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.
Author: parke15836@gapps.uwcsea.edu.sg
Project week reflection 1
Currently, I am writing a reflection during the early stages for planning our cas experience, ie project week. We have currently been doing research on what activities, service and creativity experiences that we can undertake in order for us to have a memorable and meaningful experience. For service, we have been looking into the Yayasan organisation which provides underprivileged kids with food and education every day. This raised the idea of learning outcome 6, where we have learned about a global issue, poverty, and tried to take local action in Indonesia to help improve the lives of these local Indonesian kids. However, during the planning of this trip, we also encountered a major issue, it being that there were riots ongoing in Jakarta at the time, so the planning for the activity (learning muay Thai) that we wanted to do could no longer be used as both our supervisor and group deemed that participating in the activity would no longer be safe. In order to make adjustments to our plan, our group had to be flexible in what they were willing to do, therefore, we managed to compromise and instead of doing an activity (learning muay Thai) which was at the epicenter of the riots, we decided to go with a creative experience that would still allow us to learn more about the culture, which was learning how to cook the local cuisine and going on tour to famous monuments and museums. This shows learning outcome 3 because even though we encountered major issues in the planning stages, we were all still able to act quickly and compromise on a new activity that our supervisor deemed safe and make adjustments to our itinerary. Moreover, this also shows learning outcome 5 as we had to collaborate to not only compromise on certain activities, we were all delegated roles during the planning stage and during the trip. Even though we had separate roles, we had to work interconnectedly with each other to ensure that we could come up with an itinerary that was efficient, but not too cramped. Overall, I am currently enjoying the early stages of the project week planning and can’t wait for the next weeks to come
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.
Viva Voce final reflection EE
In my extended essay, I would have considered doing a less broad research task on tires my investigation on the physical mechanics led to no changes in my final conclusion. I believe that if I had to redo the extended essay I would have focused more on induction braking as it is the line of investigation with most ambiguity. this would have allowed me been able to form a more complete conclusion on the viability of induction braking and would have allowed me to further understand the technical limitations behind them. However, I would still justify the exploration of the recycling of tires as it allowed me to fully understand why tires can and should be used as a composite in house building. Although tires have great housebuilding properties, a question that I had after conducting my research was why aren’t tires a more prominent resource used in housebuilding as they are not only cheaper to acquire, there is also a large abundance of them sitting in landfills which are polluting our planet. Through this investigation, I managed to gain a vast amount of knowledge on this topic which I enjoyed more than I would have thought.
Interim reflection (R2)
After finishing my research, I have come to understand that has already been done on improving the sustainability of tires, but even more, can still be done. I have now gained a fuller understanding of the principles behind induction brakes and how it wasn’t as viable as I had initially thought. I also had to conduct more extensive research on thermal physics to understand how compositing concrete with tire bits could help improve its insulative properties and how this could help recycle tires. An issue that I had come across was my communication, I found it difficult to communicate in a way that was clear and engaging. A solution that my supervisor came up with was to use more images to keep the reader engaged and allowed me to refer back to the image, making my writing more clear. Throughout my essay, I feel my understanding of the topic had become more complete.
FOA 2 Reflection
The main purpose of my FOA was to learn about the changes that the internet has brought to beauty expectations and societal roles that society has imposed on women. I decided to do a presentation because it easily allowed me to structure the ideas that I wanted to express, also easily allowing me to illustrate the changes that the internet has brought to these expectations and beauty standards of women. To achieve this idea, I decided to compare and contrast the advertisements from before the internet and from after which allowed to me clear express the changes. It also allowed me to go into more detail on how the internet has brought these changes. The effect that these ads had on women has changed with the changes in expectations because now that these standards have become more open and tolerant which has raised the confidence in women due to the lower in expectations. The reception has also changed because of the change in attitude in today’s society as we have become more politically correct and sensitive towards more issues. This FOA relates to part 1 of the course as it is analyzing the changes in the culture and the changes in the societal expectations of women, which relates the aspect of gender and power. I tried to use a more formal register for the task as the issue is very serious, to also help raise awareness about the gender. I structured my analysis by analyzing the features of the text to allow me to closely analyze the effects of that these advertisements had. I think I did okay in our performance, however, I feel like I could have related my analysis of the text more to the contexts of the advertisements. Furthermore, I feel like sometimes, my language was a bit colloquial at times. I feel like next time, I wanna focus more on analysis and relating it back to my context in the future.
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.
EE day reflection
Something that I have learned, by adding more pipes in parallel, the induction braking force increases, which means that the more pipes you have, the better of a brake the pipes become. Something that I am proud of is that I managed to make the general structure of my rationale and figure out what I need to talk about, also that I managed to conduct some preliminary experiments on the effect of the amount of pipes in parallel on the inductive force. What I am going to be doing next is focusing on finishing up my 1000 words and to start collecting data for my experiment.