English

Ms Rachel Deligiorgakis – Leader of Learning

2024 has been a busy year for the English Faculty as we embrace the opportunities offered by the new NSW English syllabus. The English teachers have spent countless hours designing new programs and resources and selecting and preparing new texts to engage our students.

One of the highlights of this redesign has been the opportunity for students to study a greater variety of texts, and our students in Year 8 have certainly enjoyed getting the chance to act out Jack Davis’ play Honeyspot in class, and learn about the role that acting plays in bringing the characters of a drama text to life.

Similarly, our Year 7 students could not believe their luck when they learnt that they would be learning about genre and intertextuality through the study of the film Into the Spiderverse.

Year 9 students, likewise, enjoyed learning about rhetoric through their study of a range of contemporary digital texts and speeches, and entertained their peers and their teachers with speeches aiming to convince us to believe topics like “the crows at Marist College Eastwood are aliens”.

Just as our junior students have embraced these new opportunities, so too our senior students have taken on the opportunities offered by our alumni tutoring program, with an impressive number of students attending sessions in the Learning Centre before and after school. It has been pleasing to see such a positive attitude in the senior English courses, and we are all proud of the determination and resilience our students have shown, and the substantial learning growth that has resulted.

Our Year 12 Advanced students have had the extra benefit of attending the Sport for Jove (theatre company) symposium on The Crucible, a valuable experience involving live theatre and discussion, that gave them a newfound appreciation for their HSC text, and refreshed their memory ahead of next term’s trial examinations. Our Year 7 students attended Unlocking the Poetry Code, a funny and informative performance from ‘Poetry in Action’ that complemented their Term 2 study of telling stories through poetry.

We have had an exciting start to the year, and have been pleased with the enthusiasm and commitment that our students have shown for English this semester.