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Boys gained an invaluable fresh insight into their GCSE set English texts when a visiting theatre company staged two plays, along with innovative interactive workshops.

The Say Two Productions company performed Romeo and Juliet – a set text for Year 11 pupils – and J B Priestley’s An Inspector Calls, which Year 10 are currently studying.

Head of English Robert Hyland said: “The majority of time in class has been spent looking closely at the linguistic and thematic features of the texts in a purely literary context. It is really important for the boys to be able to appreciate how the literary foundation of the classroom translates into the dramatic sphere of performance if they are to maximize their understanding of the texts.”

In addition to performing the plays, the accompanying workshop programme involved hot-seating – where a character in a play is questioned about his or her background, behaviour and motivation.

“Ordinarily in a performance, the audience and actors are kept separate. On this occasion the workshops led by Say Two were innovative in the way the company really encouraged students to engage in the process of understanding how the page translated to the stage, and the theatrical purpose of Priestley’s and Shakespeare’s writing,” Mr Hyland added.

Jeshvin Jesudas, of Year 10, praised the interactive way in which An Inspector Calls was shown and the hot-seating, which, he said, “helped us to understand how the characters actually felt and gave us a greater and wider understanding of the play”.

The boys were also encouraged to speak out the dialogue from various scenes and to consider the relationship between the characters and how the characters perceived themselves.

For Romeo and Juliet, an interactive staging in costume of the Capulet Ball (Act 1, Scene 5) and of the sword fight between Romeo, Mercutio and Tybalt (Act 3, Scene 1) helped show Romeo’s progression through the text, proving popular with the boys.

Sajeev Karunakaran, of Year 11, said: “It was a very enjoyable performance that expanded my knowledge of the play. I enjoyed the open discussion on the key themes of the play, and the best parts were the interactive activities like the sword-fighting.”

The staging of both plays sought to engender greater insight into the key themes. “The aim was to aid students in their understanding of the set texts as dramatic texts, in addition to simply being academic texts to be studied as literature. Students can hugely benefit in their understanding of the plays if they understand the stagecraft and can anticipate the audience reaction,” added Mr Hyland.

Afterwards, several of the boys gave their views on Say Two’s visit:

• Jai Patel, one of the Year 10 pupils who participated in the workshop for An Inspector Calls: “It was a very detailed insight into the actions and morals of the characters, showing text character development as the play progresses.”
• Umer Saad Rahman, of Year 10: “It clearly showed the development of the characters and helped to improve my understanding. It was very interesting and interactive.”
• Chakshu Chopra, of Year 10: “The performance was extremely engaging, and it portrayed many themes that we learned in class. Watching the performance helped me understand more and really brought the ideas and theories we learned to life.”
• Dylan Domb, of Year 10, enjoyed seeing the twists and turns of the narrative happening right in front of him.
• Jao-Yong Tsai, of Year 10, felt the production helped to show the recurring themes more clearly and to illustrate the deep ironies and contradicting views in the play.
• Ansh Jassra, of Year 10: “I was able to achieve a greater understanding of the interactions between the characters, which, in turn, aided deeper analysis of the stage directions.”
• Daniel Rodrigues, of Year 11, thought that the actors helped the audience further understand the plot and he enjoyed a very “immersive experience”.
• Athiyan Chandramohan, of Year 11, felt the occasion was informative, helping him understand the themes of the play much better.

Two QE boys are among the prizewinners in a national competition aimed at finding better designs for electric vehicle charging points.

Year 8’s Tharsan Nimalan won a prize in the seven–14 category, while Ashwin Sridhar, of Year 10, achieved success in the 14-–19 age group in the Eco-Innovators Competition run by the Government’s Office for Low Emission Vehicles (OLEV).

Their success came as the Government announced that a ban on selling new petrol, diesel or hybrid cars in the UK would be brought forward from 2040 to 2035 at the latest. Prime Minister Boris Johnson made the announcement as the country plans to host the annual United Nations climate change summit, COP 26, which is being held in Glasgow in the autumn.

The brief for the competition was to create a design for on-street electric vehicle (EV) charging points that were innovative, iconic and beautiful. At QE, entries were handled jointly by the Geography and Technology departments.

Geography teacher Nilisha Shah said: “I congratulate Tharsan and Ashwin on their success. As the Government’s announcement shows, universal use of electric vehicles is an idea whose time has clearly come, yet there is still much work to be done in making our cities ready. Innovative, creative thinking such as Tharsan’s and Ashwin’s is likely to prove essential if the UK is to get the infrastructure right.”

