Senior Play cast

Rehearsals are now starting for the Senior Play, Dancing at Lughnasa, the cast being :

Michael - Rory Quinn
Kate - Celeste Guinness
Maggie - Ellie Russell
Agnes - Annabel Sharma
Chris - Jessica Young
Rose - Rachael Roden
Jack - Dylan Stewart
Gerry - Oscar Nunan

More in due course from the production process.

New Library Books

New books are always being added to our excellent Library collection. Here is Librarian Tom McConville's latest list of new additions. They include :

In Junior Fiction,
Michelle Paver's Outcast, the fourth volume of the Chronicles of Ancient Darkness sequence, called 'very moving and touching' in an Amazon review, and Michael Scott's The Alchemyst (more on Scott's website).

In Senior Fiction, Pat Barker's Life Class, mentioned in a post here recently, Sebastian Faulks's Engleby, and Don DeLillo's contribution to the steady growing genre of '9/11 Fiction', Falling Man (reviewed by Adam Mars-Jones in the Observer here as 'a masterly polyphonic fizzling').

In Non-Fiction, two books relevant to English courses, Christopher Bigsby's excellent study Arthur Miller, and Ariel : the Restored Edition, which includes a fascimile of Sylvia Plath's originals.

Size Zero Yummy Mummy Papped

The latest edition of the Shorter Oxford Dictionary has been published today (see the AskOxford website in our right-hand sidebar). It includes 2,500 new words and phrases, including 'cattle class', 'manbag', and 'flexible friend'. And 'Jaffa Cake' has at last made it into the official lexicon.

William Carlos Williams

Today, we resume the scheme we started last term of having a 'Poem of the Week' posted around the school and read in English classes. Read the first post here, explaining the idea.

This week's poem is 'This is Just to Say', by William Carlos Williams. See the American Academy of Poets page on the poem and the poet here, with the full text.

Pat Barker

Pat Barker's fine novel Regeneration, set in Craiglockhart Hospital in Edinburgh in the First World War, is again on the Leaving Certificate course, and our V form will be studying it in the coming year as part of their comparative module. Today, Barker is interviewed in the Guardian by Sarah Crown about her new novel, Life Class, also set in WWI (and now in our Library) :-

"What she likes about writing about the first world war, she explains, is that it has become the archetype for other wars; by writing about it, she is writing by proxy about all the wars going on today".

House Speeches 2007

Members of the Transition Year have just started putting together their pieces for this year's House Speech competition on the evening of Sunday 30th September. They speak for up to five minutes on a topic of their choice in front of the school (and judges) in the BSR.

Two members represent each House (as well as a reserve), and this year they are (Glen) Patrick Faulkner and Jasper Mathews, (Gwynn) Alec Cherry and Robin Russell, (Stackallan) Ian Fraser and Luke Pitt Ryan, (Hollypark) Jessica Dean and Sophie Kyd-Rebenburg, (Iona) Lauren Cooke and Molly Sanderson. Josh Buckingham is presenting the evening. All TY members write a review of the process and evening afterwards, and we'll post one here when the time comes.

McCarthy, Fitzgerald

Two online interviews noted recently:-

• an interview with Tom McCarthy, author of an intriguing and original novel we recommended last year, Remainder, in 'Ready Steady Book'. It's just been reissued in paperback.

• an interview in today's Guardian online in their series 'Great Interviews of the Twentieth Century', with F. Scott Fitzgerald, first published in the New York Post in 1936.

Senior Play auditions

Auditions will be held in the coming week for our annual Senior Play, in November, which this year will be Brian Friel's fine study of five sisters in 1930s Donegal, Dancing at Lughnasa. Plenty more detail about the production here after rehearsals get going.

Hamlet article

In the main section of today's London Independent, Paul Taylor has an interesting article about the history of Hamlet productions, 'as Jude Law and David Tennant reveal plans to play' the part. He examines performances by Lawrence Olivier, Simon Russell-Beale, Mark Rylance (pictured - 'the supreme Hamlet of our times'), John Gielgud, Stephane Dillane and David Warner :-

The bottom line in this greatest of all tragedies is that the preternaturally brilliant hero treats you, through his soliloquies, as an equal. And I would argue that the experience of seeing plays at Shakespeare's Globe has intensified our awareness of this phenomenon. All the actors I have loved ... have had the ability to bare their souls to an audience in such a way as to see deep into yourself.

See the full article here.

