Principal’s Message Week 3 Term 3 2022

Guys and Dolls Production

I hope you got to see this year’s school production of Guys and Dolls. To say I am proud of the students and staff would be a massive understatement. I thought the production was fantastic and judging by the responses of the audiences that is no exaggeration. The show was sold-out every night and both matinees. Every aspect of the show was thoroughly professional, from the sound, lighting, costumes and stage props, to the acting and singing of the performers and the seamless efficiency of the backstage crew. While it takes a team of people to produce an event such as this, one person – Tessa Kirk- stands out in terms of her effort, motivation, energy and professional execution of direction and production she brought to the show. Tessa has built wonderful relationships with the students motivating them to go well beyond what they themselves thought they were capable of achieving. I will be very surprised if a few of the students aren’t inspired to go on and pursue theatre studies in later years and possibly even as a career pathway.

My thanks and congratulations to Tessa and all students and staff who contributed to making this year’s show a standout.

Course Counselling for 2023

It’s early in Term 3 however students in years 8, 9, 10 and 11 have been busy doing course counselling interviews this week in preparation for 2023. Pleasingly this year we have been able to conduct the interviews face to face in our school atrium. My thanks to parents and carers for working with us and investing the time to develop an individualised education program for your son/daughter. It is a long and complex process to organise the course counselling of close to 1000 students. The next step will be to make decisions about what subjects will run based on student preferences then create a timetable that reflects these preferences. We could of course more easily create a timetable based upon set blocks so that student choice was limited to those set blocks, but that is not the Geelong High School way. Our approach is to determine student interest and allow this to drive the shape of our program and timetable. The end result, while taking longer, is that the vast majority of students get all or nearly all their first preferences and we have happier, more engaged students doing the subjects that interest them the most. My thanks again, to students and parents/carers for engaging in these important conversations with us, and my sincere thanks to the team of teachers that have facilitated these conversations.

Glenn Davey

Principal