Tharsan went through a number of design ideas and drafts before settling on his submitted design, which was based upon a large tree. The trunk had a spiral staircase which users could walk up to reach lounge-style leisure facilities – perhaps a restaurant – at the top of the “tree”.

The intention behind this, he explained, was to help EV users pass the time whilst their vehicle charged and even make the charging point a desirable destination – thus overcoming the perceived drawback of electric vehicles that users would have nothing to do while re-charging. Tharsan wanted, in fact to make non-electric car users “jealous of the experience they could be having”.

His design involved the use of lightweight, more sustainable and recyclable metals and other materials, with green planting on the roof. Vehicles would be parked around the base for charging, with cables pulled down from the trunk and plugged in wherever the connection point is on a vehicle.

Ashwin designed a charging station with a “contemporary aesthetic” and a “self-maintaining garden to absorb pollution”. He envisaged a vertical garden some 3 metres high which would collect rainwater and self-irrigate, featuring green plants and mosses that are good at capturing carbon.

Ashwin envisaged targeting high-pollution areas in terms of locations for his charging station, which would also be designed to provide easy access.

Even before learning about the competition, Ashwin had already been thinking about charging point designs, having seen existing ones around London and thought that they could be made better. “They should be more than charging points,” he said, pointing out that ones created according to his designs would not only help “green” the urban landscape, but could usefully act as a source of information, for tourists, for example. Since so many charging points were going to be needed, it was important to get more functionality out of the space.

QE attracted a high-class field of some of the best and brightest robotics enthusiasts from London schools when it hosted its VEX EDR senior tournament.

Eight awards were on offer – the highest at any school-based regional competition this year – and all 20 teams were keen to pick up some silverware.

Headmaster Neil Enright said: “Robotics is a hugely popular extra-curricular activity at QE, with our boys enjoying national and international competition successes. We are therefore pleased to be able to give something back to school robotics by hosting tournaments here.”

Participants in the QE North Regional competition included the reigning national champions, St Olave’s Grammar School from Orpington, as well as Greig City Academy in Hornsey and The John Warner School in Hoddesdon.

QE entered four teams: HYBRID, comprising Year 12 pupils, and SYNAPSE, ECLIPSE and Technogear, whose team members are all in Year 10 and were thus the youngest competitors in this age group.

Head of Technology Michael Noonan said “Following on from the tremendous success of the IQ Regional event for junior teams which we hosted at the end of last term, there was excitement and anticipation aplenty in the Shearly Hall as the senior event got underway. Our teams were in confident mood and eager to prove their mettle on home ground.

“There was high drama from the very beginning when QE’s SYNAPSE team, which had been confident of putting in a strong performance, faced a setback when their robot failed the routine inspection by the very narrowest of margins. The team suddenly faced a major undertaking – rebuild the ‘bot’ whilst also trying to practise and prepare for the competition. Their gallant efforts meant that a newly constructed, but, as yet, untested, robot was ready in time for qualification, but it put them under a great deal of pressure,” said Mr Noonan.

It was an intensive day of preparation and competition. All the teams were extremely busy both with practising and with forging relationships with teams from other schools with a view to forming alliances at a later stage in the event. They also had to contend with the four circulating judges, who interviewed the participants for the Design, Excellence, Think, Judges’ and Build awards.

Toby Reisch, Systems Engineering Manager at Cummins Inc and the Design/Excellence Judge said: ““I was enormously impressed with the quality of the work from all of the teams as well as the clear dedication to the task. The use and understanding of many industry-standard processes was great to see coupled with extensive innovation and lateral thinking.”

And Mark Jones, also a Design/Excellence judge said “The standard of the design and build was very good, especially with those teams that are new to the VEX and VRC competitions. The teams were knowledgeable about their robots and the processes that they had been through.”

When the competition began in earnest, QE’s team HYBRID had some challenging initial games, achieving some tight wins. In their second qualification, match they signalled their intent, as well as their capabilities as an “offensive juggernaut”, in the Tower Takeover game, scoring an impressive 76 points, Mr Noonan reported. This put them on the radar of other strong teams, and despite narrow losses in two of their eight games, they remained a favourite to take a high-ranking position in their alliance selection later in the day.

For team SYNAPSE, the scale of the challenge of rebuilding and practising simultaneously proved too much, as they succumbed to more losses than wins. The School’s other two Year 10 teams performed valiantly; Technogear finished in eigth position in a highly competitive field, and ECLIPSE finished 13th.

