Headmaster’s Extra

The examination season is now fully underway and School seems a little empty as a result. The boys I have spoken to seem pleased with how things are going and I hope that continues. In support of our exciting Antarctic Expedition project we had an excellent lecture from Professor John Smellie of the British Antarctic Survey. His specialist field is Volcanic Activity in Antarctica and he gave a fascinating insight into a subject I certainly knew very little about! It was good for the boys to hear about such interesting, long term research and its impact on the science of Global warming.

Kevin Riley

The best tennis of his life

Year 10 pupil Myles Golding gave his “finest display so far” during his visit to Hawaii for the ITF Boys 18 singles, according to his tennis coach, Clinton Coleman. In Myles’ first match he beat Brazilian Marco Kobayashi 6-3, 6-2. “Myles showed a great mix of strong hitting and patience to break his opponent down,” said Mr Coleman. He then played the number 12 seed, American Will Oliver, who was two years older than him. After losing the first set, Myles produced “the best tennis of his life”, to take the second. In the Hawaiian heat, he lost the final set and the match. “He was the youngest player in the draw but still gave the seeded players a scare,” added Mr Coleman.
 

Cambridge-bound for Summer School

Congratulations to Jathukishan Shasiharan who has been successful in his application to attend the famous Cavendish Laboratory summer school in June through the Senior Physics Challenge. The summer school is for gifted Lower Sixth Form Science students and is highly regarded by leading universities as an access initiative directed at AS Physics in schools across the UK. Through the summer school they aim to demystify, and make more accessible to a wider range of students, the transition to university physics. During the five-day course in Cambridge, Jathukishan will participate in research lectures and practical laboratory classes.
 

School of Rock

The John Lyon School has held its first Battle of the Bands, organised to raise funds for the World Challenge group heading to India this summer. The contest had a little more kick to it than your average lunchtime concert, with numerous guitar solos, deafening drums, and particularly enthusiastic front-men/singers (and one guitarist who managed to bloody his fingers whilst strumming … true rock star fashion). There was, in addition, an unusually involved audience, who didn’t miss an opportunity to show their enthusiasm vocally! Four bands took part, only a fraction of the ever increasing number of bands in the School, formed partially as a result of the popular Jam Sessions after School on Friday. Needless to say, the selection process for deciding which bands should perform came under some criticism… This is, however, not likely to be the last of these concerts, with many bands already underway in writing their next song. The winning band, Riot in Heaven, is pictured.

Tim Smith, Lower Sixth

Inter-House Photography Competition

This year instead of the traditional House Art Competition it was decided that digital photography was the chosen medium. The theme of Sport proved very popular. Entries included free-running, horse-riding, formula one racing, and football in Cape Town. The standard was extremely high in all year groups, making choosing the winners very difficult. Moore came first with a large number of very impressive images, followed closely by Butler, Norwood and Vaughan.

Individual prizes go to; first Daniel Cordas in Year 10 for his photograph of a football, which captured the magical quality of light on water (May’s artwork-of-the-month – click here to view). Second place goes to Bilal Khan’s humorous take on riding a bicycle. Sebastian Ferrao’s artistic photograph of a shuttlecock, is third closely followed by Jeyam Emmanuel’s old training shoes. Congratulations to everyone who entered the competition.

Click here to view the winning entries.

Darren Bell, Head of Art & Design

Summer Exhibition of Art

To celebrate the hard work and effort of our A Level and GCSE Art & Design students, we have decided to exhibit their work for everyone to enjoy. The exhibition is on Friday 20 June from 7:30pm to 9:00pm in the Mall Gallery and the Sixth Form Art Studio.

We hope that you be able to join us in celebrating the work of some of the most talented artists within The John Lyon School. Every Art & Design examination pupil will have a selection of their work exhibited, as it is an opportunity for the boys to showcase their creativity. Both staff and pupils have worked hard to produce some outstanding work throughout the past two years and we highly recommend that you visit.

Darren Bell, Head of Art & Design

Sport Report

Running for Harrow Athletics Club (Harrow AC) in the National Junior League, Lower Sixth Form student Sonny Flynn has beaten a Senior 400m record that has stood for the last 26 years. Sonny ran a time of 51.19 seconds to break the first senior record, in any event, since the year 2000.

