The ISE mission is to educate resilient, confident, self-motivated and creative students, who are internationally minded and accepting of individual differences, and who will be inspired to develop their learning and achieve their potential.
4 November 2016 Dear Students, Parents and Staff A warm welcome back after the short break. I hope you had time last week to take in some of the special events of Dutch Design Week. My favourite booths at Stripj-s, were those organized by university students, including the TU/e. It will be interesting to see which of these student innovations become part of our everyday future. This week we make preparations for Diwali, and look forward to Eindhoven's Glow Festival. These celebrations have inspired my selections of books listed at the bottom of this newsletter. My choices are connected to one of my hero's, Richard Feynman. If you have not come across this unique scientist, I think he would like to be known, more than even his Nobel Prize, for his unique capacity to make the strangest and most complex aspects of science seem absolutely simple. He believed that it was his duty to offer clarity and to 'enlighten' - not a bad philosophy to govern your approach to life. I strongly recommend to all secondary students the first few minutes of the BBC interview, as they will sense just how wonderfully beautiful and simple he makes nature really seem! Eindhoven Glow Festival & Diwali In a city that literally has given light to the world, it seems rather timely and appropriate that within the next two weeks the community will enjoy both Diwali and the Glow festival. Glow events combine the natural beauty of light with technology, and human ingenuity. You will not have to be an artist, nor a poet, to be amazed and inspired by the creations to be exhibited. The light sculptures and designs should not only bring a little more 'light to the world', but will also honor the ingenuity of the people of this region and the Philip's family in particular. "At this time of Diwali and as I light this sacred lamp I am aware of how this lamp symbolises the triumph of: enlightenment over blind faith; prosperity over poverty; knowledge over ignorance; good health and well-being over disease and ill health; Freedom over bondage... In our struggle we will be celebrating this triumph together." Nelson Mandela, 1991
Diwali celebrates the natural beauty of light, while recognizing, honoring and valuing all that 'light' represents. At a time when world political figures seem to rely on public ignorance as opposed to knowledge, truth and wisdom to convey their ideas and to persuade; when they use fear as opposed to courage, contentment and faith; and when they use isolationism as opposed to community spirit, freedom and international-mindedness, Diwali provides the
The school vision is of a purposeful and focused learning community based on respect where all are engaged in a co-operative, challenging and enjoyable learning experience. We aim to provide a caring, supportive and positive environment where students, staff and parents feel valued, and safe.
The ISE mission is to educate resilient, confident, self-motivated and creative students, who are internationally minded and accepting of individual differences, and who will be inspired to develop their learning and achieve their potential.
opportunity to reflect and celebrate those characteristics and attributes that truly bring 'light' to humanity and the human condition. We could do with a few more Nelson Mandela's and Richard Feynman's in this world – people dedicated to providing the form of security that only comes through wisdom and understanding. We also need communities to continue to celebrate Diwali, to offer opportunities to reflect on such enlightened ideals, values and truisms. I am therefore extremely pleased that we are hosting the Diwali celebrations next week, and look forward to seeing many of you add your own 'light' to the festivities. Source: •
Speech by Nelson Mandela at Diwali Celebration held at Durban City Hall, 3 November 1991 (Accessed 28 October 2016)
Halloween Parties: Witches, Goblins and Rabbits Are Coming to the ISE! "And Now, Harry, let us step out into the night and pursue that flighty temptress adventure." J.K. Rowling While we may have missed the exact date for children to have a Halloween adventure out in the cold, dark and mysterious night of Eindhoven, we will have our own party for Goblins, Cats and Rabbits this afternoon and this evening. As always, my very special thanks to our Parent Committee for organizing the Halloween Parties today and for making our entrance way in Owl so very festive! (I just watched some primary school children who literally gasped when they saw what had been created for them) Note for Students: In which book and page is the quote from J.K Rowling from? Hint: in which books does Harry talk openly to Dumbledore, and Dumbledore seek Harry's help? More Than a School: Helpful Advice and Programmes for Parents In keeping with our vision to be 'More than a School' we are aiming throughout the year to provide seminars and courses for parents to help assimilate into new communities, and/or provide further information related to our vision for education. The following sessions are planned for this month. •
The Dutch Lessons for parents began this week. If you are interested in seeing if any places remain available please get in touch with Frans Suikerbuik (
[email protected]).
The school vision is of a purposeful and focused learning community based on respect where all are engaged in a co-operative, challenging and enjoyable learning experience. We aim to provide a caring, supportive and positive environment where students, staff and parents feel valued, and safe.
