CAS
Kolkata GC 2018
This year I am involved in planning the Kahaani dance show for the last time. I have once again been assigned to the logistics team, but being a more senior member of the GC meant that this year my role involved a lot more leadership and responsibility than it had before. I have to take on a greater amount of tasks, as well as explain to the younger, less experienced members of the group how to carry out their own tasks. The show will take place in January, so our responsibilities include allocating people into different dances, finding rehearsal spaces to the dancers, organising the facilities for the day of the show, etc.
Compared to last year, I feel a greater amount of responsibility having helped to run so many shows before. While I feel confident about completing all the tasks properly and on time, not having the older and more experienced members to help guide the show and rely on for help has been a bit challenging. I have had to develop leadership skills in order to provide support to the group and take on the challenge of planning the show without other members to fall back on, which relates to the 2nd CAS Learning Outcome.
Guitar
AMK MINDS
This week was our second to last meeting for AMK MINDS of the academic year. We completed the same activities as we do every session, including playing the drums for 30 minutes and coloring with the clients for the rest of the time. During the first few sessions, the clients did not feel encouraged at all to drum and were very apprehensive about it, in spite of how hard we tried to encourage them. However, during our last visit not only were several of the clients very excited to work with us, but also played a lot more strong and confidently than they had done at first. Some of them could even come up with slightly more complex patterns. Seeing this improvement in their motor skills throughout the year showed how effective their regular encouragement and dedication in carrying out this activities, and felt really good given all of the hard work we have to dedicate into planning and carrying out each session. This experience relates to the 4th and 5th CAS Learning Outcomes, as I worked together with the members of our service to create and commit to skills that were eventually beneficial to our clients, allowing them to improve their foundational motor skills.
Guitar Exam
I have spent the past few months practicing for my upcoming Grade 8 guitar exam in 2018. The requirements for the exam are to play 3 pieces, performing a range of different scales and doing an aural test. At the moment I am working on the 3 songs that my teacher has selected for me to play in the exam. As these songs have the greatest weightage in my overall grade, I have to dedicate a lot of time to each one, going through the piece section by section and addressing different components like the speed of the music, the volume at which it is played and the part it plays in the overall melody, the effects of which are known as dynamics. Therefore I take around 2 months working on each of them, practising around half an hour to an hour everyday to make sure that I have memorised the music and can play it smoothly and fluently. While this is a challenge, particularly when I’m having trouble on a certain section, it is the part of the exam that I most enjoy as it gives me the chance to show my ability on my instrument as well as the fact that I really love the sound of the pieces that I will be performing. This experience relates to the 4th CAS Learning Outcome, as I have been dedicating a lot of time overall each week towards completing my pieces, even when I have a lot of other work that I need to complete and not a lot of time to do so. I hope that this commitment and perseverance will allow me to do well in this component come the day of the exam.
First Semester of STEM
I have recently just completed my first semester as one of the chairs of STEM Club. Being part of this club so far has been so much fun and I am so proud to have had a leadership role in it. So far some of the topics we have discussed in our weekly sessions include space colonization, eugenics, nuclear weapons, coding, and artificial intelligence. It really seems as though we are beginning to achieve our goal, with everyone in the group becoming actively involved in the different conversations that we have, and so far everyone has been very accepting and encouraging of all the different opinions within the group. At the moment we have 10 members besides the chair, all from different areas of the high school and from different social groups. Yet through STEM we have been able to break these barriers to have some really insightful conversations about topics that we are all passionate about and we are now all very comfortable and at ease around each other. As the second semester approaches, we are shifting our attention to an individual task for each member rather than just discussions, with each person completing some form of digital presentation to be uploaded to a website that we have just created. This presentation can be about whatever they are passionate about within the fields of STEM and will address the nature of their topic and its impact on our world. While myself and my fellow chairs are still not 100% positive as to what this will look like, STEM being a collaborative group will look to the opinions of others as well to decide how best to approach this next stage in the year. This relates to the 3rd and 5th CAS Learning Outcomes, as this entire CAS experience is organised by myself and two of my peers and is also acting as a CAS experience for others, as well as the collaboration we have been able to achieve between different people with shared interest.
