At Speech Night this year Kelly L in Year 10 Blackwood became the inaugural winner of the Dr Katie Allen Oration Award.

The Dr Katie Allen Oration Award honours the exemplary contribution Dr Katie Allen (Stephen, 1983) to the School, as a third-generation student, past parent, Chair of Council and President of the Merton Hall Foundation. This prize is awarded annually to the winner of the Years 9 and 10 House Public Speaking competition. 

Kelly was invited to present her oration on the night, speaking on the topic: ‘Why Teachers Matter’

In an atom, there are neutrons, protons and electrons. In an essay, if you do not run out of time, there is an introduction, body paragraphs and a conclusion. In a school there are classrooms, sometimes red brick walls, students and of course, teachers.

In fact, without these teachers, these seemingly self-evident truths remain hidden. I would not have known about the components of an atom, my writing would be a stream-of-conscious, and I would not be able to appreciate the symbolic weight of a red brick.

The teachers who taught us the tangible: how to spell, how to read, how to multiply, or provided us with the sometimes more powerful intangible: quiet words of encouragement or a small comment that transformed our entire perspectives.

The lessons we learn from them do not end when the bell rings, when it reaches 3.18pm, and we start quietly packing up our stuff to leave from the Christine Briggs building, or when there is five minutes left of Drum and we need to decide to either borrow our book or place it onto the return pile. Their influence stays with us for the rest of our lives.
In 2001, Liu Ci Xin, the author of the novel The Three-Body Problem, wrote a Sci-fi short story called The Village Teacher.

Fifty thousand light-years away, lives an interstellar civilisation with an advanced alien species, very different from us. They inherit memory biologically, so they are born with their knowledge, they do not have or need teachers.

To maintain cosmic order, these aliens exterminate any planets they deem ‘primitive’ or of ‘low intelligence’.

On earth, in the depths of a remote mountain village in China, an old, sick teacher had dedicated his life to educating. And before he dies, he teaches his students one last lesson, Newtonian physics.

To determine if lifeforms on earth are truly of ‘low intelligence’, the aliens scan the minds of Earth’s inhabitants, testing on one universal concept. Newtons laws of motion.
And luckily, they detect the knowledge in these village children, who are recalling their teacher’s last physics lesson, and discover that earth does, in fact, possess intelligent life, keeping it from being destroyed.

But they wonder. As a civilisation who does not obtain memory biologically, how can we possess such intelligence?

Then, it is revealed that we. On this tiny green and blue planet, have teachers. A concept that exists only in the remote antiquity of Milky Way civilisations.
So, the survival of the human race depended not on scientists, not on generals and not on world leaders, but on one village teacher’s commitment to his students. This is how a teacher can make a difference. They are what makes us humans, humans.

And in our world, all of our successes, advancements, developments would not have happened without teachers.

Every doctor, every lawyer, every inventor and even every teacher, can trace who they are today back to a teacher. The ones who guided and shaped them, the quiet words of encouragement, the small comment that changes a trajectory.

From the story, we learn, “It is the teachers who keep the flame of civilization alive. Whether in bustling cities or remote villages, they act as the bridge – linking past and future, guiding children towards the halls of knowledge, and connecting the humble earth beneath our feet with the vast cosmos above.”

And as we sit here tonight, in the Melbourne Town Hall, surrounded by our Melbourne Girls Grammar School teachers, it’s worth remembering how lucky we are.
We are fortunate, because we have teachers who dedicate their time, energy, Sunday afternoons for marking assessments and hearts to helping us grow, and we can learn from these people who make a difference every single day.

So, in a school there are classrooms, sometimes, red brick walls, students but most MOST importantly, we have our teachers. Thank you.

Kelly L
Year 10