Abingdonian 2020

88 The Abingdonian It can sometimes take a while for a new Lower School cohort to gel as a team as first years make the jump from primary school and second years take on the responsibility of having younger boys to mentor and support, but this year things did seem to settle down remarkably quickly and so it should perhaps not be a surprise that the undoubted highlight of the Lower School year (and possibly of my entire teaching career to date!) came after only a few weeks of the new term with the annual House Singing Competition and a superb demonstration of teamwork and commitment from the boys. Having chosen a song that was well-suited to their voices in the form of A Million Dreams from The Greatest Showman , we used every musical trick in the book (soloists, antiphonal sections, and even a high-soaring descant sung by the Lower School members of Chapel and Gospel Choir). Every single boy played their part in the final performance and many of them even managed to smile and look like they were enjoying themselves (no mean feat when you know that all the older boys in the school are watching you) and there was unrestrained joy when the judge announced that Lower School had won for the first time in the competition’s history. It was the perfect example of being the best you can be. As the year went on, the first years quickly adapted to the expectations of life at secondary school, impressing their teachers with their commitment in the classroom, and the second years really started shifting up through the gears as they were faced with more and more challenging work. The boys were also involved in a really wide range of Other Half activities and the introduction of the new Other Half Praise system led to recognition of these achievements on a regular basis during morning registrations. The boys also showed that they were always up for a bit of healthy rivalry and the inter- tutor group competitions in the first half of the year (rugby, the Lower School Challenge, cross country and chess) were all fiercely contested. The Lent Term ended rather abruptly due to the school closure but we did manage to fit in the inter-tutor group hockey tournament, won by 2G and 1H, and hold an end of term assembly in which we were able to celebrate the fact that members of the second year had done very well in the various scholarship examinations with awards going to Sean Hanlon, Aluinn MacDonald, Roddy McVie, Arthur Robertson, Thomas Wilson (music exhibition), Lachlan Keene (music), Finnbar Scott (art), Tristan Clark Lam (academic), Jack Veal and Oliver Veal (academic and sport), and Rupert Mathieson (academic, drama and music exhibition). The usual residential adventure trips could not take place in the Easter holiday, but, to keep the boys occupied over the break, they were offered a range of challenges by their tutors and senior members of staff including baking an Easter cake, designing a water feature, coming up with kitchen chemistry experiments, and playing a tune on glasses of water. There were lots of excellent entries, with Oliver Sherratt, Finn Walsh (joint runners up) and Sam Wormald (overall winner) doing particularly well. The Summer Term was a term unlike any other but, despite all the difficulties involved, it was great to see how well the boys adapted to online learning, managing to keep on top of their lessons and taking the opportunities offered by a rather different range of Other Half activities. It wasn’t always easy and it was undoubtedly the case that many of the boys really missed the hustle and bustle of being in school together, but they will definitely have learnt a great deal about themselves and what really matters to them over Lower School