The latest Tallis 16+ news

Number: 03 | 15 June 2020

Listen to listen to Jenna Lowndes' moving response to the killing of George Floyd entitled BlackLivesMatter.

In this newsletter
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Heads of Year message
Student Voice
Black History Month planning
What have you all been up to?
Year 12 Physics Club
A-level Graphics virtual gallery
Sophie's Cycles
Teni's poems
Film & Media showcase
Chemistry Olympiad update
Art & Design

Dear Tallis Sixth Form Community

As we embark upon the last half term of the academic year, we have been finding imaginative ways of continuing the delivery of the curriculum and giving pastoral support to all members of our 6th form community. Tutors will continue to contact students weekly via email. Do reply to your tutor and ask for help if you need it.

A fundamental part of Tallis 6th form life lies in opportunities afforded to students beyond the curriculum. Since the school closure we have organised student voice meetings, lecture society debates and the KS5 book group in virtual settings. These have been completely wonderful and have enabled the students to communicate ideas, thoughts and feelings in forums beyond their homes and social media platforms.

In Student Voice we are continuing to create a Yearbook to enable the Yr 13s to celebrate their time with us. We are also thinking about the present and the future by collaborating on projects such as collating our Lockdown Diaries and Photos, in order to document and reflect on these strange times.

Lecture Society is thriving and we’re very excited to see Olaitan, Chair of Student Voice delivering a Black Lives Matter Lecture in the wake of civil unrest in the US. Much of the media speculates on how different the current protests feel in relation to those of the past. The scale and diversity of those making their voices heard may well be the catalyst for real change. We have always been and continue to be very proud of Tallis Student Voice and the 6th form community and have every confidence that they can steer this debate sensitively and intelligently in the coming months.

Take good care
The Sixth Form Team

Student Voice

Student Voice Meetings
The brilliant 6th form student voice is now meeting online. Please join the conversation. Remember you don't need to be a post holder or a tutpr rep to get involved. Email Ms Astill to get your teams invite.

The next meetings are as follows:
Tuesday 16th June at 3pm
Tuesday 30th June at 3pm
Tuesday 14th July at 3pm

Lecture Society
Olaitan in Year 12 is delivering a Black Lives Matter lecture. She will be addressing concerns that have arisen from the recent protests and thinking of ways we can all explore and educate ourselves on issues around racism and race relations. If you would like to come along, email Ms Astill.

This will take place on Monday 22nd June at 3pm.

Black History Month planning

Dear Post 16 students,

Last week we sent home an additional Black Lives Matters Bulletin that addressed the current racial tensions following the death of George Floyd in the US. We asked students and parents to get in touch to begin initial conversations about how our community would like to respond to these issue. We at Tallis believe that through dialogue and education, we can equip the emerging generations to create global, lasting change for the better. We also believe this is best achieved together and would like to continue to that conversation.

For that reason we are inviting all of you to register interest if you would like to contribute towards the planning of the next Thomas Tallis Black History Month, October 2020. The theme will be “Say Something!,” and will focus on the UK civil rights movement through history up to present day.

If you would like to make a suggestion, offer input or feedback from previous years, or would like to contribute in any way, we would love to hear from you. Please complete this short form.

BHM Student Engagement Form

Over the last few years, Thomas Tallis Black History Month has grown immensely and we certainly plan to continue to grow. That said it is important to acknowledge due to the impact of Covid 19 it may not be possible to run certain events as we have done in the past. But whatever happens, we fully intend for this time to be full of a rich and engaging experiences that help to address those problems of division in the community for our students. Let’s come together, learn about inequality and change things for the better.

Charmaine Jean-Paul

Rhianne Benzadi's baklava

What have you all been up to?

Curious about how everyone is doing, I recently emailed all year 12s to ask them that very question and I have been amazed by the variety of responses I have received so far. There has been a good amount of cooking and baking going on for starters (and desserts!). Important life skills, without a doubt. Others have also been learning programming skills, plumbing and languages as diverse as Japanese and Norwegian. Many are developing their musical prowess on piano, guitar and mandolin it seems, and enjoying extra time to practice their singing and dancing too.

I was impressed to learn we have at least two novelists fervently writing away, one is 60,000 words into a collaborative effort with her sister and another working alone, but already ten chapters into an exciting mythological adventure that has me more than a little gripped and looking forward to the next ten chapters. Did I just find a reason to hope lockdown continues? Perhaps.

Some of you have signed up for online courses; Owen Moore has already completed a 10 module International Open Academy course in Accounting and Bookkeeping. Others have joined programmes with the National Youth Folk Ensemble and the Maritime Museum Youth Collective, while some are learning all sorts of skills from family members, from driving to beekeeping.