The ISE mission is to educate resilient, confident, self-motivated and creative students, who are internationally minded and accepting of individual differences, and who will be inspired to develop their learning and achieve their potential.
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Welcome to the Netherlands! - Tuesday 8th November 08.45 to 10.00 am An Information session, presented by Olivia van Broek of the Expat Centre South, is offered to parents and is designed to provide some practical advice for families who have just arrived to Eindhoven. For details see the Monthly Newsletter. Exiting the Netherlands! – Thursday Nov 18th 09:00 to 11:00 am We haven't forgotten those of you who are leaving the region. Heidi Los will give some practical advice and I will help as well with information related to finding the right school for your children Importance of Raising Bilingual Children & Transitioning to a New Country Tuesday 19:00 to 22:30 pm 22 November Dr. Tracey Tokuhama-Espinosa will explain just how important it is for children to become bilingual. Dr. Camilla Spadavecchia will offer an introduction to one of her courses on helping Knowledge workers immigrate. Both of these are topical for our community.
The Importance of Non-Directed Play A few years ago, I happened to be speaking with an executive from the LEGO Corporation. He mentioned how financially difficult the process was for his company to move from the traditional LEGO blocks many parents will have enjoyed as children, to the specialized kits of today. In my view, tinkering with bicycles and engines, and building structures using LEGO blocks, has been instrumental in the development of all mechanical engineers over the past half century. The original LEGO blocks required a child to use their own creativity to imagine and then create cars, bridges, spaceships – whatever the child-mind could conceive it could be built using Lego. I do recall being absolutely thrilled when LEGO moved from the traditional cuboid shapes to providing wheels, and curved pieces. However (and maybe I am just a little too old), but these new kits while producing more real-life looking outcomes, have a very different effect on children. These kits require one to follow rules and diagrams. Sometimes these skills can be helpful, when building an IKEA wardrobe for example, but they also eliminate that pure creative stage that I always enjoyed, and believe is essential for a child's development. Our future designers and engineers, need such opportunities when they are young to explore possibilities and enhance their creativity. Children also need opportunities to play. When I say play, I mean play in its most pure sense...without equipment...without rules set by adults... without the adults organizing and managing their play. The school vision is of a purposeful and focused learning community based on respect where all are engaged in a co-operative, challenging and enjoyable learning experience. We aim to provide a caring, supportive and positive environment where students, staff and parents feel valued, and safe.
The ISE mission is to educate resilient, confident, self-motivated and creative students, who are internationally minded and accepting of individual differences, and who will be inspired to develop their learning and achieve their potential.
Children who at a young age are offered opportunities for non-directed play, will create their own games, and their own rules for the game. They will develop a set of social norms for their play, will learn to compromise, lead, follow and solve problems. Educators and parents must consider such forms of play as a curriculum entitlement for all children. We might want to consider replacing our primary equipment boxes with an empty box… Maybe, just maybe, we can place some chalk in these empty boxes, but leave out the equipment! Experimental Play - Rockets to Take Us to New Heights There are other forms of play that I think are equally important to a child's development. When I had reached the grand old age of 9 years old, play turned to the creation of what we called 'rockets'. Our rockets were not made from a kit we bought. There were no directions, nor adults to guide the process. We made our rockets from a dried tree branch, the cardboard from a cereal box, and a piece of string. We also discovered that a metal nut was helpful to add weight so the rockets would fall nose-down, but that was it. There was no Youtube in those days. We were not near a library, and there were no adults to guide the experimenting. We learned that by wrapping the string around the branch in a particular way it could project the rocket high into the air. We would make small changes in our design: the length of the branch, the shape of the cardboard stabilizers, the way we wrapped the string around the rocket, and the method of throwing it. After thousands of attempts, with a group of friends all making small adjustments, we eventually created a design which would send that rocket up .. up .. up and far across a large field. It was absolutely beautiful to watch your rocket in flight, and there was immense satisfaction in seeing that your small change could made such a difference. I believe this process helped me to truly understand what it felt to truly 'think like a scientist'. This 'play' was non-directed – no adult organized the groups; no adult provided a design; no diagram nor helpful hint had been offered to us. The idea of the rocket and the design came directly through a group of children playing together. Like the LEGO blocks above, children should be given such opportunities to play, to socialize, to be an artist, and learn to lead through the process. Give young children space and time to play, and just watch what they can create! The school vision is of a purposeful and focused learning community based on respect where all are engaged in a co-operative, challenging and enjoyable learning experience. We aim to provide a caring, supportive and positive environment where students, staff and parents feel valued, and safe.
