Over the past couple of weeks, this service has really been something I’ve been looking forward to. Our partners from Tampines MINDS center have been allowed to come so we have finally been able to have live sessions with them. This has all involved a lot of planning and collaboration with them to be able to arrive at this point.

Now that they are here, during our sessions I have really have had to focus on the ethical considerations involved when engaging with them. Yoga is something that, when not done correctly, can create injuries. So our job as their coaches is to help provide support and ensure they do the exercises correctly. This has definitely been a challenge because the majority of them do not understand English very well so learning how to adapt our routine to carefully show them the exercise and learning how to simplifying movements on the spot has been crucial. During my first session with them, one big challenge was definitely having a partner who was injured on his knee. Although it was the first session and everyone was excited to show them our new program, I had maintained a sense of ethical responsibility in the sense that I had to control for him the extent to which he could push himself in doing the exercises and adapt a new routine just for him.

1 – Self Reflection- What were some of the most interesting discoveries you made about yourself through the Myers Briggs and holland code tests? How has your planning for the future changed or stayed the same during this unit? (100 words).

I have discovered from my Myers Briggs test that my personality is not only quite social and extroverted however I am also an entrepreneur which I think is something I had not really seen myself as prior to this. However, once looking at the career options possible for me I saw that a lot of them fit into entrepreneurship which is all about starting up businesses. I think this goes really well with my other personality types and other career choices as I see myself in the future not only helping others and being in creating links with a wide range of people, however, I also now see myself starting up an enterprise or a business. I think this may come later on in my life however I have realized that I am not all about the stable but tough and energy-consuming career I always thought I needed and I now see that I would like to go out and find or create something for myself related to my passions. I think I also now see that there are a lot of different aspects of career paths I can go into and that is something that excites me and I look forward to.

2. Self Advocacy- Professional relationships. Name two or three important skills you learned about maintaining positive professional relationships and how will you use them in the future (50 words).

I think something I have learned is that in order to maintain a positive professional relationship, this goes both ways. It is not something that only one side has to do and commit time and effort to however it is something both sides of the relationship need to meet. I think the relationship bank has really helped me to see that small actions are important and necessary in maintaining a positive relationship with others. In a more professional aspect, I think I have also realized that maintaining a professional relationship is hard and takes time and this is something that is built over time. It does not come immediately and I think the most important is to understand that some things may negatively affect a professional relationship but based on the reactions we have to fix these, this can really help to grow and strengthen this relationship further.

Today we had a workshop with an American mime Bill Bowers. He has worked with Charles Lecoq, a practitioner we have studied recently. I think throughout this process I have learned how we can portray objects and make objects come to life without any dialogue and with simple hand and body movements. I have learned how small specific movements we can do by just simply moving fingers can have a great effect on transforming objects and sparking imagination in the audience. I have really seen this connection with my CP process where I studied Rakugo, which is a comical Japanese form of mime. I think miming creates a special connection between actors and the audience which other forms of performance which include dialogue just simply can’t portray. I think it gives off a different message to the audience which is much more impactful and hooks the audience into every specific movement the actors are doing much more than if actors were to use dialogue to explain their movement processes.

Over the course of the past few months, I have been coaching middle school touch rugby once a week after school. I have really enjoyed this opportunity to not only develop new coaching and leadership skills but to also create a connection with some players joining high school touch next year. I strongly believe that a strong connection is crucial between team members and this is created over time which was one of the factors which led me to sign up for this activity. This coaching so far has enabled me to develop a lot of my leadership and communication skills as I have had to explain to a lot of the younger girls the rules of touch and have had to be clear in these explanations. One challenge in this activity has definitely been trying to explain moves and simple plays to some of the new girls as I found that when I play I am able to see opportunities for these plays and execute them however explaining when and how to others has been a challenge for me. However, to overcome this I have realized that demonstrating and explaining these things over the course of a few trainings has really helped. This was to allow the girls to come to these realizations of where space is or what moves they could be calling in a more natural way. I have learned that this learning is repetitive and the need to organize drills that allow the girls to realize the importance of the scenarios for when they use specific touch skills is important for their development as players.