Many have told me about taking a greater interest in the news and current events, not only related to the whole coronavirus issue, but even more so about the shared horror we witnessed seeing what happened to George Floyd and the subsequent protest it has sparked in America. Several students are currently working on personal projects related to this and the wider Black Lives Matter campaign and I hope we might be able to share some of those later among our Tallis community when we can once again come together and assemble properly.

All this came from just a dozen or so replies to my question. I can only imagine what the rest have been doing (besides their studies, of course). Hopefully more of you will write to me and tell me soon, but it’s been so heartening to hear it’s not all Netflix and social media. In fact, several told me they have deliberately sought to reduce their time spent online and do these other things instead and how much better it has made them feel. As one student so eloquently put it, “I’ve taken the time to feel better about myself”.

I have had some fabulous replies to my email and I do so hope many more of you will reply soon or at least draw some inspiration from those I have told you about and work on a little personal development of your own.

Tim Young, Deputy Head of Year 12

Year 12 Physics Club

This year we have run a physics club for Year 12 students once a week. We have developed their problem solving skills using various publications from the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge. They have also participated in the Physics Olympiad from Oxford university with a number of students achieving gold, silver and bronze awards. More recently in lockdown we have turned our attention to quantum mechanics and solving the Schrodinger Equation via Microsoft Teams (a second order differential equation with complex numbers!). The students have been cheerful and enthusiastic throughout. Einstein for one never believed that quantum mechanics was a complete theory, stating that ‘God doesn’t play dice’. However, it appears that the ‘old one’ might be right. In Richard Feynman’s theory of quantum electrodynamics (aptly named QED), quantum mechanics is the most successful theory ever created, with predictions matching experimental outcomes to 16 decimal places (1 part in a 10 million billion!).
We’ve also fitted in some astrophysics and relativity (to give Einstein his dues!) along the way… also indirectly hats off to the mathematics of the wonderful Emily Noether.

Andy Smythe, Director of Science

Here are some students' thoughts:

Physics club this year has been so much fun. Aside from the weekly biscuits, it has made me realise how vast of a subject physics is, and how interesting it can get. From introducing me to calculus at the beginning of the year, physics club has built up these skills, and I am now able to confidently attempt the really hard calculus involved in deriving Schrodinger's equation in quantum mechanics. We've learned about other interesting concepts, such as how gravity works and determining big G, which have brought the concepts defining the physical world to life. It has been brilliant and I really hope it can continue when we are back in school and also throughout year 13!

In physics club this year we’ve learned about interesting things. From time travel to special relativity. We are also learning those hard concepts and we’ve also been doing imaginary numbers and Taylor’s series. We’re watching documentaries about the Hubble telescope and about what happened in the evolution of the universe and one of my personal favourites, black holes.

I have learnt many amazing skills that are real applications of physics specifically quantum mechanics and how that involves applied maths at a higher level. This has included Taylor series' and imaginary numbers, which are a lot simpler now than they first seemed! All of the topics have been difficult but manageable and they now seem much less daunting than they seemed at first.

A-level Graphics Virtual Gallery

Ms Ferris and the DT team would like to share some of the wonderful work from our year 13 Graphics students.

Nino Esiashvili
Was inspired by contemporary design trends and luxury magazines. She used Indesign for design and layout and illustrator and Photoshop for illustrations and an animated gif.
Link to animated gifs: https://ninoesiashvili.wixsite.com/gifs

Nicole Rodriguez Yagual
Nicole's music promotion task was inspired by the music of Travis Scott and surrealism. She used Photoshop and Illustrator to enhance and develop watercolour, colour pencil and pastel drawings.

Jonathan Gallardo
Album cover, poster and animated gif were used in Jonathan's Photoshop and Illustrator pieces. Click the image to view the animation.

Nicholas Holdsworth
A range of promotional products for a PS4 basketball game including logo design, box artwork and inserts, promotional mug and game promo. He was inspired by Kode Abdo and Paula Scher and used Photoshop, AfterEffects and Premiere Pro.
Link to animation: https://nickgraphicsalevel.weebly.com

Sawda Hassan
Looked at magazine design, changing approaches to fashion and the depiction of women. Her designs incorporated Indesign, Photoshop and Illustrator.

Eric Addo-Dadzie
Was influenced by Masashi Kishimoto and Akira Toriyama in his Illustrator and Indesign produced manga and lasercut point of sale.

Lily Gordon
Looked at how emojis have been developed with animation. She used Illustrator and Photoshop to create branding for her product called 'Androji', animated gifs and an animated poster.
Link to animated products: https://androji.weebly.com/

Ayomide Ahmed
was influenced by David Carson and the punk movement. His printed and digital zines were created as a tribute to Thamesmead. He used Illustrator, Photoshop and Indesign.
Link to digital website: https://ayomideahmedcp.wixsite.com/rotr

Charlotte Wells-Barbier
With a theme of the environment and global warming Charlotte created a magazine using Indesign for layout and Illustrator and Photoshop for illustration.

