I would like to thank you all for the welcome you have extended to me. Since I am new to both Saint Maur and Japan, I thought that this would be the perfect opportunity to tell you a little about myself. As some of you already know, I am from Northern Ireland in the U.K. As a child my family moved to Kuwait where I was educated. I received my tertiary education at the Ulster University and University of Sunderland and then moved back to Kuwait to begin my teaching career. I spent the last 10 years in Kuwait working as a teacher, middle leader and Senior leader at a Primary School.

The 5th Meeting of the Asia Pacific Telecommunity (APT) Conference Preparatory Group for World Radio Conference (WRC-19) (APG19-5) was held between 31 July - 6 August 2019 in Tokyo sponsored by Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (MIC) and supported by the ITU (International Telecommunication Union) Association of Japan.

Noted bilingual actor and television personality Thane Camus Ikeda, Saint Maur Class of 1989, made a strong impression in the role of Sir Harry Parkes, the first British ambassador to Japan, in a recent episode of NHK’s annual “Taiga Drama.” On Sunday 2 September, Thane (who uses the stage name Thane Camus or セーンカミュ) appeared in “Segodon,” the televised biography of Japanese Bakumatsu hero Saigo Takamori.

During the summer vacation, Yokohama Science Frontier High School (YSFH) kindly invited a Grade 12 student to experience life as a Japanese high school student.  This was just one of the many events organized as part of the Saint Maur – YSFH collaboration. In the following article, the student reflects on this worthwhile experience.

The IGCSE (International General Certificate of Secondary Education) examinations for the tenth graders are held in two sessions every year: October/November and May/June. Each subject is separately graded with each student taking exams in several different subjects.  The IGCSE results for the sophomores of 2018/2019 were issued mid- August.

During this past summer, a group of Grade 10 and Grade 11 students travelled to Cambodia to participate in Habitat for Humanity’s Global Village program. Habitat for Humanity is a global non-profit organization whose vision is a world where everyone has a decent place to live. As part of the Global Village program, our students helped a family in need rebuild their home.

We were very fortunate to have the Japan Blind Soccer Association teach our Grade 4 students about blind soccer. It is their first time coming to an international school.

The yearly visit of the Yokohama campus of the RIKEN Research Institute has now become somewhat of a tradition and it is truly one of the highlights for IB Biologists. This year, we brought this collaboration one step further with the visit of one of RIKEN Yokohama's senior scientists, Dr Todd Duane Taylor, who gave our IB Biologists and Physicists a lecture about handling and curating the ever increasing amount of scientific data generated worldwide.