In the Harrow Athletics Championships JLS Year 8 pupil, Luke Roach-Christie, won the shot putt and was second in the discus. Joe Cumberbatch, was third in the 200m. These two pupils, along with four other JLS athletes, Nathan Grant (100m), Scott Wilsher (Triple Jump), Babatunde Adelekan (Long Jump), and Anthony Jeffrey (200m) were all selected to represent the Borough in the County Championships.

In the Harrow AC Trophy Meet, Luke Roach-Christie won two gold medals, placing first in both the shot putt and the discus. JLS also achieved six silver medals with Scott Wilsher (100m), Kingsley Alleyne (200m), Aaron Sutherland (80m Hurdles), Munraj Matharoo (Javelin), Robert Ivory (High Jump) and the 4 x 100m relay team. This resulted in JLS taking second place in the overall team event.

Luke Roach-Christie has now beaten the School Records in the junior age group (Years 8 & 9) for both shot putt and discus, despite competing against boys in the year above him. He recorded 12.62 metres for the shot (2 meters on the previous record) and 34.33 metres in the discus (12 metres on the previous record).

Nathan Ireland, PE Department

Headmaster’s Extra

Term has started well with the news about our success in the Salters’ Festival of Chemistry and William Phelan (7R) winning the Dragons’ Den Competition at Northwood College recently with his ‘Washing Machine Leak Detector’. As I write, it appears summer has arrived too, which bodes well for our U15 Cup fixture against Tonbridge. I enjoyed my visit to Shanghai, especially the school visits; I hope we may develop some links as a consequence. The pace of development I saw was truly astonishing; on the way back to the UK I sat next to a young Chinese woman who was working for an Indian Petro-Chemical firm in Shanghai and on her way to a job interview in New York. As I said to the boys in Assembly, that’s the competition in the future!

Kevin Riley

Putting on their thinking hats

The Year 8 Gifted & Talented boys recently spent a day exploring Edward de Bono’s ‘Six Hats’. The originator of the term ‘lateral thinking’, de Bono is famous for producing books for the business community. The six hats represent six thinking practices designed to maximise perspective. The exercise aims to stimulate one’s ability to think in six different mind sets in a sequential and systematic way. During normal discussion, people generally adopt one hat and stick to it according to their prejudices. One can challenge people to ‘yellow hat’ (think positively about) an idea, knowing that they are prejudiced against it. Are they clever enough? The artificiality and game aspect of the method adds to the power of the system: people disassociate the concepts and ideas they are putting forward from their ego and preconceptions. We have run the programme for three years. This year we focused on the green hat (idea generation). The acronym WORDE stands for wishful thinking, outrageousness, reversal, distortion and exaggeration. By applying these concepts to an idea or theme, we create movement and a change in perspective. We had a very enjoyable time observing how these ideas have been employed in the classic comedy sketches from the past.

Sam Andon, Mathematics Department

Salters’ Festival Success

Last year four JLS Year 8 boys achieved an excellent result when they came second in the Salters’ Festival of Chemistry at University College London. This year four of our Year 8 boys achieved FIRST prize in the Salter’s Festival at Queen Mary University. Congratulations to:- Stephen Bennett (8Q), Robert Gardiner (8P), Sevan Keoshgerian (8R) and Arjun Puri (8R), accompanied by Mrs Lily Gupta, Head of Chemistry, who took on pupils from 20 other schools. As a group, all four boys listened carefully to the instructions, worked extremely well as a team, reported their results accurately and behaved immaculately. Their challenge was to ascertain who had stolen the silverware from a mansion, using forensic science. Each of the six possible suspects, all employees of the mansion, had a sample of salt found on them when questioned. There was also a sample of salt found at the crime scene. The students had to find out what the samples were and match one or more of them to the one from the body. They had to perform flame tests and chemical identifications on each of the samples and known chemicals, repeat and check their results, and then cross-reference their results with the witness statements they were provided with. Bobby Gardiner (8P) said: “Overall it was a great experience and I would do it all over again if I was given the chance. We learnt a lot about chemistry and even if we hadn’t won we would have had a lot of fun.”