https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRvX6k_AQ_U&feature=youtu.be
Here is my final reflection after participating in project week. I try to reflect on my experience during project week and how it has shaped me as a person.
CAS
Swimming at the end of grade 11
This year of swimming has been especially challenging for me. Though I may have been focused more on the physical aspects of swimming throughout the year, I wasn’t too focused on my mental aspect towards it. Throughout this year especially, I hadn’t been enjoying the sport as much as before and I felt that it was difficult to go swimming. Not only has my love for the sport been dying out, it was also difficult to maintain a consistent commitment to the sport because of academic stress and pressure. Being at the end of grade 11, where academic pressures are high, I had to ensure that I got the grades I wanted to apply to the schools I wanted to go to. This was an example of the challenges that I had faced throughout grade 11. However, throughout these hardships, I was able to persevere and get through the year not only maintaining my swimming commitment and academics but also with my happiness. This helped me develop by understanding myself and how to balance my happiness with my commitments. I feel that this has shown growth as I had to make adjustments to my schedules for my sake which meant that I cut down on swimming and spent more time relaxing and destressing, because what was once a stress-reducing activity (swimming) had actually started inducing stress as a result of the expectations and performance requirements in swimming. In general, I was quite pleased with my performance at the end of grade 11 and being crowned SEASAC champions as a team again was also quite gratifying as the hard work that had been put in had paid off.
Chinese chat reflection 2
Finishing up Chinese chat in grade 11 has really left some impactful experiences on me. Being able to watch my mentees progress throughout the year in the Chinese abilities with the aid of my teaching and their school learnings has made me feel a sense of accomplishment. It was gratifying to know that my planning towards each lesson was effective yet enjoyable for the students, this ability has also translated into other areas of my life where it was important for me to have a good plan for self-management. This shows learning outcome 3 where I had created a plan for my CAS experience, being Chinese chat, each lesson, I had to carefully plan how I was going to approach the lesson and what subjects and areas I had to cover in order to ensure the learning of the students. Moreover, with each subsequent lesson, I was able to show growth as I had become more accustomed to the teaching role as compared to being a student. Throughout the duration of the activity, I became more aware of what attitude I should be approaching the students with and how I could have the most enjoyable lesson without it getting too boring for the student, seeing as they are kids in middle school, planning out break times or rest times for the to just relax was something important that I found since they couldn’t concentrate for very long. Only after a few sessions of doing this was I able to get the right balance between rest and study which kept the student engaged during our study time but also relaxed enough so that he wasn’t stressed during this lesson. This shows growth because, in the beginning, I was very unsure about how to approach and teach the students, but as time went on and more sessions passed, I become more aware and learned more about the intricacies of teaching and was able to grow into a better mentor for the students.
Swimming in grade 12
This year has been a difficult time for me for swimming. The wrestle between academics and continuing swimming has been hard. Especially in grade 12, when all the internal assessments and extended essay we had to do, being able to organize time was vitally important if I wanted to continue swimming. Something that I did do was to cut down a bit on swimming other I felt that it would have been difficult to maintain a good study schedule. This compromise allowed me to maintain some form of swimming standard and also allowed me to focus on my academics when I needed to. This in a way shows my perseverance to the sport as I could have easily given it up, so actually deciding to continue swimming was a way for me to demonstrate this quality. I feel as if I was somewhat successful in achieving my goals for swimming, I wanted to make the SEASAC team in which I did, however, unfortunately, it was cancelled. More importantly, I made my goals for the times that I wanted to swim in competitions which I was rather proud of. I feel like this time period where I had to compromise has helped me grow as a person. This is because I managed to find a way to balance both swimming and academics where I wouldn’t have to sacrifice one thing. This quality can help me in the future when I am forced to make a hard decision. This year in grade 12 has been really special in terms of swimming, as it is my last year in high school for this sport, so leaving with some great memories has always been a good thing about continuing swimming.
Piano reflection 2
Piano this season has really helped demonstrate my commitment and perseverance because with all my other academic and activity commitments, I have made time during lunches and after school to practice during school and after school. I have since had to have given up time with my friends to go and eat lunch but instead, I went down to the music rooms to practice my songs. I feel like doing this had made me a more organized person as it has allowed me to realize just how much time I can make available for my studies and activities if I am really focused on them. This has also made me realize my ability to commit to something as now I can dedicate a lot of time to something I enjoy, which in turn, can make more a better student as I can dedicate more time to studying. This has also proved to be a development of learning outcome 3 because finding the balance between academics, swimming and piano were difficult. Having to plan for each piano session and time for practices by myself was difficult but after a few weeks of experimenting, I was able to come up with a schedule that allowed me to practice piano, maintain my academic and swimming commitments.
