Buddy Class and being a boarding buddy

Being a boarding buddy for 3LPN class is my favourite part on Monday mornings. All students are extremely intelligent and sometimes ask me questions that require deep understanding and knowledge. Originally, I’ve decided to take the buddy class to be able to help them learn and interact with each other freely. To my surprise, I’ve been learning more from them and came to be a less collaborative person than them. This irony is something that makes every session very fun and entertaining. Each student has his/hers own strong worldview and opinion on things, and shares concerns and thoughts even on big topics like university education and career. Excellent behaviour and wonderful sense of humour of my little friends helps the learning process and relationships prosper. They all like to share their stories, which never repeating and always extremely interesting. Being ten years older than them, I’ve expected them to be less mature than they actually are. However, all my expectations changed since the day I’ve become their buddy. Working with them is a pleasurable process from which I’ve learned more than I thought i would. Although first few times were a little challenging to build the connection between each one of them, now we’ve become very close friends and we are having a lot of fun. They know my hobbies and I know theirs, and we update each other every other week on what happened in our lives and in the world.

High School Orchestra

Since the last post, we had one very big concert, where I’ve been

participating in two performances. First was with my music HL class

and the other one was the orchestra. We were preparing 3 pieces, two

with the whole orchestra (strings, woodwinds, percussions etc.) and

one only for strings. During the preparation for the concert, my

violin skills and sense of assembling have been developed tremendously.

It is a wonderful chance for me because I get to learn a lot of new

things about myself. Some things I’ve never learned about made me more

knowledgeable in the area of music. I’ve had a hard time first few

month because of the language barrier. I have never learned any type

of musical structure or any other concepts in English. So this is a

very big change for me. As we are all different and many of orchestra

participants have different backgrounds in musical education, it was

hard first to understand each other.

For example, all my life I was using the do re mi structure of musical

notes, but since I joined the orchestra, I met a lot of people who are

using the ABC notation. And so I had a great chance to learn

a new way of writing down the notes. It was a bit hard to get on with,

but no one said it will be easy. I just now realise that I have played

3 pieces on our last orchestra concert. Three pieces for such a short

period of time is a big change and learning pace and pressure for me

as well.

But aside from an extremely intensive and hard work, it was a lot of

fun and it is so much easier to learn pieces with everyone all

together. It is one of the most remarkable moments for me because I

was lucky to feel the music which we are creating together. It

is a miracle by itself! And being a part of this miracle means a lot

to me. Now we are continually learning new pieces for our next

concert. I am very happy that I am able to join this powerful

orchestra, with talented, knowledgeable and well-trained musicians. I

am looking forward to our next concert in February.

Basketball

Basketball is my favourite sport, I enjoy working hard during training sessions. It is an inspiring and powerful process that makes me think strategically and become more goal-oriented. I was playing basketball in my previous school for 5 years and when I first came to UWC I knew exactly what sport I wanted to do.

Basketball is a team sport, which by itself means that there should be strong collaboration. Being a new player in the team, in an absolutely new environment, surrounded by people I have never met before is tough. And for me its going to take a time to blend in. It is a big challenge for me to create a connection with each of my team players and to find my place in the team. However, I am very passionate to learn more, to learn new tactics and new skills.

Basketball is not just a sport skills, it is an intelligent game that asks you to use communication and strategic thinking. The most important thing that I have learned from first few trainings is that in this sport you have to be very disciplined and well-prepared. I really enjoy playing this sport and I look forward to do my tryouts.

 

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