Three cheers for Thomas Mills

Ben has now finished school - he won't be returning until after the October half-term holiday. This is a momentous occasion but has been made very painless by the response of Thomas Mills High School who really couldn't have been more helpful. On Thursday we went again to see Ben's head of year, Mr Wheeler, who handed over a not-too-huge pile of books and list of work for almost all of his subjects.

According to my calculations we have work for Science, Maths, English, French, German, DT (Design Technology), History, Geography, Latin and RS (Religious Studies). Missing are PE (but I feel confident he'll get plenty of exercise), Drama (but we do have A Midsummer Night's Dream for English so can put on a performance on board) and Art (perhaps he can illustrate the journal his English teacher has asked for). Some of the teachers have been quite creative (for DT he has a CD of design software and has to design his own boat), others less so (not sure that Sikhism or the history of black Americans is very relevant to the voyage).

Still, three cheers for the school who could have made life so difficult, and instead have been immensely positive and helpful.

Our plan is for Ben to do a couple of hours work each weekday right through the summer, as this will be much easier to manager than a longer school day. I also hope to teach him the basics of navigation as this includes a whole lot of other aspects (geometry, geology, geography, arithmetic and meteorology, to name a few). I'm planning to take along my little-used sextant, together with a helpful almanac etc downloaded to my Palm, so perhaps he can help me with astro-nav - I certainly can't understand it!!!

1 comment:

Ben said...

YIPEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE! i got most of the email adresses from people at school so i'll still be able keep in touch!

Merry Christmas from just me

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