around COVID-19 and the priority of keeping our students and staff safe.
Diocesan Sport - Postponed and Cancelled Events
The following sport events have been postponed:
- Monday 19 July - Secondary Netball Championships
- Tuesday 20 July - MISA Sport inter school competitions
- Tuesday 20 July - NSWCCC Football Knockout Wollongong Vs Parramatta Games
The following sport events have been cancelled:
- Friday 23 July - Secondary Athletics Championships
NSWCCC Sport - Postponed and Cancelled Events
The following sport events have been postponed for the first two weeks of term 3 including:
- NSWCPS Golf Tournament
- NSWPSSA Boys Football
- NSWCPS Rugby 10 A Side Knockout
The following sport events have been cancelled:
- NSWCCC Boys Hockey Championships (Week 4)
- NSWCCC Netball Championships (Week 5)
Due to the extended lockdown and the ever changing COVID-19 situation further events will continue to be monitored and updates will be provided via the College Newsletter.
NSWCCC Sport Registrations
A reminder that students and their parents are responsible for monitoring the closing dates of NSWCCC Sport Registrations. Information regarding upcoming events can be accessed via https://csnsw.sport/events
NSWCCC is a pathway suitable for students playing a representative level of their sport outside of school. For instructions on how to register go to - https://csnsw.sport/help/help-guide-for-parents
NSWCCC Sport Registrations 2021:
- 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
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/
For the most up to date information regarding NSWCCC events collow CSNSW Sport on social media:
Ms Sarah Bowen
Acting College Sport Coordinator
bowens01@dow.catholic.edu.au