The alliance selection was hotly anticipated, with all 20 teams having the opportunity to compete. Team Technogear profited from their eighth-ranked position to select their QE classmates, ECLIPSE, while Team SYNAPSE paired up with a team from Westminster, aiming to upset the odds in a preliminary quarter-final. As expected, team HYBRID was selected by the number one-ranked team, Control Freaks from The John Warner School (JWS). They went on to form what would prove to be an unbeatable alliance.

Drama unfolded throughout the elimination rounds, as lower ranked teams, ties and close calls for referees added great atmosphere and excitement to the occasion. As the semi-finals drew to a close, the formidable QE/JWS alliance had overcome all of their opponents with ease, winning all their eliminators by an average score of 44 points.

Team SYNAPSE’s alliance unfortunately could not overcome their first obstacle, losing out in a closely fought tie. However, it was the surprise package of the day – the all-QE alliance of the Year 10 teams, who reached the decider – narrowly beating an all-JWS alliance in the quarters, and a JWS/Olave’s alliance in the semis.

In the final round, the action started in an unexpected way, when the number one-ranked team changed their autonomous routine. This tactic proved crucial, as the scramble for cubes ended in a flurry of scoring, de-scoring and stacking of cubes in protected zones. Ultimately, the highly offensive tactics of the higher ranked alliance prevailed, with QE-JWS winning out with a score line of 65-20. The audience recognised the efforts of the teams in reaching the pinnacle of the competition, as did the judging panels.

Not for the first time this year, QE had both reigned victorious and lost the final in the same action! However, the audience recognised the efforts of the teams in reaching the pinnacle of the competition, as did the judging panels. Team Technogear were awarded the Design Award for the second time in four days, but the majority of the spoils went to Hybrid – winning the Teamwork, Skills and Excellence Awards. With only one competition left before the signature and National Championships, this event proved to be an invaluable exercise in building skills and experience for these teams at the highest stage.

“I have to thank my colleagues Sean Kelly, Shane Maheady, Gillian Deakin, Jonathan Leigh, Lydia Jowsey-Alexander and Liberty Kimber for their contribution in setting up and helping to run the event,” concluded Mr Noonan.

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The competition came just days after QE’s teams had pitted their wits against some of the finest VEX EDR Teams in the country at the GCA Regional event. “The same teams took part against high-quality opposition from the powerhouses of south east schools robotics,” said Mr Noonan. After the early bouts, Queen Elizabeth’s teams were placed highest, with SYNAPSE ranked first and ECLIPSE ranked second. Team Technogear ranked right at the bottom at 15th. Year 10’s Heemy Kalam from team SYNAPSE selected the experienced St Olave’s School’s Download Complete Team – reigning national champions – to be their partners in the elimination matches.

“Team ECLIPSE were then faced with a conundrum: did they pair up with their next highest ranked team, or did they choose familiarity in team Technogear, and hoist them up from lowly 15th Position to be part of the second overall-ranked alliance?” said Mr Noonan. They chose their classmates.

“The QE/St Olave’s pairing quickly made light work of their competitors, whilst the all-QE alliance were desperately unlucky to be denied by a falling robot and then to miss out by a single point. SYNAPSE-Download Complete went on to win their semi-final by 12 points, with their final match proving to be their tightest in elimination; they won by 12 points.

“Great credit is due to their drivers and designers, as well as their programmers for an autonomous routine which proved effective throughout,” said Mr Noonan.

Technogear were crowned Design Award winners and Robot Skills Award winner, making QE robotics the winners of three out of four awards on offer on the day.

The teams were made up as follows:

• HYBRID (Year 12): Devin Karia, Tanishq Mehta, James Tan, Daniel Radzik-Rahman, Rishi Amin and Deshraam Ganeshamoorthy,
• SYNAPSE (Year 10): Bhunit Santhiramoulesan, Ashwin Sridar, Heemy Kalam, Jao-Yong Tsai, Chakshu Chopra, Vedaangh Rungta,
• ECLIPSE (Year 10): Frank Zhang, Arjun Arunkumar, Jashwanth Parimi, Raghav Rajaganesh, Arya Bhatt, Akhil Walia,
• Technogear (Year 10): Anubhav Rathore, Aditya Khanna, Dylan Domb, Yash Shah, Utkarsh Bhamidimarri, Anish Rana.

 

Simon Dyton went on to become a School Captain under Eamonn Harris and then to gain a Double First and a PhD studying English and History at Cambridge – but his first encounter with QE’s then-Headmaster was far from auspicious.