Service reflection 3
Here is a video of Alex and I interviewing each other about learning outcome 6.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4yRK9YhFaAk&feature=youtu.be
Service reflection 2
This image is showing my confidence levels over time since the start of the service, it has helped to show my perseverance in being able to continue doing the service and help build up my confidence in working with people who have intellectual disabilities. Also working with other people during the activity has helped improve my confidence as it allowed me to express myself better.
After visiting the Minds care centre for the first time, I had a bit of a drop in confidence as the next time we were going to see our service partners, it was going to be the first time we were going to have a session that we planned ourselves. This brings me to learning outcome 3, where we had to initiate and plan a CAS experience. Planning the first session was nerve-wracking as it the first time I had to plan something for people with intellectual disabilities as I didn’t know what activities they would enjoy and engage with and what they wouldn’t. After the first session, my confidence had a bit of a fall as some of the activities that we had planned to do didn’t work out to great, seeing as the clients didn’t engage too well with them, therefore, we were forced to reflect on the session and see what sort of activities they would enjoy. It turned out simple games or activities worked best as they were the ones our clients enjoyed most so after the second session, my confidence had started to rise again because the new activities that we planned were a lot more engaging and the clients were interacting a lot more with the activities.
Piano
This is an example of me demonstrating learning outcomes 1 and 4. I am not a very confident person so performing in front of an audience of people, no matter how big, is always nerve-racking for me and I always get very freaked out, so with this piano recital, I was very nervous to make mistakes, even in front of my own parents. However, I feel after performing, the fear has slightly diminished as I realized, no one was there to judge me and it helped me become more confident. This piano recital has made me more committed because of the amount of practise I needed for certain parts of the songs, even though I messed up a part, I had to put a lot of practise into it. Some parts of the song I struggled with came out quite nicely because, at lunchtime, I had to come in and practice, but I feel in the end, it paid off quite nicely.
Video
https://www.facebook.com/qyyang2004/videos/10217538113468711/?t=7
服务义工的回报
在高中的阶段，学生有要求餐酒创造，行动与服务的计划。这个计划的目的是希望学生收纳柜通过社会实践去体验生活。我们学校要求学生做服务义工，除了让学生长大对社会游泳以外，还为了拿到IB文凭。学校利用学生的空闲来安排学生去做服务义工，所以我每天星期一，下学后会去conference room 1，跟着脑残疾人一起跳舞和做活动。对我来说这个机会来跟住脑残疾人跳舞，我遇到了很多困难，因为我跟着他们在一起，感觉非常不舒服，不知道怎样跟着他们沟通。跟着他们一起跳舞时，我遇到了很多困难因为大部分时候，不但脑残疾人很难跟他们一起沟通，所以我们不知道他们想说什么，而且我觉得我跳舞的时候有点尴尬。但是，我们一直做了的时候，我们就找到了办法来解决这些问题，我们常常会跟他们的关爱人一起沟通，学一学怎样跟他们沟通，还有我跟学生花更多时间，跳舞不会太尴尬因为我们学生的一组已经会很熟悉了。我第一次做服务室，我的态度比较烦恼，我觉得跟着他们一起跳舞就是浪费我的时间但是，久而久之我开始看到做这个服务让我得到很大的收获。
做服务义工是，我收到了很大的收获。因为，跟着脑残疾人在一起，我们应该要爱心和耐心跟着他们在一起因为他们大部分是，不懂社会规范。但是，我们看到他们跟着我们，开始沟通是，我们都感觉到成就感，因为看起来我们又进步了。服务义工让我学会与人相处，丰富了生活经验，加深了对社会的认识。初期之外，参加服务可以培养在我的组织能力级领导能力，也有助于增强自信心。我鼓励大家通过多做义工来了解社会，感恩回报社会，当作对社会游泳的人。
Dragons Swimming
I have been doing swimming for over 10 years now and I have a pretty accurate idea of where I am, what I need to improve on and where I am good at. I am a distance swimmer meaning I swim the events like 400, 800, 1500 freestyle and this would be considered as one of my strengths as they are my strongest events. Something that I know I need to is my breaststroke, I can barely swim it at speed because I rarely practise it but from now on I’m trying to get better at it by doing it more in training sessions and also doing exercises to make my hips more flexible. I know that I also need to work on my sprinting abilities as I find sprinting hard due to the fact that I’m too used to swimming distance events so to improve this, I will be doing more gym sessions to improve my strengths and power to swim faster. I am committed to swimming as I have had to give up most of the other sports that I wanted to pursue just to purse swimming competitively, I swim 9 sessions a week and participate in 2 land training sessions a week bringing my swimming hours up to over 20 a week.