We are delighted to invite parents and students to our Year 10 Symposium to hear presentations from students from NHEHS and Harrow School. The event will be held at NHEHS on Tuesday, 15th November 2022, from 3:45 – 6pm, with presentations starting at 4pm.

The “Remove/Year 10” Symposium, now in its third year, is a challenging cross-subject research project which allows the most scholarly students at Harrow and NHEHS to learn to collaborate, whilst developing their appetite for challenging material and real scholarship.

Students work in groups of four, with two from each school. This year, each pair will produce an academic article, using original sources, and produce a presentation. The questions are drawn from different subject disciplines, all loosely tied to a central theme. Articles will then be published in a journal which explores the topic of Bees from a number of different academic angles.

One of every three mouthfuls of our food depends on pollinators such as bees. These furry insects,and the complex social structures within which they live their lives, have inspired great minds since Aristotle. We challenged our students to investigate them from a number of perspectives: from
Literature to Linguistics, Ecology to Economics, and Mathematics to Musical Semiotics.

Classics & Biology: Tony, Jimi, Isabella, Olivia
The extent to which Aristotle’s observations about bees is corroborated by modern science, and what this tells us about ancient Greek science in general.

Mathematics: Andy, Tony, Dana, Ishita
Why the internal structure of a beehive forms an elongated rhombic semi-dodecahedron.

History: Ben, Jerry, Alex, Imen
How, and for what purposes, the symbol of the bee has been used in history.

Linguistics & Biology: Jerry, Nicholas, Jasmine, Julia
How bees communicate through a ‘dance’ relative to the angle of the sun, and by buzzing to particular pitches, and the extent to which this behaviour functions as a language.

Literature: Arthur, Jonathan, Beatrice, Niamh
Shakespeare’s use of bees as a symbol for human hierarchy in his History plays.

Musical Semiotics: Ben, Richard, Georgia, Harriet
The compositional devices deployed by Rimsky-Korsakov to make the Flight of Bumblebee sound like a bee, and why certain musical sounds evoke bees in the human imagination.

Genetics & Ecology: Jonathan, Steven, Alice, Maya
The use of honey as an antimicrobial agent, and its role in modern medicine.

Economics: Sudeep, Viren, Abigail, Evie
The main challenges and rewards of the Nigerian honey-production economy, and the options open to the government to support producers through economic policy.

Read more about the symposium here. To book your free ticket, please see the newsletter of 14th October for the Eventbrite link. Ticket sales close on 7th November. We look forward to seeing you there.