The Principal's Report
At this week’s first Year 12 Seminar Day for the year we hosted Sam Clear, who several years ago spent 550+ days walking across the Americas and a significant section of Europe, all in the name of promoting unity. Sam’s is a fascinating story and a gripping, engaging and inspiring 90-minute presentation, which the Year 12 cohort really enjoyed. A combination of touching stories of beautiful people he encountered but more so the enormous challenges and difficulties, Sam’s journey taught the students – and indeed the staff – some valuable lessons around perseverance, resilience and gratitude.
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Time and space do not permit me to go into detail about Sam’s experiences, but suffice to say they were at times terrifying, exhausting and emotionally draining, requiring tremendous reserves of strength, courage, initiative and sound decision-making.
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In discussions with my small group of 14 following Sam’s presentation to the whole Year Level, the students spoke with maturity and honesty about the need for perseverance and resilience in their lives as young men in Year 12, 17 to 18 years of age.
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These were valuable lessons. Things just don’t always go as we want them to and parents, staff and others can’t just intervene and make things right or take responsibility for issues and tasks which really fall under the students’ own decision making and organisational domain.
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It was refreshing and encouraging to hear our Year 12 students speak about how this affects them individually; responsibilities and challenges each of them has, which require a degree of perseverance and resilience to deal with most days of most weeks.
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As I often say, De La Salle students are terrific young men and their input and insights following yesterday’s inspirational story from Sam only reinforced this perception.
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