Absence   

    If a student is absent, parents are asked to contact the school and report that absence. Simply ring the school and you will be directed to the absence phone system. You should then give the name of the student and their tutor teacher.

Attendance

    School hours are 08:35 to 15:00. If a student is late, they must sign in at the Student Office.

    School times are as follows: Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday.

08:35 - 09:35  Period 1

09:35 - 10:35  Period 2

10:35 - 10:50  Tutor Time

10:50 - 11:10  Interval

11:10 - 12:05  Period 3

12:05 - 13:00  Period 4

13:00 - 13.45  Lunch

13:45 - 14:05  School-wide reading

14:05 - 15:00  Period 5

Wednesday Only

09:00 - 09:55  Period 1

09:55 - 10:50  Period 2

Rest of the times are the same as for the other days.

Cellphones

    The current cell phone policy is that, although permitted at school, they must not be used or turned on during class time.

    A team of UK researchers recently compared the performances of 120 women and 120 men in a computer test involving switching between tasks of counting and shape recognition.

    Men and women were equally capable when tasks were handled one at a time. But when the tasks were mixed up, there was a clear difference. According to the paper published in the journal BMC Psychology, both women and men slowed down and made more mistakes as the switching became more rapid. But the men were slower, taking 77 percent longer to answer, whereas women took 69 percent longer.

    To make the experiment more relevant to day-to-day life, researchers tried a second test. A group of women and men were given eight minutes to complete a series of everyday tasks, such as finding restaurants on a map, doing simple math problems, answering a phone call, or deciding how they would search for a lost key in afield. Once again, women outperformed men in the test, particularly in the key-searching task.

    “It suggests that in a stressed and complex situation women are more able to stop and think about what's going on in front of them,” researcher Keith Laws of the University of Hertfordshire, UK, told BBC News. “In contrast, men had a slight impulsiveness（冲动）, answering without giving much thought to their responses.”

    So where do women get the ability to keep organized under pressure better than men? Researchers believe that it has its roots in evolution. In early human communities, women had to keep an eye on children while cooking meals. Meanwhile, men only needed to focus on hunting.

    Emily Temple-Wood was 12 years old the first time she was bullied(欺凌) online. They left ugly comments on her Wikipedia and Facebook pages about her looks “that would make my mother's hair curl.” says Temple-Wood, now 22 and in medical school. The reason? “I was a woman on the Internet,” she said.

    Over the years, she considered how she might take revenge(复仇). Then, as a freshman in college, it hit her: “What do misogynists (men who hate women) hate most?” she asked herself. “Women who are productive!” Her solution: For every rude comment she received, Temple-Wood would post a biography(传记) of a woman scientist, and thus, in 2012, Wiki Project Women Scientists was born. She wrote about her heroes, like Barbara McClintock, who received the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, and Caroline Still Anderson, one of the first African American women to become a doctor in the United States, in the late 1800s. With help from other women, many of them scientists who have also been bullied online, Temple-Wood has published hundreds of these biographies and women of all ages have taken notice.

    “When I was a kid, I could count the number of women scientists I knew about on one hand,” wrote Siko Bouterse, who used to work for the Wikimedia Foundation. “But our daughters have the chance to get much more knowledge about scientists who look like them because of Emily.

    The ugly comments still come, says Temple-Wood. Being a strong woman online is not easy. “We all have days when we break down and need to have a glass of wine,” she says. “I tell people who are being bullied that it's OK to be sad. But now you need to find a productive way to take revenge.”

    Before you were my teacher, I thought that teaching was the last thing I wanted to do. Why would someone want to come in every day and attempt to instruct students, many of whom couldn't care less, or to get paid very little compared with the work he or she put in?

    You may have thought that the only thing I was learning from you was the course, but that's not all l learned. From reference books to funny jokes, you made each class exciting. You always tried to make class charming so that we could be excited about learning. However, those days have gone by.

