This week we gathered to acknowledge and celebrate the achievements of our 2022 high achievers. This included students who received ATARS in the 90s, students who achieved the highest study score in individual subjects and the highest achievers in the VCAL pathway. We also announced the College Dux.
We listened to speeches from Nyah A our VCAL High Achiever and Violet H College Dux for 2022
VCE Leader Lisa Bolitho shared the following words:
We are all here to celebrate doing ordinary things, extraordinarily well, in a manner befitting Clonard’s Brigidine values of strength and kindliness.
The 2022 VCE high achievers here today have achieved ATARs that place them in the top 9% of the state and/or achieved the top study scores of a particular subject at Clonard.
They will have you believe that their efforts were nothing out of the ordinary, tell you that they ‘had fun’ and balanced school work with paid employment, community or leadership work, sport and socialising. They won’t be wrong, but what these high achievers perhaps don’t realise, is that what they have accomplished, and what enabled this type of balance, was their exceptional use of the resources before them. As teachers, we learn a lot from the students in our classrooms. These students were models of how to:
- Use every minute of your time productively – including time for rest.
- Plan ahead
- Predict obstacles or challenges and actively seek out solutions.
- Take responsibility for your own learning and achievement.
- Actively nurture relationships with classmates and teachers.
- Never think near enough was good enough.
- Model humility, hard work and persistence, shouldering maturity and persistence that impressed us all.
- Maintain a sense of humour and know when to have a bit of fun!
- Ordinary things? Yes. But done extraordinarily well.
The students on the stage today did not strive to be THE best; they strove to be THEIR best.
