Student Portfolio

1-Qu’est ce que vous avez très bien réussi pour cet examen oral?

2-Qu’est-ce que vous souhaitez faire mieux pour l’année prochaine?

3-Comment allez-vous faire mieux la prochaine fois?

I think I could have done a lot better as I think that I revised in the wrong way, I should have put in a consistent amount of work throughout the year rather than studying for exams at the end. If I could do anything differently, it would be to put in a consistent amount of work throughout. I’d like to make more notes about each question and be more thorough with all my units.  Despite this, I do think I did better than last time but I don’t think I did well as I could have done a lot better.

In the past year, a large part of my life has changed with one of the major differences being that I uprooted my whole life to move to Singapore. Throughout all this, I believe that I have learnt a lot about myself and discovered that I am actually capable of a lot more than I expected. I began to understand that being independent was something that I could be and being all by myself away in boarding school helped me understand that. I also learnt to deal with pressure in a myriad of different ways, as UWC was a large school with a a lot to do. In the past, I aspired to be a type of person that could handle any situation that came forth, one of those people that could do everything themselves and didn’t exactly need anyone to do anything for them. By living in the boarding house, I feel that I have taken a step towards the right direction to somewhat achieve that. I have always felt that this is a strength of mine, knowing what I want and knowing how to get it, I tend to be a determined person that would go most lengths to get what I want and knowing that I made a step in the right direction makes me motivated to do well at this school.

A lot of my personality has been developed through my interests and hobbies. As a child, I used to do gymnastics, it was outside school so it was something I started by taking the initiative to get interested in a sport that I liked the idea of. I started training when I was seven but I stopped when I was 13 as I felt that I didn’t have the time to spend on it, considering the steadily built amounts of schoolwork. I consider this as one of the reasons that I tend to be loyal or dedicated to anything I’m interested in.

Before moving here, I lived in Mumbai and I still consider it to be my home, no matter what. In India, I do think that the culture and the people differ greatly from here which did help me see the world in two vastly different perspectives. Although I love my home, my friends and my family, I was sheltered when I lived there. To this date, I often feel like I had blinders on in Mumbai but when I’m here, it’s just me and no one to stop me from seeing the world. It feels like I see a range of different lives now, rather than just one perspective repeated with different faces.

My aspirations for the future are not only to improve my life the way it is but to grow as a person while doing that. My largest aspiration would be to be able to push away distractions and be able to genuinely focus on anything I’m doing. Currently, I tend to get distracted by a range of things, varying from my phone to even a poster on the wall next to me. I would like to overcome that and learn to focus on what I’m doing, being able to dedicate time to a certain task and being able to give it my undivided attention. Over the summer, I want to try different methods of avoiding distractions and seeing what works, one of these might be sitting in my room alone with my phone turned off or playing white noise on my headphones as to not get distracted. I do think that I will be able to find a solution over the summer and would like to dedicate time to finding this.

One of the factors that could motivate people to kill could be decreases in employment rates or inflation in economy. If there aren’t enough legal jobs to go around, people would clearly go looking for less than legal opportunities to make an income or if the expenses go up, ie: prices of daily essentials increasing, people would look for ways to make more of an income.

At some point or the other, a message is somewhat ingrained in people’s minds and that is to do whatever it takes to survive, no matter the circumstances. It could possibly be our natural animal instinct but it does exist and in a society that the message seems to be kill or be killed, in or circumstances hate or be hated, it might not be as dire as murder but it could very well lead to death either way.

Analyse the ways in which Shakespeare evokes contradictory feelings towards his characters.

Shakespeare evokes contradictory feelings towards his characters by displaying their flaws as openly as their strengths. One of the ways that he does this is, using Lady Macbeth as an example, he obviously exhibits her to be a strong powerful woman but allows one to dislike her character by displaying her greed for the throne, “and dashed the brains out, had I so sworn” (1.7.59), she goes so far to imply that she would even kill her own child in order to get what she wants.

