Author Archives: stanl35240@gapps.uwcsea.edu.sg

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PSE First Unit Reflection

Our first unit in PSE this year was as interesting as it was informative. We learned about a variety of topics and had discussions on their relevance to us as both teenagers and IB students.

We started off with learning about different personality types including:

  • People who act immediately
  • People who consider the future before acting
  • Those who consider other opinions before acting
  • Those who pay attention to the details before acting

After seperating ourselves into a group with we identify with most, we came up with the advantages and disadvantages of our personality types. For example, I believe I pay attention to detail before commiting and actions. The advantages of this approach is that I can prepare for a variety of outcomes, and increase my chance of success by having enough information to make informed decisions. The disadvantage of this approach is that it is quite time-consuming, and the possibility of overthinking problems is high.

This personality will be quite useful for my IB studies as detail is extremely important when writing essays, doing tests or simply working on my homework. Although there is no “best” personality type, each personality have certain scenarios in which they might be more effective.

Another interesting topic we discussed in PSE was the concept of emotional intelligence (EQ). In short, EQ is how we control our own emotions, while being able to recognise what other people are feeling. This is an important skill to have, as studies have found that people with higher EQs are generally more successful in life. Asides from that benefit, having a high EQ would allow better interaction between your peers and family, thus allowing you to avoid unnecessary conflicts.

Each member of our class took an EQ test to see how emotionally intelligent we were. My result was that I had around an average amount of emotional intelligence. This indicated that I had room to improve. In my opinion, a good way to improve your emotional intelligence is through self-reflection and increased social interactions with your friends and family. The benefit of this improvement process is that more than just my emotional intelligence would improve. Self-reflection and increased social interactions impacts numerous aspects of my life. I will be able to make myself a better person while hopefully improving relations with those I interact with.

The final topic we discussed in our first PSE unit was the idea of being “gritty”. Grit is a word I have heard numerous times throughout my middle school and IGCSE years, so learning about it in IB was no surprise. However, learning about grit now made me realize the importance of having that trait while being an IB student. The IB course will not, and hasn’t been, easy. Grit means being able to stay focused and hardworking in a difficult scenario for a long period of time without simply giving up or going through an easier but less fulfilling route. This sounds exactly like the IB programme.

There will be countless tests, homework assignments, essays and presentations I will need to make throughout the following two academic years. This will all be done in conjunction with my service and activity commitments that I have, which is not going to take an insignificant amount of time. In order to persevere until my graduation, I will need to be gritty. I must dig in, and withstand the vast horde of hard work that is rapidly coming my way.

The first unit of PSE has been an informative and relevant journey so far which has positively impacted or will benefit my academic and personal life so far. The concepts of beneficial personality types, emotional intelligence and grittiness will all be important in laying the foundation for what will hopefully be a successful journey through IB.

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Grade 11 Initial Activities and Service commitments

My activities this season consist of both physical and mental activities.

On the physical aspect, I have joined the U19 football team in my school, playing as the goalkeeper. I am also playing and training for a U17 football club outside of school, called Red Star F.C.

As for my intellectual activities, I have re-joined the Model United Nations (MUN) Delegate training activity, where I will be able to join MUN conferences throughout the year. Additionally, I have joined the Historical Society, as learning and discussing about historical events is a passion of mine.

In terms of my service commitments, I have re-joined the Blue Dragon GC and joined a service called “Memoirs of a Pioneer Generation”. Blue Dragon is a group that operates in Vietnam with the goal of giving housing, education, nutritious meals and supportive mentors to street children. In addition to this, Blue Dragon also aims to prevent sex trafficking in Vietnam and China, and have rescued thousands of girls trafficked to China, along with raising awareness in local towns and villages. Every year, our school holds a Blue Dragon Photographical exhibition at the Hilton hotel in Singapore, although in recent years this exhibition has evolved to showcase artwork, dance and music mostly created by the children and teenagers of Blue Dragon.

Memoirs of a Pioneer Generation is a service that aims to collect stories of Singapore’s pioneer generation, and combine them into pieces of writing, videos and through other forms of media.

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Service Learning – Service Logistics

Service Logistics

2017-2018’s 2 seasons of service can be described in one word. Hectic. The starting of any major endeavour will always begin with a rocky start. To say Service Logistics was any different would be a gigantic lie. In fact, rocky start may not even be an adequate description.

