Over the last year and a half I have really enjoyed teaching Science at The Abbey School and I will be very sad to be leaving. The girls are curious, kind and confident people and there really has been no bigger joy than teaching them Physics (and a little bit of Chemistry even if they do sometimes get disappointed that there aren’t more explosions). The laboratories here are excellent teaching spaces and very well-equipped.
Over the past couple of weeks, we have completed our energy transfers topic with Upper IV, culminating in a final ‘coffee cup challenge’, where the girls had to design and build an insulated container to keep a drink warm as well as making it aesthetically pleasing and there were some very good builds indeed.
Upper III have just started waves after completing forces, where they got to imagine a world without friction and here is an excerpt from one of the students, Elsa, which was very entertaining:
‘In a world without friction, things would be chaos. The emergency services would be called out every second of every day, because cars would crash, people would slip, and there would be so many more accidents. Even if you tried to walk to school, it would be as difficult as ice skating, with no friction acting on your shoes to steady you and slow you down. Cars would shoot forwards and would be unable to stop, so if there was traffic one car would just smash into the next and then the next and then the next and there would be no control whatsoever. If you were at a swimming pool or even if the floor was wet at home, you would fall and it would be even more dangerous than it is already. Not only would you fall, but with nothing in front of you you would just drive into someone or something else. So, to put it mildly, yes it would be a nightmare, so thank goodness we have friction to stop us!’
Lower IV have been busy working on distance-time graphs and many of them had fun on the mini-astro gathering data before thinking about how to draw a distance-time graph for different types of travel, where some very impressive cartwheels were carried out.
Lower V have been working hard on their forces topic, thinking about centre of mass and Hooke’s Law. They got to see the difference between stretching a steel spring and stretching a strawberry lace (which undergoes something called creep and therefore does not obey Hooke’s Law).
Overall, my time here has been wonderful and I am sure that the other science teachers would agree with me that this is a really special school to teach science in. We are so excited to see many of the girls to go on to become amazing women in STEM, who then go on to inspire other young women and girls. You should all be very proud!
Dr Gilroy-Hirst