Kahaani Rehearsals
While this is my second year helping to organise the annual ‘Kahaani’ shows with my global concern Kolkata GC, this is my first time actually participating in the dance myself. I chose to sign up as a dancer this year as I was particularly fond of this year’s theme. The theme of the show this year is to have its entirety act as an interview of a disabled person, discussing the adversity they faced and how they were able to overcome this to realise their full potential as a human being with just a minor obstacle to overcome, yet capable of doing all that those without their disability can achieve. Each dance is intended to represent a defining moment in the person’s life. Therefore, I felt that that the dancers had a more important role than ever, which led me to my decision to sign up myself. I have not danced since I was 9 years old and even at that time, I felt very under confident and unhappy doing so. Therefore I knew that this would be a challenge for me, as I would be working with people who are confident dancers and will have less trouble processing and understanding the steps than I would. Therefore this relates to the 2nd and 6th CAS Learning Outcomes, as I will be taking on a challenge that I know will be incredibly difficult and testing for me but will hopefully allow me to develop a new strength in dancing in order to support the cause of Kahaani and raise money for the children in Kolkata our GC work so hard to support and raise awareness towards the global issue of the marginalization of those with disabilities around the world.
Our rehearsals take place every Monday lunchtime, for 45 minutes each. Here is a clip from our second rehearsal:
Final game of Football Season
My final game of the season with the football team this year was a play-off that takes place between two adjacent teams in the division. That meant that our team, the 5th place team, had to play against Chatsworth, the 6th place team, in a competition for who would eventually finish in 5th place in the final table. There are a total of 8 teams in the girls division. We had lost the previous game by a very large scoreline, so we were all very keen to win the game. Before the game we discussed some of our failures from the previous game and decided that we needed to communicate more on the pitch, so that we are aware of our options at all times. Keeping this in mind, we ended up winning 3-0, and all of us felt proud of representing our school in a positive way on our own pitch at the end of the season. My experiences this year in football relate to 4th and 5th CAS Learning Outcomes. This year the school increased the intensity of the sports program here at UWC by increasing the number of training sessions from two to three for all teams, as well as requiring us to play more games than any other season before. This meant having to commit a lot of time to football, even when I wished to prioritise other things. However, in the process I had the chance to collaborate with other girls in the high school whom I had never spoken to before, yet had to trust under the intensity of the match and in the process I was able to meet so many incredible people and experience so many valuable moments through this CAS experience.
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Project Manager for AMK MINDS
This week I had the chance to take on the role of project manager for our session AMK MINDS. The responsibilities of the project manager include organizing activities for us to perform with the clients there as well as ensuring that all the required materials are present and ready to take with us on our journey there. I decided to organize a coloring session, as I felt that coloring is a great way for the clients to do an activity that challenges their co-ordination and creativity, as well as simply being a fun activity that I knew they would enjoy. I printed out several coloring pages for the clients so that they would be able to choose which they would most like to do, as well as collecting several boxes of color pencils from the service office. It was the first time I had taken on a leadership role in the group, and before doing so I had little awareness of the initiative and commitment it takes to properly organise a session. For this reason I feel that this experience relates to the Second CAS Learning Outcome, as this responsibility ended up being a greater challenge than I initially expected, in order to ensure that everything runs smoothly throughout the sessions and that the clients could actually enjoy and benefit from the experience. I have never been very strong with my organisational skills, particularly with all the additional academic pressures that have come this year, yet motivation to create a good experience for the clients whom we have grown closer and closer to as the weeks have gone encouraged me to organise everything in a timely manner, allowing me to develop a new strength.
CAS Investigation
Planning out CAS experiences:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LOOM_vggfr8CO8LUW_gkHkP3mpzWHuVcJHGD1nwjmrw/edit