The ISE mission is to educate resilient, confident, self-motivated and creative students, who are internationally minded and accepting of individual differences, and who will be inspired to develop their learning and achieve their potential.
The Teacher's Toolbox: Dyslexia Part 2 This item follows on from the situation mentioned in the last newsletter of a student who had learning difficulties related to Dyslexia. The story, I will describe below, actually took place over several years. It has been shortened to fit into the newsletter, and is connected to a long set of conversations I had with an engineer. This engineer holds over one hundred patents, is both extremely creative and also extremely Dyslexic. I wanted to understand more about Dyslexia so the engineer and I had a series of conversations, which helped me to truly understand the challenges he faced above those I had read or were presented in seminars. It is fortunate that through my conversations with this engineer, we would be able to help the student mentioned below. The Student: As I recall, this student was extremely excited about starting secondary school. Unfortunately, his academic performance from primary did not match his enthusiasm. His frustrations with his performance in secondary eventually led to absence from school. I started working with him, to try and figure out what the issues might be. Talking one day, with the engineer I mentioned above, I learned more and more about the challenges he faced in school and university. I also learned how much he enjoyed creating things with wires, lights, and anything mechanical. Through one of the student's friends I learned that the student had created a 'light sculpture' as a gift for a potential girlfriend. When this sculpture was sadly returned, unopened by the girl, it was seen by the engineer. He told me (without knowing anything about the student) that he thought the student was 'like him' very creative, as the skill involved in creating the sculpture was quite impressive. I wondered if the student might also be Dyslexic, and so asked an expert to work with him. The results were quite dramatic. The expert helped the student to readjust what is called the 'mind's eye'. It is difficult to explain what this is if you do not have the problem, but as it turns out this 'difficulty' (and also a 'gift') was shared by both the student and the engineer. It has to do with the position from which we experience the world. When I take part in a conversation, I "see" the world roughly from a position in, I guess, the middle of my forehead. This is my observation point for the world around me. My world emanates from this position and I view others in the world relative to this position. The student and the engineer on the other hand had very different observation points (the position of their mind's eye).
The school vision is of a purposeful and focused learning community based on respect where all are engaged in a co-operative, challenging and enjoyable learning experience. We aim to provide a caring, supportive and positive environment where students, staff and parents feel valued, and safe.
The ISE mission is to educate resilient, confident, self-motivated and creative students, who are internationally minded and accepting of individual differences, and who will be inspired to develop their learning and achieve their potential.
To understand this, imagine that you are making a movie right now of the scene of you reading this newsletter. Suppose that the camera is positioned slightly above and in front of you (or actually anywhere besides directly in front of where your eyes are right now). With the camera in this position you become a character in your own movie. Therefore, a person with a mind's eye which is not positioned in the 'usual' place will look at the world, and their place in the world, very differently than is typical. Their sense of identity, and the way they interact with others will equally be very different,. One of the steps in helping both the engineer and this student was to 'provide them with a way to alter, at will, the position of the 'mind's eye'. As I recall the engineer-inventor was very concerned that moving the position of his 'mind's eye' would have a serious negative effect on his ability to create (he can see complex sets of diagrams in 3-D without a computer!), but as he was told he could change it whenever he wanted he was happy to go through the process. With the 'mind's eye' in a position other than where the majority of us experience the world, your sense of identity and the way you interact with others is greatly affected. The good news, is that this alteration of the mind's eye plus visualizing the non-picture words as mentioned in the last newsletter has made a dramatic difference to both the world of the Engineer and the student. (The Engineer continues to this day to invent and work on new patents!)
Further Reading: •
DAVIS, R. P (2010) 'Gift of Dyslexia', Peregree a Penguin Publishing Company, New York.
Meeting on Transport Before the holiday I met again with a city official who is to contact several municipal traffic experts and possibly an expert from outside the municipality to examine the situation. It was clear from him, as well as myself, that there will need to be a joint effort to find solutions to the bottlenecks – many of which are outside of the ISE campus. At the same time, there is one spot within our control where we are currently aiming to make changes. In the morning we have parent vehicles leaving the campus at the same time as some secondary students are entering. This slows the vehicles exiting the campus and is quite dangerous for those on the bikes. Please can I ask all such students to use the Oirschotsedijk bike path and enter via one of the gates adjacent to the Fox building. We will open an extra gate near the Fox Building to reduce the distance students might have to travel. Please continue using this path and entrance each morning, until we can extend the bike path right next to the main campus The school vision is of a purposeful and focused learning community based on respect where all are engaged in a co-operative, challenging and enjoyable learning experience. We aim to provide a caring, supportive and positive environment where students, staff and parents feel valued, and safe.
