The most prominent thing I think I have learned from these months of community, action and service was how I increased my awareness of my strengths and new areas of growth. I've realized that I'm strong in committing to my service and my action (tennis) but need improvement on actively reflecting and noting my creativity.
For creativity, I have done many collaborative work with others, such as Skylor (my co-leader), Ms. Raina (my community service supervisor), members from Cleft Palate into organizing the main event of Battle of the Bands where the library service sold drinks. My main creativity however, still lies in the service I did during WWW as I was the leader for the mural projects. I was happy that I got to show my creative side with my mural designs and also took a hands on approach with painting the murals as well. However, in the beginning of the semester I made the goal of regularly updating my personal art blog and failed to continue that.
I did not exactly fail to continue it but was advised to drop it by my CAS supervisor. Creating a blog to show off my personal artwork was not the correct approach to show my creativity as I am also an IB Visual Arts student. It would be tricky and suspicious if I put my drawings for creativity since I could also use those drawings for my IB Workbook. From this situation, I considered the ethical implications of my actions. As I do not want to create any problems for my CAS supervisor and I do have other areas I can support my creavity, I deleted my personal art blog.
For action, I still have continued tennis but temporarily stopped until the christmas break. This semester it was very very difficult to time manage school work and still commit to the tennis sessions. However, even though I had extended essay going on, internal assessments and portfolios due, I still managed to show commitment to tennis by attending sessions with Heesoo. We have learned more skills in tennis, refined previous skills learned and most importantly, played a really good game! In the beginning we were unable to even get the ball back and forth for more than 2 hits. Now we were able to hit the ball back and forth for atleast 10! It was really intense haha! I have not done any other official action as diving is impossible to do right now with my father's work schedule other than swimming for leisure.
During stressful times I enjoy going for a swim at the u.s. embassy's rec center as no one is there for most of the time. It is a quiet swim that I enjoy very much and I've tried to take a new (personal) challenge of swimming two weeks or so and it has been going well actually! I don't know how to swim properly so I've been trying to learn the proper strokes (particularly the front crawl or freestyle and breaststroke -i can never get the kick right) I should have put this on my CAS blog but I suppose it is too late now. During the christmas break I will surely upload some pictures of my (horrible) butterfly stroke haha!
Service is probably my best and most prominent area of CAS that I think I do well in. I take Library Service very seriously and try my best to support the causes of library service. I am not particularly strict with my group about organizing the library (as they are just children) and take the responsibility of organizing it myself for most of the time. However, I do give a hard time to the IB students (Onkar, Humza and Philipp) to organizing the library and do their cas blogs since they are IB students who should show IB qualities.
The big event that library service had this year was the fundraising for the Jaffna Library during the battle of the bands concert that cleft palate facilitated. As I mentioned before, we sold drinks (cola, sprite, juice and milo) and managed to make a nice profit of more than 18k rs. I'm really proud of that as that was a big challenge that we undertook and surpassed in!
I am however, disappointed in my involvement with book week. During the months prior to December Skylor and I collaborated with eachother and our service as to what we should do during the book week. We planned to make daily emails to everyone with small things (such as quotes about reading and it's importance), have a day where you have to dress up as your favorite book character and most importantly have students bring in books to donate but- many things went wrong with that week and I can't blame us for not being more active. Skylor went on Saisa to Dhaka and was unable to help out with book week. Also, the sad fact is that the secondary school is not interested in the promotion of books. We did not have an assembly prior to book week so we were unable to make any announcements. I am really disappointed with that though since I had high expectations that we were going to make book week the best week this year.
Despite that, I think library service managed to revive ourselves with the money we made during the battle of the bands concert and we were able to show our commitment to our activity. everyone in library service (except Sejuti -a middle school student who was not allowed to stay out late because of her parents) managed to come, buy a ticket from cleft palate and did a shift to prepare and sell drinks. I'm really proud of my service because they also took the activity seriously (but still managed to have fun).
So to conclude this reflection... did I manage to meet the goals I made this year?
I can say yes and no. I can say yes, as I have developed new skills in tennis, (a bit in swimming but that's off the record I suppose), organized and collaborated with more people than I ever imagined, engaged with an issue of global importance in library service (finally!) which was raising funds to donate and promote reading and education to a poorer community, and showed commitment to action and my service.
I can say no as well since I have not been the best with creativity as I would have liked to but still managed to make it up and because there is always room for improvement. I would like to make CAS and reflecting a part of my daily life more and more. The more I realize how CAS can help me grow as a person and round me out -the more I am keen to doing it.
Yes, this semester was the most challenging and I have slipped up quite a few times, but I am taking the challenge to do better next semester with everything, from academics to personal life to CAS. As I once heard from my Spanish teacher,
"Experience may not always be the kindest of teachers, however it is the best." -Spanish Proverb
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