    Whenever I was confused and needed extra help, you were the exact one to turn to. I would walk into your room for help and there would be several kids. You ran from one student to the next helping each one through their confusion. You could have gone back home after the bell rang. Instead, you chose to Stay and care about what your students did.

    You didn't only care about my learning, but you also cared about other things I was involved in. At the beginning of the year, we wrote down our hobbies and interests. You remembered what we wrote, too. I had missed class for track meets (田径运动会)and when I came back the next day, you would ask me how it went. Many of the teachers never bothered to ask what I liked to do.

    These things showed me the value of teaching. They showed me how much of an influence a teacher can have on a student. I want to be the one that influences students and pushes them toward success. I want students to leave my classroom thinking that their time was worthwhile (值得的). I want to be the inspiration for them that you were for me. Whenever it gets hard for me to continue on this path, I'll remember you and what you did for me.

    Around the world, 62 million girls are not in school. The White House's Let Girls Learn effort aims to change that.

    At 13, Hawa Abdulai Yorke left her family's home, in Ghana, Africa, to live with an aunt who promised to send her to school. Instead, the aunt put Yorke to work as her maid. Determined to go to school, Yorke returned home and began selling water in a nearby city to raise
money for her education. She did that for three years. What hurt most was that her father had the money to pay the school fees. But he chose to spend the money on a motorcycle.

    Yorke's story is familiar to girls growing up in Ghana. There, a girl's place is in the home. Educating girls is considered a waste of money.

    “It happens more than it should, where parents have money to send their girls to school but choose not to,” says Ryan Roach, a Peace Corps volunteer in Ghana, where nearly 55% of girls are not enrolled in secondary school. “Cultural beliefs say education is not a wise investment(投资)”

    The White House's Let Girls Learn is working to change this view of girls' education, in Ghana and in countries worldwide. First Lady Michelle Obama says parents have to be persuaded that girls' education is a better investment than marriage or household labor. A World Bank study backs that up. It shows that for every year of secondary-school education, a girl's earning power increases by 18%.

    Today, Let Girls Learn works in 13 countries, and there are plans to expand the program. Recently, Let Girls Learn hosted a 24-hour event at which girls in different parts of Ghana joined Peace Corps volunteers, tech experts, and university students to brainstorm creative solutions for the barriers to girls' education. Yorke's team came up with an idea for an app that sends a recorded message to parents' phones from a Ghanian celebrity about the benefits of girls 
attending school.

    Yorke, now 22, is about to finish high school. Thanks to Let Girls Learn, she plans to attend college and study computer science. She says working alongside women college students at the Let Girls Learn event strengthened her determination. “I'm focused on my books,” says Yorke. "I know if I study hard, I, too, can go to the university and live a happy life."

In 1991, Terry Gelber rented a stage at the Castillo Cultural Centre to perform his poetry. When asked by the booking agent what kind of poetry he wrote, his response was "Taxi Poetry".

While driving his taxi and reciting poetry, he noticed his taxi driver's licenses are also called "hack licenses". Then he thought for a moment and said, "Hack Poetry!" Thus "Hack Poetry" was born.

At the first reading of Hack Poetry, a fellow taxi driver and poet Tom Ostrowski joined Terry. The two cabbie poets read to an audience of six people plus one reporter from New York Magazine. Asked by Charles W. Bell of the New York Daily News what he called the growing group of taxi poets that appeared at readings, Gelber replied, "Did you see the movie Dead Poets Society?"

In 1992, a poetry contest was added and a television game show was produced for Manhattan TV. In the following years, Terry appeared as the Hack Poet at lots of events reading his Hack Poetry and writing poems for special days such as when an old taxi was put in the Museum of New York. After a successful business in 1999, the Hack Poet bought an old farm in the Catskill Mountains where he has been able to be close to nature and animals. Poets will be invited to share the loneliness of the hills in a place that thankfully has not quite moved into the 21st century.