William Trevor books

Our most distinguished Old Columban author, the novelist and short story writer William Trevor (whose real surname is Cox), recently kindly donated to our Library signed first editions of several of his books, including The Old Boys, Cheating at Canasta, Felicia's Journey, The Children of Dynmouth, A Bit on the Side, The Story of Lucy Gault and After Rain. Another donated novel is Fools of Fortune, sections of which are set in the College. William Trevor has also written about SCC in his memoirs, Excursions in the Real World.

Transition Year course 07/08

Last year we posted a lot of material by our Transition Year pupils, including Extended Essay and Work Portfolio pieces. We have just started on the 2007/08 course, and over the next week or so, pupils will be selecting books for their Extended Essays (some of the completed ones will be posted here near the end of term). They get advice sheets (here) on possible topics and books, but essentially come up with their own ideas. Over the next two months they read, take notes, plan and then write these considerable projects. Some of last year's essays are on our new wiki here.

Our Wikispace

As the school year gets going properly, we've now developed our own new wiki, partly to manage, organise and preserve the huge amount of good material written on this blog by our own pupils. It's still in an early stage, but will develop gradually over the next months. Staff and pupils can edit it (not the general public) and help build up our resources. The Link is above, in the right-hand sidebar, and under 'Our Sites'. Thanks to the free service for education wikis from the people at Wikispaces.

(If you're not sure about the term itself, the Wikipedia entry on Wikis, starts :-
A wiki is a collaborative website which can be directly edited by anyone with access to it. Ward Cunningham, developer of the first wiki WikiWikiWeb, originally described it as "the simplest online database that could possibly work". One of the best-known wikis is Wikipedia.)

New Term

A year after we started this blog fully, this is our 200th post, just as we start a new term. Shortly we will resume regular posts about school news and events, and continue to post examples of pupils' poems and stories, book recommendations and so on. There's lots of activity ahead of us, and also shortly news of our recently-developed 'wiki'.

Then We Came to the End

Joshua Ferris's debut novel, Then We Came to the End, is a virtually unique book - an entire novel told in the first person plural, starting :-
We were fractious and overpaid. Our mornings lacked promise. At least those of us who smoked had something to look forward to at ten-fifteen. Most of us liked most everyone, a few of us hated specific individuals, one or two people loved everyone and everything. Those who loved everyone were unanimously reviled.

What follows (set in a Chicago advertising agency) is an extraordinary technical achievement, but also a consistently funny and often disturbing take on American life and the workplace. It’s also about the nature (and lack) of our individuality, and the ways systems and institutions seep into the fibre of our lives.

Ferris writes on office life in the Guardian here, and the book’s website is here.

JMG

Where We Are

Thanks to a new service from Google Maps, there's now a widget on the right-hand sidebar giving our exact location. Click on 'view larger map' for the full map and then you can zoom in and out. The tabs to the right allow you to switch to Google Earth's helicopter view, and there's also a 'hybrid' option.

Hopkins at Glasnevin

One of the poets on the Leaving Certificate rota (last on in 2006 and sadly not with us this or next year) is Gerard Manley Hopkins. Irish connections include the annual Monasterevin summer school (he used to visit the Kildare village while teaching at the Catholic University in the 1880s); its website includes a searchable online archive.

He is buried in the Jesuit plot at Glasnevin Cemetery, which has excellent tours for schools and the general public. Pictured, our head of department John Fanagan at the memorial on a recent visit (Hopkins's name is on the top of the second tier).

Book recommendation : The Fall

Simon Mawer is a versatile English novelist who lives in Rome, and whose novels don't seem to have made the general breakthrough they deserve. A biology teacher, his most recent book is a biography of the monk Gregor Mendel, subtitled 'Planting the Seeds of Genetics'. His website includes a recent essay from Nature magazine on 'Science in Literature'.

The Fall was published in 2003. The title combines two of the book's concerns: mountaineering and the loss of innocence. Mawer writes evocatively about climbing, particularly in Wales and on the Eiger mountain. His prose is clean and expressive, and the story rattles along. It is underpinned by a mind unobtrusively at work, examining the nature of love, friendship and the effects of time.

Leaving Cert results 2007

Congratulations to all our pupils who have today received another outstanding set of Leaving Certificate results. The overall points average of 441 across all subjects has gone up slightly from last year's phenomenal 440.

In English,

• 94% of our pupils took the exam at Higher Level ; nationally, 64% do.
• 20% of Columbans got 'A' (nationally the figure is 6.6%)
• 33% got 'B' (nationally 18.2%)
• 29% got 'C' (nationally 24.2%)

This means that 53% of our candidates achieved A or B at Higher Level, and 82% got A, B or C (49% nationally).