Near the end of the school year

I haven't entered any blogs for a while, and I have had plenty to blog about. unfortunately I will not have time towrite much.

First of all, I will mention how proud I have been to be responsible for the preparation of our seven Year 8 for the UK Junior Mathematics Challenge. They did themselves proud by winning three Gold Certificates and two Silver Certificates. Over 240,000 Year 8 students enter the challenge sponsored by over 3,500 schools overwhelmingly from England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The challenge is aimed at the top third of Year 8 students from these countries, and many schools enter a best third or less of their mathematics students.

A Gold Certificate is awarded to the top 6% scorers, a Silver Certicate to the next 13%, and the next 21% win a Bronze Certificate. That 42% of our students won Gold, awarded to the top 6% of the entrants, and 71% won Gold or Silver, which are awarded to the top 19% of all those sitting, is an outstanding result.

Congratulations to Maximilian Micallef-Eynaud, Jean-Baptiste Suchet and Marc de Menibus our Gold Certificate winners, and Jacques de Guibert and Pierre-Antoine Argouarc'h, our Silver Certicate winners on doing so magnificently. Maximilian is from Malta, and the other four boys are from France. The French boys had only a few words of English when they came to the college between eight and twenty months before sitting for the challenge, so their results are even more marvellous when it is realised that the challenge, in part, calls for a high degree comprehension of English even for native English speakers.

Just a year older than the boys mentioned above is another French boy who came to the college only in September 2008, and who is a brilliant mathematics student. He likes mathematics so much that when possible he worked on past papers of past maths challenges, and very much helped in the preparation of the boys for the challenge. We are very grateful then to Antoine Haentjens for this.

Indeed, I am very fortunate to have the opportunity to do my best to help the boys here in the maths challenge and in other ways, especially, of course, in their formation of strong, committed Followers of Christ devoted to the Church.

We are in the last week of term now. Last week, the boys and some staff spent two nights at the Benedictine Abbey of Fontgambau. Seventy monks are there, the great majority, young and middle-aged. A few years ago a group of 18 monks from Fontgambeau left together to make a daughter house in the USA. It makes a great impression on the boys to see so many fit, happy and peaceful-looking men spending hours each day in prayer, knowing they are doing this day after day, week aftr week and year after year. I didn't go this time because I needed the time to organise several things before leaving Chavagnes International College on July 6th.

This week we have our sports day, a much looked-forwarded to event, and on Friday at 4pm we have our speech afternoon followed by the girls' school production of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Cinderella, a buffet meal and the college's first ball. It will be great to see on this occasion some past students, including Anna Andrews from Wagga Wagga from the girls school who will be here with her parents.

There are some busy and exciting days ahead. Sad ones too when I will be once again saying goodbye to students whom I will miss very much.