“He largely ignored me and spoke to my parents,” says Simon (OE 1997–1994; School Captain 1993). “My father said, ‘Why don’t you talk to Simon?’ Mr Harris said to him sternly: ‘I can fix a naughty boy, but I cannot fix a naughty parent.’”

Later, however, Simon learned lessons both from Mr Harris and from other QE teachers that have stood him in good stead for his current role as an English teacher in the Upper School at the Marymount School of New York, a nursery-to-high school for girls on Fifth Avenue.

“The students at Marymount recently voted to have me speak to my school’s National Honor Society and share some scholarly advice. I was immediately reminded of a lesson I learned from Eamonn Harris. He once told me that the most important thing in life was ‘kissing the plan’, by which he meant that ‘doing a little bit’ every day was the best way to get a job done. That has stuck with me.

“I never thought that I’d be using my experiences of English lessons at QE to design my own classes, but the experiences of being taught by Mr [Eric] Houston and Mr [David] Jones proved very useful.

“Mr Cossey was also a fantastic example of passionate teaching. His furious roaring (and slamming of desks) over Harold II’s anger at William the Conqueror stayed with me for years. I love sharing my enthusiasm for storytelling and my enjoyment of language and literature with my students.”

“I remember Mr Houston making a boy stand against a wall in the Science block for ‘not behaving like a good chap’. This is when I started to sense that the school was being hoisted up by its socks into a new kind of institution. I loved the school trips to Moscow and St. Petersburg with Mr [Tom] Guthrie. I met my first Russian gangsters, held my first handgun, and — in a more trusting age of air travel — sat in the cockpit and lowered the landing-gear when we landed back in England.

“I loved being School Captain: organising Founder’s Day was a fantastic challenge.”

After A-levels, Simon took up a place at Gonville and Caius College. “When I went up to Cambridge, my main model for life at university was The Young Ones television show. I had been looking forward to learning alongside girls for the first time, but Caius didn’t admit any female students to read English that year, so I was stuck with more boys. I played rugby and rowed.”

Following his graduation, he stayed on at Caius for an MPhil and a PhD. “My doctorate involved exploring representations of early modern religious radicalism and grew out of a love of John Milton, whose Paradise Lost I first read in A-level English with Mr Houston.”

In those post-graduate years, he recalls enjoying lunch and drinks with Eamonn Harris in The Eagle, the 17th-century Cambridge pub where, in 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick famously first spoke of their discovery of the structure of DNA. “He was excellent company and was really enjoying retirement.”

Simon served as the MCR [Middle Combination Room] President and introduced graduate seminars that continued, in one shape or another, for years. “I loved my time at Gonville and Caius College. I made some excellent friends, and friendships have been the source of memories that I value the most.

“As a graduate student, I really enjoyed teaching undergraduates, but I loved working with teenagers on summer schools—first on a Cambridge University outreach scheme and then for a New York-based company that operated academic summer schools all over Europe. After several years, I visited New York to work for that company on a short-term work visa, which ultimately turned into a Green Card, by which time I was running summer schools and hiring teachers from all over the world to teach everything from Anthropology to Zoology—mostly in Oxford and Cambridge.

“Eventually, I decided that I wanted to teach full-time, so I looked into teaching and joined the Marymount School here in New York. I’ve had no real masterplan or strategy behind my career path. I’ve always enjoyed studying, writing, coaching, and teaching. I am a long-time believer in reading widely, thinking broadly, and finding the happiness in life. I’ve pursued a career that I enjoy and that I find satisfying.”

Among the many highlights of this career, he recalls one recent, somewhat “terrifying”, example: “The students voted for me to take half-court shots during the high school’s Spirit Week pep rally. (Spirit Week, by the way, is a week of morale-boosting activities designed to help the students through the post-Christmas gloom.) I think it was Mr [David] Maughan and Mr Clarke who coached basketball, but nothing prepared me for hundreds of students chanting, ‘Dr. D, Dr. D!'”

Another highlight of his life stateside recurs daily as he savours his walk home each day across Central Park.

“When I arrived in New York, I was told that it was a great place to spend some of my 20s (I was 28) and all of my money, but—now that I’m in my 40s—I’ve found a happy place on the Upper West Side with my wife, Meredith, and dog. I feel very fortunate that I can live and teach in a city that’s incredibly diverse. I recall that I did a project on Kyrgyzstan for Mr Guthrie in A-level Russian, but it’s only in New York that I finally met a Kyrgyz horseman, who was stunt-riding for the circus. You never know who you’ll meet, and everyone has an interesting story.”

