Learning is not attained by chance; it must be sought for with ardor and attended to with diligence - Abigail AdamsImmediately after the long weekend the pace of academics became hectic… of course we have weekend activities such as the ‘Formal’ and Kodai Basketball Open Tournament to provide the balance! For the IB Diploma students it meant preparation and completion of English HL/SL and Hindi IB Orals. October was also the month when students from grades 9-12 took the PSAT and SAT examinations respectively, followed by the ACT examinations.
Alongside, college applications were being processed, especially the UCAS applications - filling of application forms, writing the college essays and securing the recommendation letters. The Careers and College office has its hands full as the Class of 2010 has 138 students making it the largest senior class in the history of KIS and the largest number to sit the May 2010 IB examinations.
The High School office was busy with “staffing” in order to ensure that all those who need keeping on track are being closely monitored. The online attendance of students is working well and is showing positive results in efficiently managing student attendance.
I am indeed grateful to the music department for working over-time in preparing the students for the RSM examinations. With the sudden departure of one of their faculty members, the department rallied together to ensure that our music students are well prepared for these examinations.
On the sidelines, our basketball teams are getting set to take part in the Ooty inter school tournament now re-scheduled to November. KIS came second in the recent Kodai Open Basketball tournament (see article).
Tectronics held an Interschool Robotics Junior competition in Bangalore and the KIS team came first in the southern zone category. Our congratulations go out to Min-Gyu Lee and Alan Alphonse for achieving this honor! We were selected to take part in the international school competition in Seoul, South Korea which we unfortunately could not attend. However, we do hope to do so in the coming year.
We also had a successful Atlas Rubicon Curriculum Mapping online core team training for the coordinators, VP and the ISM. Now we are gearing up for the all staff training in curriculum mapping next month. The English, Second Language and ESL departments have started their curriculum review. Especially this month our heads of departments and coordinators are very busy in the staff evaluation process. We are indeed grateful to Selvi Britto our new data base programmer for starting the Eforum on the Moodle platform and training the staff in this area. This Eforum is to be used for online learning and academic discussions. Our congratulations also go out to Marsha Joshi who was elected our NESA representative for 2009-2010 and to Anna Kagedal who will take over this responsibility in 2010-2011.
The busiest month of the first semester had its usual moments of tensions, pressures and the sense of satisfaction that multi tasking and time management has worked with varying degrees of success!
