Tampines Climbing Final Reflection

LO1: Unfortunately, I have been sick for a few of the climbing sessions, so I have not improved as much as I would like in regards to the longer walls. I do feel much more comfortable with the heights, which preplanning routes helped a great deal with. However, I got a lot of opportunities to practice dinoing on boulders, which is something I am now much more confident in. This experience also helped me get more comfortable with the social side of rock climbing since I can now belay confidently I feel more prepared to climb in other groups.

LO2: Speed climbing was a new challenge for me, and while I did not get as much practice as I would have liked, I still found a few ways to improve. Throughout this process, I got much better at selecting and memorizing a route before going for a full attempt on a difficult wall, which made speed climbing much easier since I did not have to look for the next handhold. Getting more confident dinoing and falling as a result of bouldering was also a big help in improving.

Tampines Climbing Initial Reflection

Inquiry+Investigation
LO1: I had done sporadic rock climbing for about a year before this activity but only bouldering and auto-belay walls. My experience in Yosemite had been with longer walls accessible by an anchor, but those were heavily reliant on legs and the use of smaller holds. The walls at Tampines were about the same length but relyed more on the grip and arm strength. It will take consistent practice to build the strength I need to adapt to this.

LO2: One discipline of climbing I had not yet encountered before this was speed climbing. I haven’t worked out how different my climbing should be for this but based on what I have seen others do, it is more of jumping from position to position than a calculated ascent. This will again come with practice, which I will do here but also by doing lots of boulders with dino’s so I get to practice with more explosive movements.

Yosemite Climbing Reflection

LO1:This summer I had the opportunity to go climbing with Yosemite Mountaineering School and learn the fundamentals of outdoor rock climbing. I had been climbing for fun and exercise at a climbing gym nearby for around 6 months and found it to be a really engaging form of exercise. It was also a good way of pushing myself to face my fear of heights. At Yosemite, I learned how to use a belay device and set up anchors. It took some time for me to adjust to being belayed in this system. Previously I had used either auto-belay or top-rope. This system required a lot more trust, and it felt like a lot more could go wrong. This initially slowed me down going up, as I was spending more time thinking about falling than climbing.

LO7: I also got the chance to learn how to use anchors, and I was surprised to find that their environmental impact was a consideration. After time the scratching left by the anchoring parts damages the rock face and leaves previous anchor points unusable. This affected the anchors we used, as they were designed to cause minimal damage and leave the climbing routes usable for future generations.

Copenhagen Initial Reflection

LO1-The practices for Copenhagen have built on my previous experiences acting. I have had to utilize basic skills for projection and performance, but line memorization for this play has been difficult. There is a lot of back and forth between characters, which makes the lines very difficult to cram alone. However, as we run it through in practice it is easier to focus on learning the tone and delivery of the cues as opposed to having to go off just the last sentence. I also have not acted in a while, however, observing my fellow cast members and engaging with the seemingly strange activities our director does at the beginning of rehearsals has helped me get back into the right mindset.

Cipher Challenge Initial Reflection

I started this activity with no experience with cipher puzzles. This has made the activity challenging, as I often find myself struggling to make meaningful contributions to the group. I am making progress thanks to the help of my peers, but I still find it difficult to follow the solutions to these ciphers. I plan to use the slides that the more experienced members of the group have created in conjunction with the solutions to the early puzzles of the challenge to reverse engineer the general method I can use to solve these puzzles.

Project Week Initial Reflection

LO3+LO5: We started this process by identifying the activities we wanted to do as a group and found common connections in scuba diving, kayaking, and hiking. We then made a list of places we could travel to and do these activities (Cebu, Tioman, and Borneo). Here working as a group was a major benefit, as we could divide into smaller groups to investigate each place fully. This allowed us to eliminate Borneo and Cebu quickly, as we could not find service to do in Borneo or Cebu. Since we divided it up, we could be confident that we had investigated each place fully.

LO6: When planning our trip it was important for us to make sure our activities and hotel were environmentally sustainable. Many of our locations rely on the tourism generated by their oceans, which are at greater and greater risk thanks to pollution. In order to help with this, we want to work with the Juara Turtle project in Tioman to help conserve the dwindling turtle population. We understand that it is a difficult issue to contribute to in such a small time frame, but we all have the potential to make a small scale difference, which when added up can lead to something greater.

