As promised, details of our plans for face to face support of boys in Years 10 and 12 were circulated on Friday last, and copies of the details have also been posted on the coronavirus webpage of the school website. Hopefully they make sense, apart from a stray reference to packed lunches in the Year 12 guidance for their afternoon sessions! Even so, there may be method in the madness even here as 17 year old boys generally do need refuelling with alarming regularity; I am sure that socially distanced visits to Greggs/Reeves or similar take-aways will ensue. We have done our best to design a programme of delivery for both year groups which enables boys to meet subject teachers but within the scope of our risk assessment and the relevant guidance from DfE. That is no easy job, as I am sure you can appreciate, but we hope that our plans will enable our boys to build confidence and make progress with their understanding after some time learning remotely.
Last week I wrote about a short story, and this week I thought I would focus in on modern art in lock down, something that I find difficult to understand in many ways. I suspect that I’m not the only one, and in fact I remember some years ago delivering a deliberately provocative assembly exploring what Art (in general) lost from the beginning of the 20th Century when the post-impressionists took control. The Head of Art at the time remonstrated with me afterwards, telling me what I was missing. She was absolutely right of course; I knew that she was at the time, but if ever I needed convincing of the value and power of Art from the last 100+ years then the video that is posted on @BWordsworths twitter would do the trick (see https://t.co/AG6MKfXwtG).
In a wonderful and thought provoking piece written for a time where none of us can get into galleries, Jonathan Jones of The Guardian explores the Rothko Room at the Tate Modern. ‘Waves of Mysterious Meaning’ unpicks the tragedy and hope that are the lifeblood of the nine huge murals donated by the artist himself to the gallery on the day that he took his own life. If you haven’t had a look then do – even if you are (as I was) somewhat sceptical about the integrity, skills and motivation of modern artists. As Jones says at the end of his piece ‘We need Art, and after this I think we’ll value it more than ever’. I think he’s absolutely right.
SDS
