High School: 21 March 2017

Find out about the many rewarding challenges in which St. Andrews students took part over the past week. A sense of pride continues to reverberate around campus.

“Be the best you can be!”

What a week!

As you probably read last week, the International Award Bronze and Silver Qualifying Journey and the FOBISIA Golf Tournament continued into this week.

Since last week’s Newsletter we have also had a fantastic visit from Liam Day (Trumpet) and Conor Hanick (Piano) from Juilliard on Wednesday, The IB Visual Arts Exhibition, and a sneak preview of our new High School Campus, on Thursday and Friday, the World Scholar’s Cup on Friday and Saturday, the Chulalongkorn University Economics Knowledge Competition on Friday and the Under 13 FOBISIA Games on Saturday, Sunday and Monday. You can read more about many of these events below, or in next week’s Newsletter.

A couple of years ago we made a slight change in our school’s Mission Statement, changing the phrase “students are inspired to achieve their full potential” to “students are inspired to be the best they can be”. As I explained in the Parents’ Information Evenings that year, there were two reasons for this change. The first was to ensure that the Mission Statement better reflected our work on Growth Mindsets, encouraging students to persist in the face of setbacks and see effort as the path to mastery. From this perspective neither we, nor the students, can ever really know what their “full potential” is - we just keep working to get a little bit better every day and then see how far we can go. It was great to hear Liam Day making a similar point during Wednesday’s amazing concert.

The other reason is that there is still, sometimes, a belief that education is all about what happens in the classroom, or even just exam grades, and we thought that inspiring students to “be the best they can be” is more obviously about so much more than this.

Over the last six days, so many High School students have shown, in different ways, that they are “inspired to be the best they can be”, whether it is trekking in Pak Chong or playing golf in Phuket, in Music, Art or Drama, at the World Scholars’ Cup or Chulalongkorn University’s Faculty of Economics or on the track, in the pool, on the pitch or on the court at the Under 13 FOBISIA Games.

What a great week!

Roo Stenning
Head of High School

Economics at Chula

Please read what one of our students has to say about the "Economics Knowledge Competition" at Chulalongkorn University:

"On Friday 17th March, Chulalongkorn University’s Faculty of Economics hosted their 19th Annual Economics Knowledge Competition.

This is an invitational competition, with any school in Thailand eligible to  enter a team of three students to participate in this event.

Of 92 teams from all over of Thailand, only the ten teams with the highest scores were selected for the Finals Round. Our team (Anda, Gene and Sun from Year 13)  then had to take an Undergraduate-level Economics test together.

Given that the test was in Thai and that the content was well beyond High School-level, the experience was both exhilarating and excruciating. The team had to deliver a 7-minute presentation on Sustainable Development Goals for Thailand in an economic context, with only 30 minutes preparation time and only a projected sheet of A4 paper allowed to be shown to the judges, who were Professors in the Faculty.

Our team chose to focus on the implications of three goals: Justice, Infrastructure Development and Education and, with the knowledge that we have learnt from Geography and Economics in IB, we were able to present our thoughts thoroughly and logically. The Economics models and theories that we used distinguished us from the other, Thai-school, competitors and we came in 4th overall from 92 teams. We are extremely satisfied with this result."

Anda (Year 13)

High School Calendar: Term 2