Joe Barnes
Steve Cutts and Kunio Katõ influenced Joe's Photoshop animation 'Aftermath' highlighting the dangers of pollution and global warming in both a humerous and serious way.
https://joebarnes-graphicsportfolio.weebly.com

Regards
Kristina Ferris, Head of Graphics

Sophie's Cycles

Click the button below to read a fantastic list of suggestions for local cycle routes from Sophie Naylor.

                                SOPHIE'S LOCAL CYCLE ROUTES GUIDE
                            

The music never stops

It is no real surprise that creative ventures have been propelled into the foreground since we entered a period of world lockdown. With added time on our hands and nowhere to go we have naturally turned to those things we can do in or around the home, and across the world people are baking bread, upcycling furniture, painting portraits, sewing face masks, singing songs of joy, and creating lockdown orchestras.

Our young musicians at Tallis are not immune to these creative impulses and I am absolutely delighted to share work created during lockdown by two of our Post 16 students.

Year 12 A level Music student Ellie Rodin-Mooney is a wonderfully skilled singer-songwriter, and the two songs from this live session will transport you to a place where soulful vocals meld effortlessly with hazy late night jazz.

Ellie Rodin Moony - Can't Keep her/TV Static

Owen Naylor Roll has been at Tallis since Year 7 and is one of the many Year 13 students who have been left adrift since the outbreak of Covid 19; A Level exams abandoned, and a sudden and unexpected departure from school life. Undeterred, Owen has kept the music flowing with this wonderful composition for percussion ensemble. There is an urgency and a mystery in this work that puts me in mind of those late 1970’s American cop shows that sadly I’m old enough to remember.

Owen Naylor-Roll - Tank!

We are extremely proud of all our young musicians and are looking forward to the day when we can return to school and resume our dutiful role as the noisiest department in the school.

Martin McCarrick, Music

Teni's Poems

Click the button below to read a series of poems destined for the Arvon Writers' Anthology by Teni Alakija.

                                Teni's poems
                            

Film & Media showcase

Here are a selection of short films produced by students from Year 13 Film studies.

Isobel Bostock - Homeless: https://vimeo.com/379770195
Homeless follows a young girl’s struggle of homelessness through the genre and tropes of social realism. I wanted the narrative to intimately follow the journey of one central character, to create a strong emotional connection and to adequately reflect the harsh reality of living on the streets, from a female perspective.

Solar Buckler Weerdmeester - Grit: https://vimeo.com/366704895
Grit is a social realist film about a young man who is struggling to confront his sexuality in the setting of a male dominated sport, boxing.

Nathan Parker - Lovepark: https://vimeo.com/425820681
My dark romantic/sci-fi hybrid short film, Love Park, showcases the virtual yet realistic world of online dating, highlighting the new age of discovering love through the use of a smartphone.

Chemistry Olympiad update

You may remember that a story about the Chemistry Olympiad featured in last month's newsletter. Thanks to a delayed reaction (!) we can now bring you photographs of (most) of the award winners plus a bit more information about the competition itself. The Chemistry Olympiad is an extremely demanding competition that challenges the chemical understanding of the best chemistry students across the country. This year a pleasingly high proportion of Thomas Tallis students rose to that challenge and independently prepared themselves for this test.

In a 2 hour written exam at the end of January, they answered questions on the amount of electricity that can be generated by a hydrogen fuel cell, the many chemical reactions necessary to preparation of a sunscreen, and the colour of chlorophyll and haemoglobin, among many other things.

When the results came in just after the school had closed due to COVID-19, it was confirmed that all of the students had performed extremely well, achieving bronze or silver awards. One student (Henry) was 1 mark away to achieving a gold certificate, but that still placed him in the top 10% in the country (out of over 9000 entries).

Congratulations to all of the students involved in getting an award in the 52nd annual Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) Olympiad 2020!

The students involved can be seen all around and go by the following: (top left going clockwise) silver awards go to Ella Dixon (13FA), and Henry La (13KA); bronze awards go to Modinat Tijani (13HB), Lucy Hudson (12RB), Tahmid Ahmad (12FA), Jenny Duckworth (12FA), William Ho (12FB), and Arnold Armstrong-Sobolweski (12FA). Well done once again to all our participants!

Aysha Karim, Head of Chemistry

Art & Design
Congratulations to Aisha Darboe who, during her timed assessment for BTEC Art and Design last week, combined 3D elements and mark making to create her interpretation of the theme 'World in Motion':

'I wanted to combine marks, inspired by my outdoor urban sketches and paintings, with the colours that I felt symbolised Greenwich. Looking at the properties of available materials, such as cardboard, and its ability to absorb, fold, tear, and peel, I decided to explore a combination of architecture, painting and drawing.'

Aisha's work is intended to be a 'Maquette' or small model for a larger sculpture to be located in Greenwich Park where the Royal Observatory and Planetarium look down at the Queen’s House.

Sam Kiff, Art