Problems

We knew this service was going to be an interesting experience when we all met for the first time. Everyone was a guy who forgot or wasn’t able to sign up for service, and we all chose Service Logistics as it was one of the remaining options.

The election of key service positions foreshadowed the problems that would continue to plague the service. Only one person nominated themself for chair. I was nominated simply to discard Vedant’s opportunity to be chair by walk-over. However, I was voted chair despite my clear protest to taking part in this election.

The problems do not stop here.

Attendance was abysmal, to say the least. There were some service sessions where only 2 people would attend. Sometimes four. The problem was that it was the same people that frequently did not show up. This made service extremely hard for us to organise. Our productivity dropped sharply as we were a clock that was missing multiple gears.

Essential agreements are, essential, for a group to function effectively. Our service never got around to drafting some essential agreements. Although we did create some goals for our service, most of them were left unstarted due to our low attendance rate.

Although there were further problems, these were just the main ones.

Success

The people who did show up often showed dedication to completing the task at hand. Furthermore, our checking in and checking out system was efficient, if hard to understand for everyone else in the school.

I believe that John, Darsh, Joseph and I were instrumental in ensuring the service wasn’t a complete failure.

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Tension Between Economic Growth and Environmental Sustainability – Global Perspectives

Formation, Recherche, et Environnement dans la Tshopo (FORETS), Democratic Republic of Congo CIFOR via Compfight

Throughout history, humans have been looking to consolidate what they possessed and enlarge it. From the cavemen of the stone age to the modern man of today, we all still depend on the environment to grow our economies. The environment has been humanity’s archaic benefactor which some civilizations worship while others take for granted.

In modern society, we are part of the latter civilisations mentioned; we take the environment for granted. It seems the meaning of life today for most people is to increase your wealth by any “respectable” method, or otherwise. The problem with humanity is our anthropocentric stance. Robbing humans is considered a crime, but taking what you want from the environment is deemed fair game. If a human were to knock down another house without permission would be considered vandalism, property damage and malicious mischief. However, major logging companies like West Fraser Timber cut down forests every day housing dozens if not hundreds of different species. The Amazon rainforest is home to almost 10% of all known species (plants, insects, animals) in the world. Yet during the past 40 years, almost 20 percent of the Amazon rainforest has been deforested [National Geographic]. We cut down these forests not because we are inherently evil, instead we do so for economic growth. Much of the Amazon has been cut down to clear space for cattle ranches and the trees cut are used for everything from houses to furniture to paper.

This is a typical account of our society’s anthropocentric stance, disregarding the environment in favour of economic growth. While humanity’s coffers get bigger, the size of forests, number of fish in the ocean, variety of animal species, they all grow smaller. Our current method of growing the economy is unsustainable and while the environment may be the first casualty, humankind will be the final victim.

It's Seen Better Days Bad Alley (Cat) via Compfight

This is not a problem we can easily solve. The Native Americans used to constantly move around to allow the land around them to regrow, thus allowing for a good balance between growth and environmental sustainability. They could do this as North America was a huge country with a small human population. However, this solution is not one we can use nowadays. Humans live almost everywhere in the world. With a population numbering upwards of 7.5 billion, there is not enough space left on the planet for us to be truly nomadic.

So what can we do? Having a stagnant economy will do no good for humankind, yet at the rate we are going the environment supporting all life on Earth will be no more. That will also do no good for humankind. With humankind being predominantly anthropocentric as opposed to being ecocentrists, we would probably find no compromise acceptable, as all we want is wealth, and more of it. It is in our nature to be selfish, and ignorant of the consequences of actions we like doing.

As of yet, I myself see no solutions that can actually happen, and work. Politicians requesting we limit our carbon emissions fly all around the world and their countries releasing multiple times more carbon dioxide than expected of everyone in the world. The President of the United States, Donald Trump, arguably one of the most powerful figures currently in our world, is a skeptic of climate change. This can have consequences limiting governmental funding for climate scientists trying to find solutions to our desperate problem. This means that even being technocentric won’t help find a problem, as you cannot develop technology without adequate funding, which only comes from economic growth.

To appeal to everyone’s anthropocentric side, perhaps the message should not be saving the environment but saving humankind through environmental sustainability instead.