Project Week Final Reflection

LO7:On our first day of project week, we went camping. Most of us had never gone before, however; we were able to combine our various half-remembered outdoor skills to assemble the tents and a fire. We also had to be very conscious of our environmental impact during camping. The fire had to be fully extinguished and our trash kept in bags, which we didn’t have. We ended up using our bigger trash as containers, which made it easier to carry back and avoid a negative environmental impact.

LO2:On day three we went Kayaking, another activity I had never done before. It was a new challenge for most of us, but we went straight into it with a sea kayak. It started a little slow, fortunately, I was the only one in a solo kayak so I did not have the initial coordination issues that slowed down my group. I switched to a double kayak on the way back and I was surprised how easy it was to start swerving.

LO6: While Kayaking we saw firsthand the pollution caused by some major hotels a few hours away from our own. This made me consider the environmental impact of unsustainable tourism. I also saw this during our beach clean-up, where we cleaned mostly plastic off the beach near the mangroves. While I felt like we had an impact, it seems like the problem needs a change at the source of waste disposal methods than simply dealing with the symptoms.

Project Week Reflection

LO4: After 7 months of work, our planning has finally come to fruition. While we had initially contacted the Juara Turtle Project as the focus of our trip, we later found out that the school had already given another group their contact. Since we were both not allowed to work with the same group, we had to redo our plan. We were able to organize diving in Tioman through a company called ecofieldtrips, with whom we were also able to organize a beach clean-up project which linked in with our diving well. Bookings beyond that were fairly easy; however, booking the ferry into Tioman island was problematic. In what I believe was an attempt to accelerate the booking process, the ferry agency repeatedly claimed the booking was canceled until I messaged them again, but at this point, the booking has been confirmed and paid for.

LO3: Transportation was my primary responsibility, but as a group, we put together various documents to communicate our progress on all fronts(Visas, medical records, local contacts, e.t.c) to our school which I have linked here as evidence of our planning.

 

Copenhagen Final Reflection

LO4-Preparing for this show required a lot of dedication, as we often met for 6 hours a week as the performance grew nearer. This was something we all enjoyed doing but grew increasingly hectic in the few weeks before the play. Two of the three cast members, myself included, fell sick with a fever a week before our first performance. This meant that we missed three of the last seven practices, but we managed because of the work we had put in beforehand.

LO5-Working as a group has been a pivotal part of this experience, as this is not a one-man play. Working in a small group (5 people) was fun as we all got to give our input into blocking and costume, but the lines have been difficult to memorize. We were only able to get them for the first time when we had to confirm our performance with the drama teachers. We also had to work together to understand the play, which had a lot of physics and history references. Our director understood and explained the physics material, and we all contributed what was needed to understand the historical context as well as the Danish pronunciations.

 

Circus Final Reflection

LO1- I was initially quite anxious about performing, which is something I normally do while pretending to be someone else. Juggling was a skill I am less confident in, particularly since you can make up a forgotten line, but its harder to recover from a dropped ball. I have partially overcome this just by repeatedly performing and dropping balls. There’s nothing to do but keep going. If I were to keep pursuing this, one point of improvement would be to actually perform a little more instead of simply juggling, but that would take more confidence building.

LO3-We also started our service component, which has required advance planning. Thankfully we have all learned the circus skills, so we had to adapt them to our various service activities. The most frequent was working with groups of children to teach them circus skills. We planned to divide into groups and have the children rotate between different stations for each skill. We have since lowered the time between rotations to suit the age of the kids and divided games that match their skill level. The kids range from ages 5-7, so starting with juggling was a stretch. We kept the original activities for the kids that progressed that far but starting teaching more basic skills like throwing and catching. We also had to plan for our performances, choosing gear that we could transport to the performances we did at retirement homes and coordinating to put together a coherent performance.

LO4-By working on this for the past year we have gained the skills necessary to make this activity possible and an understanding of each other’s strengths and weaknesses that make a good performance. By spending a season learning the circus skills we taught and performed with, we had something of value to provide instead of bumbling our way through our later service sessions. By learning together we also knew each other’s strengths and weaknesses allowing us to divide up teaching and performing effectively. We also met during lunches to get ready to perform.