School Cadets: Extreme fun leads to future excellence

Trinity Grammar Cadets
Learning to lead … Trinity Grammar School Cadets.

For pure adventure, it’s hard to beat Cadets. What other extracurricular activity combines sport, camping, bivouacking, tracking, patrolling, navigating, abseiling, bushcraft and tactical camouflage with practical military skills such as casualty evacuation, radio communications, first aid, field engineering and ceremonial drill and parade routines? As after-school activities go, cadet training is “extreme”.

But more than fun and excitement, cadets acquire a fundamental skill set that helps them to mature into self-confident, responsible and resourceful young adults. This is why cadet units are a central aspect of student life at many independent schools.

Trinity Grammar School, in Sydney’s Inner West, places a very high value on its cadet program making it compulsory for all students in years 8 and 9. While no longer mandatory from year 10 onward, students are encouraged to stick with the program to bolster their leadership skills. “Trinity has found that those boys who continue beyond the compulsory two-year cadet window are amongst the best leaders that the school produces,” it says. Continue reading “School Cadets: Extreme fun leads to future excellence”

Independent schooling helps bridge gender pay gap

IGS schools

For all the gains feminism has brought women, true equality, particularly in the workplace, remains elusive.

Women make up almost half of university graduates and enter the workforce in equal numbers to men yet they earn less and climb the corporate ladder much more slowly, if at all.

On the bright side, things are changing — albeit very slowly. The release of the Gender Equality Scorecard this week revealed that women earn 23 per cent less than men but that figure represents a gain of 1.6 percentage points in the three years since the first Scorecard was released. Continue reading “Independent schooling helps bridge gender pay gap”

Pop quiz: Name more than one female scientist

How many famous female scientists can you name — not including Marie Curie? If you’re having trouble thinking of any, you’re not alone; even scientists struggle to answer this question.

Brainy beauty ... actress and inventor Hedy Lamarr.
Brainy beauty … actress and inventor Hedy Lamarr.

The ongoing Public Perception of Famous Female Scientists survey has, since 2004, asked over 1000 scientists and members of the general public in the UK and Western Europe to name 10 famous women scientists. So far, just over 1 per cent of respondents have been up to the task while 30 per cent could name only Marie Curie, the Polish-French two-time Nobel Prize winner for her work on radioactivity and the discovery of the elements radium and polonium. DNA researcher Rosalind Franklin and pioneering nurse Florence Nightingale (included for her statistical work) rounded out the the top three.
Continue reading “Pop quiz: Name more than one female scientist”