SJC TYs are getting philosophical

AFTER a hectic first week, with the bonding trip to Petersburg and the issuing of the Junior Cert results, things have settled down in the first St Jarlath's College TY class. This year, Transition Year students will be taking Philosophy classes with Ms Elaine Feeney. This is a new venture for us all and initial impressions are very good. To initiate the topic, we discussed questions that cannot be answered: 'Is there life after death?', 'What is the meaning of life?' The discussions to date have been entertaining and enlightening. On Monday, we [private]elected people to be in charge of our Philosophy Twitter account (SJCPhilosophy). Later that evening the four students on the Twitter committee set up the page and got the other students in our class to follow the page. If you wish to partake in our philosophical debates and would like to support us, then you can follow us @SJCPhilosophy on Twitter. In our English class, we have also set up a blog in order to discuss topics related to Transition Year. Thanks to Ms Brighid Cannon for helping with this project. You can follow this by joining stjarlathsty.edublogs.org. Each student in Transition Year must create a poem for English class in order to send in to a national competition, Cuisle Young Poet of the Year. The poem can be of any heading depending on the poet's individual choice. Also essays are to be written on numerous topics that were handed out to each student. These will then be read out individually in aid of public speaking, people can work individually or in pairs. On Friday September 22 we collected money in aid of Enable Ireland. Enable Ireland provides free services to children and adults with disabilities and their families from 40 locations in 14 counties. After Ireland's success in the Paralympics, there is a heightened awareness of disability. After seeing the Irish athletes' trials and successes we decided that we wanted to help. This gave us a desire to allocate a fund in aid of Enable Ireland. We would like to thank everyone who contributed money towards Enable Ireland and we know they will be more than delighted with this collection. For our activities class, we were introduced to our Film Analysis and Appreciation Module. In the first lesson we watched The Social Network movie. We observed numerous aspects of the film that you may not notice while watching before, such as the subtle anti-Semitic theme, lighting and character development. This made for a very worthwhile discussion and we look forward to further analyses. Finally, for Science class, we will be entering the BT Young Scientist Exhibition. This involves experiments that must be done by students either individually, or in pairs. An experiment cannot be used that has already been done before. Experiments chosen by our teacher, Mr Peadar Conroy, will be sent to the BT Young Scientist in Dublin which will be held in the RDS. [/private]