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Principal's Blog

Radnor House parents receive a Weekly Bulletin of news information, highlights of achievements and details of forthcoming events, as well as additional communications from other departments and individuals as necessary.

Our Principal, Darryl Wideman, also writes a regular blog to share his thoughts about education and the world with a wider audience, which you can read below.

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  • We Will Remember Them

      Battlefields Tour – Saturday 2nd April 2022 After writing 1,200 words last week about the journey to get to France for our trip to the Battlefields of the First World War, I can now tell you what happened when we finally got there.  In the thirty years since I first visited t...
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  • It Is Better to Travel Hopefully than to Arrive

    This phrase can apparently be attributed to the Scottish novelist Robert Louis Stevenson, with the idea that your focus should not just be your end point, but you should also enjoy the way you get there.  Stevenson died aged just forty-four in Samoa.  He looks to have crammed many journeys...
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  • Have You Fulfilled Your Potential Yet?

    Every now and then a moment comes along that reminds me what is really important and reinvigorates me about why I enjoy my job so much, an enjoyment that I appreciate I sometimes manage to hide rather well.  Such a moment came a couple of weeks ago at a Dukes awayday for principals and heads, w...
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  • Ten Choices

    As well as trying to instil a love of history in my pupils when I am in the classroom, I have always felt it my duty to impart wider wisdom wherever possible.  Having taught all the Year 7 and Year 8 classes for a few lessons in recent months, my top tip just now is probably to avoid saying...
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  • Words of Wisdom

    The wise words of the Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius, to which I referred in last week’s blog, reminded me yet again that there is so much good advice out there, if only we can find the time and space to absorb it.  On reflection, and with all the desperate news filli...
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  • Sticks and Stones

    ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me’ is one of those expressions familiar to all of us, used from early childhood as a defence against name-calling and to build resilience.  The joy of looking things up on Wikipedia is often to find something new, in...
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  • Devil-Land

    A spoiler alert, if one is needed, is that despite the title of this blog, it is about a history book and not about current events in Ukraine, where ‘Devil-Land’ might well be an understatement for what is going on.
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  • Loose Ends

    From time to time, usually in the middle of the night, I remember that I have read things in the last twelve months that I have forgotten to share with you.  This might be because I did not think they were as interesting as other bits of information I wanted to highlight, or it might be because...
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  • Lessons from our German Cousins

    I first heard about the book I referenced last week, ‘A Woman in Berlin’, in John Kampfner’s entertaining contrast between Britain and Germany called ‘Why the Germans Do it Better (Notes from a Grown-Up Country)’, which is not quite the overwhelming eulogy you might exp...
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  • Reading for Pleasure?

    It turned out to be a very quiet Christmas in the Wideman household, with positive Covid tests meaning a lot of enforced self-isolation.  Looking back, I am not quite sure what I did to fill the time, but several hours each afternoon were dedicated to reading Antonia Fraser’s biography of...
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  • Paradise by the Dashboard Light

    The death of Michael Lee Aday last week had a strange effect on me, so I thought it might be a useful self-help tool to use this week’s blog to try to articulate my thoughts about why this might have been.  If you logged in to read my reflections on the lengthy tome that was Cromwell...
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  • No More Stiff Upper Lip?

    The Duke of Wellington allegedly said that the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton.  In fact, the concept of organised sports did not become a reality until decades after the defeat of Napoleon and there were no playing fields, as we would recognise them, in 1815.  You...
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