He is now a US citizen. “My wife and I spend our vacations in the deserts of southern Utah, on the beaches of the Virginia coast, and in the forests of upstate New York. I appreciate hard work, good fortune, personal wellness, and physical fitness.”

Jake Nielen is revelling in his role within an industry enjoying explosive growth and operating at the forefront of a technological revolution.

Jake (OE 2004–2011) is a London-based account manager with Amazon Web Services, helping financial technology (FinTech) startups rapidly achieve global scale and huge customer growth through applying artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML).

On graduating from Cambridge, he joined Egon Zehnder, a top-three executive search firm focused on board-level appointments for FTSE 100 and Fortune 500 customers.

“After two years working across various industrial and financial services clients, I moved to do the same role at Amazon, ultimately specialising in finding and convincing some of the best technical minds around the world to build some of the largest distributed technical systems in the world, and solve some of the hardest AI/ML challenges across Amazon Retail, Amazon Prime Video, Alexa, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and even Amazon’s Operations business.

“Whilst in that role it became obvious that AWS was exploding in terms of growth. It currently stands at $36bn revenue globally, growing at 36% year-on-year, which has never been done before in the history of technology services. (We have 19k in the sales team with 12k open roles for next year!).

“In addition to that, we are adding a new feature or product every three hours (2500-plus last year alone), and the pace of change and ability to work in an industry that is revolutionising and democratising how millions of customers around the world consume and process data was too good to pass up.

“I’ve since joined the Startups team, focusing on helping FinTech customers (Monzo, Transferwise, Nutmeg, etc.) get the best out of our services and support those types of customers as they scale globally and offer new services to millions of new customers around the world.”

Among highlights from earlier in his career he would include working on the process to appoint the new Chairman of the Government-owned Royal Bank of Scotland. Another was rebuilding the Prime Video technical leadership team, which last year launched live-streaming of the Premiership in the UK.

“More recently, it has been helping two of my customers win deals with FTSE 100 businesses and supporting [banking start-up] Tide to grow to over 100k small-business users in the UK as well as [helping them towards] international expansion in the near future.”

At School, Jake was a notable sportsman, playing for the First XV and also involved in athletics, water-polo and cross-country.

He vividly recalls “the trials and tribulations of the U16 Sevens and XV rugby teams – the wins and losses and the team-building that came about as a result of an ‘aggressive’ fitness regime based on a strategy that if we couldn’t run through or round our opponents, we would just have to run further and work harder”.

“More generally, I’ve got good memories of constantly being flagged down in the corridor for having my top button undone, the pain of the ‘elephant dip’, the relentless number of A3 grids in Geography.” He confesses to having occasionally been guilty of putting off difficult homework – “deferring it all to an hour before and having to work in the atrium on top of the lockers”.

“But,” he says, “most of all, I have good memories of the dedicated teaching staff who worked above and beyond to provide a top-tier education to anyone, regardless of background, for free.”

He especially praises current Headmaster Neil Enright, who taught him Geography, and his form teacher, Tahmer Mahmoud. Jake, who went on to take a First in Geography at St Catharine’s College, continues to apply Mr Enright’s “organisational capabilities and standards” to this day. “I still colour-code and underline headings on my work.”

“Mr Mahmoud…taught me to intellectually stretch myself to think bigger during form time (‘If you drop a ball, how can you be sure it will always fall to the ground? On what basis do you think the colour red looks the same for you as it is for me?’).”

At Cambridge, his dissertation was on community perceptions of volunteer ‘gap year tourists’ in Ethiopia (“which I loved”).

He remains close friends with a group of OEs – “essentially everyone you see in this picture” [right], taken at Allianz Park, home of Saracens, for the QE First XV’s match against Haberdashers’ Aske’s Boys’ School in 2017. Old Elizabethans pictured are top row, left, to bottom right: Alex Grethe, Jake, Anton Bridge, Ioannis Loupas (all 2004-2011); Anoop Raghaven and Max Hassell, (both 2002–2009); Alvin Bombo (2002–2007); Gideon Levitt (2004–2011); Aaron Levitt (2002–2009); Matteo Yoon, Adam Kuo, Alex Goring (all 2003–2010), and Francis Vu (2000–2008).

“The other photos show us all wearing our QE First XV tops in Japan when we went to visit for the Rugby World Cup.”

Jake’s ambition is, he says, “to continue to learn and always be curious, to push myself out of my comfort zone every day, and to continue to do the hard things well. I’ll probably stay at AWS until I come across a Fintech that seems interesting enough to leap in to (in the interests of being curious).”