This year due to less competitive opportunities as our usual Saturday games and in-season games have been canceled, I wanted to get more touch training into my week. Last year, I was part of a club called Bedok Kings which was a very local club and I really enjoyed learning their ways of playing and their different skills. I think thanks to them last year during the school season I improved so much and overall it was such a fun opportunity to play with a new team. I also really love playing touch rugby and learning new moves and improving at the sport so being part of a club was a really great opportunity for me. Last year however was the last year for Bedok Kings so this year I wasn’t sure which club to join but after asking around I found a club called BUCKS. We train twice a week for 2 hours which on top of my other sports and activities makes quite a lot of commitments. This is why one of my goals for this activity will be LO4 (commitment) and showing perseverance and resilience. This is because on a Wednesday afternoon I will have a total of 3 sports during the day and therefore my time management will need to be very effective if I want to be able to manage my time properly and be able to meet deadlines. Although this will make my schedule much busier I would still like to show my commitment and motivation to this sport and this new team by coming to training although there will be no games or competitive tournaments with other club teams. Another goal for this activity is LO1 – awareness of strengths and areas of growth. I would really like to use this activity to gain new skills and learn how to organize different plays and settles during games with people I am not used to playing with. I think collaborating with people outside of my usual touch team will be a great opportunity for me to learn new ways of playing and overall improve my skills in touch. I also think that because BUCKS touch is a mixed sport it will give me a great opportunity to play with people of different age groups as well as playing with boys which I think will significantly help my progress in this sport.

ZEN ZEN ZO is a theatre company in New Zealand teaching how to bring more energy to a performer on stage to make their performance highly more engaging for the audience. During this workshop, we first worked on adopting multiple different levels of energy while walking around the room. We worked on energy levels 1 – 7, 1 being absolutely 0 energy and lying on the floor and simply having the minimum amount of strength to stand up. While slowly going through energy levels 2 – 7 I needed to show a change in motivation in my character by changing the situation which my character is in resulting in needing to portray a higher and more urgent energy level. I think what was particularly challenging in this activity however was maintaining a high energy level over a long period of time whilst not however increasing my pace. As we increase our energy levels as performers, we tend to want to increase our pace to portray this increase in energy level. However, in this workshop we learned how to manage to increase the energy in our body by engaging much more parts of our body such as our core, raising legs to be on our toes and ready to bounce for something in front, hands, and arms stiffer and directly by our sides… without increasing our pace. This I found was the key highlight and the key takeaway from this workshop because, in my opinion, in order for the audience to be fully engaged in the performance, the performer needs to know how to properly engage the audience in their movements and what they are doing on stage. The audience needs to want to be attracted to the actor and intrigued by what he/she is performing on stage by maintaining a high presence through a high energy level even when not moving around the stage.

For Sports Ethics we meet once a week on a Wednsay at lunch and so far we have talked about key recent events with ethical issues across multiple different sports. Since this is a new activity however we need to build it from the start and my ultimate goal would be to create a good foundation and start to this activity so it could develop and hopefully gain more interest in more students over the next years. I think this activity has a really good capapability of raising awareness on the ethical issues seen in some sports and high performance athletes once it is more developed. At the beginning of this activity therefore we have been planning a lot on what we want to focus on during the sessions as focusing on the ethics of sport in general is quite a broad topic. I have really liked the general open discussions we have had on any recent events raising ethical issues in sports however we also need to start focusing on one particular issue to gain more knowledge and have the possibility to spread more awareness about it.

I think this activity will allow me to engage with issues of global importance (LO6) because what I have really enjoyed about it so far has been the discussions and investigations on decissions made by high performance athletes, coaches, organizations which have had many ethical implications. Because I am really passionate about sports I find these discussions particularly interesting because in various situations I am able to connect and understand the situations these athletes are put in and therefore come with better and richer ideas to add to our conversations based on some issues I see which relates to us as athletes in school. I think this is why I will also really enjoy my CAS project for this activity as I will be able to change or raise awareness on some aspects of out school sports which I see some issues in and connect these to more global issues to portray the significance of correcting and understanding these issues. For example one big issue I can think of is gender imbalance in sports and coaches understanding the difference between male and female bodies and capabilities however not letting this impact the way and toughness in which they coach their athletes. This is one significant global issue which many female athletes around the world have mentioned in interviews and on various occasions where they feel they are undervalued due to having different capabilities as men. Another issue we have discussed has been on the Micheal Phelps situation (the gold medal winner olpimian swimmer) who was praised for having hormonal advantages to aid him in swimming. However a female track athlete Caster Semenya who was has more testosterone levels than the average woman was denied the capability to compete. How is it fair that a male athlete get’s an advantage however a female athlete experiences this difference as a disadvantage. Another issue I am particularity interested in has been the opsycolgoical help some high level athletes lack or simply do not have access to especially in high risk sports such as the F1. Many F1 drivers do not get psycolgocial help to aid them throughout their career however how ethical is it that they lack this provision when many face death during high intensity races? I will need to plan a CAS project using any aspect of this activity which inspires me so another important part will be to plan (LO3) the issue I want to raise awareness on around school as best as possible to ensure I convey this issue effectively and ultimately raise more awareness on this activity.