The ISE mission is to educate resilient, confident, self-motivated and creative students, who are internationally minded and accepting of individual differences, and who will be inspired to develop their learning and achieve their potential.
roadway and add an extra gate next to the current car gate. This should eliminate at least one of the issues. Suggested Readings: My suggestions for readings this week are connected to one of my favorite quotations, scientists, and ToK questions. The quotation is from the Physicist, Paul Dirac which was used in a ToK question many years ago, and one that I thoroughly enjoyed discussing with students. "In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite." ~ Paul Dirac Source: As quoted in Brighter Than a Thousand Suns: A Personal History of the Atomic Scientists (1958) by Robert Jungk, as translated by James Cleugh, p. 22 For me the scientist that epitomizes the first part of this quotation is the Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman who more than any scientist of the last century tried his best to make the complex seem simple and to inspire, in all who came in contact with him, a love for science and nature. To me, it is absolutely right that his Nobel Prize was connected to a diagram which bears his name, and which made a very complicated idea in quantum mechanics seem so much easier. If an ISE student ever makes a time machine... and I hope they do... I would love to go back in time and take one of his classes. He wanted so much to inspire the next generation of physicists so he developed his own first year university course, which to this day is considered, by those who should know, the very best ever. Feynman was hilarious. He loved pranks, and he simply enjoyed life to its full. He worked on the Mahattan project, won the Nobel Prize and helped engineers discover the cause of the Space Shuttle explosion several years ago. Recommendation 1: Feynman's Interview (For All Secondary Students) I recommend the following Tedtalk to every secondary student, which will help to explain everything from friction, conservation of energy, why things burn, cool things about plants, the sun, etc. This Tedtalk epitomes the two qualities that we should strive for as educators – a deep passion for our subject, and a desire to find a way to make complex concepts seem easy. •
TEDTalk: BBC Interview of Richard P Feynman Accessed 21 October 2016
Recommendation 2: Six Easy Pieces (For Senior Students and Parents) IB Maths and Physics students might also enjoy a celebrated book of Professor Feynman called Six Easy Pieces (there is also a book called Six Not So Easy Pieces... and it is not so The school vision is of a purposeful and focused learning community based on respect where all are engaged in a co-operative, challenging and enjoyable learning experience. We aim to provide a caring, supportive and positive environment where students, staff and parents feel valued, and safe.
The ISE mission is to educate resilient, confident, self-motivated and creative students, who are internationally minded and accepting of individual differences, and who will be inspired to develop their learning and achieve their potential.
easy!). I read this many years ago, and as with everything he does, he makes the topics that much easier to comprehend. There is a downloadable pdf and ebook available. •
FEYNMAN, R. (1963) 'Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics By Its Most Brilliant Teacher', The California Institute of Technology
Recommendation 3: How to Be An Explorer of The World (For Primary Students and Parents) This book was suggested by a parent and artist, Kim Wieringa, who reminded me of the books that are available today which help to scaffold the 'art' of creative thinking through a process of journal writing and exploration. At a young age the key to creativity is to be given the time to experiment, and make 'good' mistakes in the process. Adults for some reason seem to be less willing to 'have a go', and the result seems to be that we appear to have overall a diminishing capacity for the creative process. The moral of the story here is simply … "Have a GO!". Recommendation 4 : Transaction Analysis (For teachers and Parents) This book suggests that the best way to ensure that students are learning and realizing their potential is to develop a classroom culture and style of communication centered on adultto-adult discussions and relationships. Teachers who create such a culture within the classroom will enjoy every minute of the teaching and learning process. Parents who increasingly use an adult-to-adult style of conversation with their children will find it infinitely easier to manage their interactions as their children go through the teenage years. The concept of Transaction Analysis was developed by the psychologist Eric Berne. It was designed for 8-year olds to understand (I think he should have use a simpler sounding name for the idea! as it makes it all seem rather complex when the ideas are not). o NEWELL, S. AND JEFFREY, D. (2002). 'Behaviour Management a Transaction Analysis Approach', David Fulton Publishers Limited Enjoy the Halloween Party and the weekend, Roy White Director
The school vision is of a purposeful and focused learning community based on respect where all are engaged in a co-operative, challenging and enjoyable learning experience. We aim to provide a caring, supportive and positive environment where students, staff and parents feel valued, and safe.