Comment on the significance of dialogue and ensemble scenes in affecting mood and positioning the audience.

Differentiate between the direct and indirect characterisation Shakespeare uses in order to construct his characters.

Shakespeare uses indirect characterisation to introduce the main character of the play, Macbeth, as he has other characters like the Captain speak of him as “brave Macbeth” (1.2.16), or as King Duncan who praises him as “O valiant cousin” (1.2.24). He did this in order for the audience to have a developed impression of Macbeth’s character when he eventually is directly introduced into the play. On the other hand, Shakespeare uses direct characterisation to construct the character of several supporting characters such as King Duncan or Lady Macbeth. They are both directly introduced into the play without the audience having any previous impressions of their characters, allowing them to introduce and construct their the characters themselves.

At first glance, there are several components on the poster that seemingly add up to provide a view into the theme of the book. The crown drips with blood, showing me that the book is about royalty and several deaths throughout the piece. The cross on top of the crown, represents religion and Christianity, which would display to me that this takes place in a European or western country. Since the cross is somewhat a significant part of this poster, I would imagine that religion takes a large part of this play and could be notable part of the main conflicts or plot. 

Danny Raven Tan, although not my favourite, really captivated my attention through his intensely felt story. As he mentioned several times in his session, his mother had a severe case of dementia, leading to an essential love-hate relationship between them. He explained how difficult it was to understand what exactly she was going through and, personally, I could relate deeply to this part of it.

My grandfather himself suffers from dementia, and him living with my family gave me a view as to what was happening in their lives and what he was going through. A lot of symptoms of dementia, such as difficulty with recent memory was something I had firsthand experience dealing with, as I watched my parents having to explain things every few hours and themselves getting frustrated. He elucidated all the issues that he had to deal with, when interacting with her clearly. In my perspective, it seemed like he didn’t exactly want to have her around or, deal with her, as such.

On the other hand, I do also believe that she still is his mother, she raised him with everything she had, she was his own blood, his own family and yet he seemed to be getting easily frustrated and primarily abandoning her when her time of need arrived. I do believe that he could have put a little more effort into being there for her and getting her the help she needs instead of being as focused on his own career as he was.

To conclude, although I completely understand where his exasperation or short temper for the situation stems from, I do think that there was more effort that he could have put into being there for his mother and helping her through this difficult time in her long life, there was more effort that he could have put in.

Mukul Deva had to be, no offence to any of the other speakers, my favourite. Upon research prior to the session, I assumed he was another writer, just a little more successful than most of the speakers we had come across, but when the session began, it was more different than I could have imagined. He came across as incredibly well spoken, intelligent and in general someone I could relate to. Most of his books seemed to be based on south eastern countries like India and Pakistan above others, this along with his nationality itself allowed me to relate to him and generally was a large selling point when it came down to it. I also majorly agreed with his philosophies and general sense of self, it made sense to me and that had to be the main reason that I liked his session so much.

From the limited previous knowledge I had on artists as a whole, I thought that it would be an interesting, and entertaining, experience to begin with. When the session began, I can confidently say that I was not disappointed, he provided plenty of insight on being an artist and how hard it was to really, make it. Although his session was one of the most interesting ones we had been to, I did think that he could have spoken about his art and how he channeled his emotions into it, instead I found him telling the story of his life, which notwithstanding the fact that it was entertaining, it was somewhat unrelated to the topics that we expected to learn.

After a good amount of research, I came to the conclusion that Marc Nair was one of the more modern poets as compared to most others in his industry. During the session, I wound up with the same conclusion, he seemed to write poetry to help people understand his perspective o major issues and the factor of him essentially rapping his poetry to a tune, was just another piece of evidence. Personally, I really appreciated the way he expressed his opinions in such an open way, a lot of them were based on topics I could relate to and I found myself interested in different ways to make opinions on serious situations, sound engrossing rather than boring. Overall, I really enjoyed being able to interact with such a frank poet like him, it was an enjoyable experience.