Final Reflection

As the final two years come to end, the time has come to look back and reflect on over the years of creativity, action, and service and my initial as goals, and how these reflected on the 8 learning outcomes.

Undertaking New Challenges:
 
All throughout the two years, I have been constantly trying out things and challenges that are new to me, from making shirts (surface embellishment) to my first SAISA (basketball) to ping pong to teaching primary kids about Sinhala (Mother Tongue Service Group). From doing this, slowly, I have seen myself push myself out of my comfort zone and try out new things more confidently with a positive outlook on it. Which I believe is a vital skill that will benefit me both in the present and the future.

Developing New Skills:

I have developed quite a few new skills over the past 2 years, and also have significantly improved on existing ones as well. Through surface embellishment, I was challenged to see art in a different perspective and move out my comfort zones for art, by making shirts through stitching, stencil making, etc. I also learned the skill of patience, which is something I learned and realize over the years of my involvement in the arts, as things may not always work out the first time and you may not achieve the result you desired, but you have to keep trying and learn from your mistakes. Through different sports, especially SAISA Basketball, I was able to truly understand the value of teamwork (working collaboratively with others), and how it is an essential part of the game. Even in service, I was able to develop leadership skills, especially since we had to teach our classes to younger, primary kids, who sometimes can be quite the handful! I think all these new skills I have learned along the way will help me in the future, with not only future activities, but life in general as well.


Greater Awareness of Areas for Development and Growth

This outcome was achieved through all activities done, as there is always room for improvement. I was able to identify and become more self aware of my weaknesses and strengths, without having a coach or teacher to point it out for me. This was especially seen in Drawing Club, and the sports I tried out (Basketball, football, etc.), as I was always reflecting on how I could drawn the piece better, or how I could have played the game better, individually. This awareness has helped me improve a lot on myself as a person and within these activities, but more importantly I was able to develop the skill of self-reflection, and how this leads to improvement.

Planned and Initiated Activities

This was only seen in a couple activities, since only a few activities I partook in involved planning. The main ones being the two service I partook in; The Forgotten Children and Mother Tongue Service Group. In TFC we often had to plan fundraisers such as bake sales or movie nights and such, and also plan our trips to certain places (such as the good market) to help spread awareness. In Mother Tongue Kevin and I always had to plan out our lessons before hand, and decide what we were going teach and how to engage the kids at the same time. This really showed me how much a little planning can go a long way and become a great benefit in the future.

Showing Perseverance and Commitment in Activities

All the activities I took part in were always either a semester or year long commitment, however the activity I took part in the longest was drawing club, doing it for three out of the four semesters available. Due to this commitment I was really able to explore the realm of art from artists like Francis Bacon to just my own themed drawing to making shirts, and from this I have really improved this activity the most. It required a lot of patience, especially when I messed up one of my pieces, however, I managed to pull it off due to my hard work and commitment.

Engaged in Issues of Global Importance

This was mainly achieved in the services of Mother Tongue Service Group and The Forgotten Children, since the primary focus of these activities were to better the community we lived in. In Mother Tongue we were mainly focused on spreading language and culture within our community since all over the globe language, and along with it, cultures, are dying every second, and we want to help preserve the culture we have available to us. We also wanted to focus on giving back to the community we lived in. While in TFC we were focused on a much more mature issue of child sex tourism in Sri Lanka, since we realize it is a major problem (not seen by the public as it is often kept underground away from the public) both locally and globally, and we wanted to help spread awareness on this topic since we felt like it needed to be addressed.

This was also seen during IB orientation, as we were split into groups and each group would interview someone in the local community. My group were able to interview a local judge for the local villagers. From this I learned, about the struggles they had, just to get access to clean water and plant tea leaves, issues always arose and the judge had to involved to help the villagers. This helped me realize lucky I was to have grown up in a comfortable environment, with all the resources I needed, and how we always need to look after one another, as we need to appreciate everyone and everything for what they have.

Consideration of Ethical Implications

This wasn't achieved in many activities, since it wasn't one of my goals, however, this was seen in my service group last year; The Forgotten Children. Since we were dealing with such a sensitive topic of child sex tourism, we always had to be careful of what were going to do and say. For example, at the primary school bake sale and movie night we did, we e-mailed the parents saying the reason for our fundraisers and our objective, and how we wanted to, in addition to the movie and bake sale, educate the kids on safety in public, the parents got quite afraid. We later received numerous e-mails saying that they didn't want they kid exposed to such topics (as they thought we would discuss about the topic of child sex tourism with them, even though we were not going to), so we had carefully plan and organize our activities and what we planned on doing.

Working Collaboratively with Others

This was seen in many of the activities I took part in, even activities that would be considered only for individuals (such as drawing club). As often I realized, that even individual activities, needed collaboration with colleagues and teachers to truly succeed and improve in the activity. In drawing club, I would always receive advice from my peers and teachers on how to improve my drawings, and sometimes I didn't understand their perspective, however, through collaboration I was always able to improve my drawing and feel truly satisfied.
This was also achieved in Basketball (both SAISA and ASA), as basketball is a heavily based team sport, to the point where if teamwork is not there, then it is an automatic loss. Even the greatest basketball players such as Dwayne Wade, Tim Duncan, Micheal Jordan, etc. all were part of a team and had to co-operate with their team, as otherwise they wouldn't be able to reach their point of status and skill. I learned this as well through first-hand experience from games and practices. As when we ran a play as team and worked the ball around, the ball would always find its way into the hoop, and there is a much higher score rate when we worked together as a team.

Mother Tongue Service Project: First Week of a New Start

Last week, our other Tongue Service Group started our first session with the primary kids after school activity (planned and initiated activities). We planned to introduce ourselves, our languages, and countries to the kids, and learn ore about the kids' backgrounds as well. We also wanted to find out what languages the kids wanted to learn.
Unfortunately, no one wanted to take up Sinhala at the moment , however we agreed that maybe some days we could do a lesson where everyone did a Sinhala lesson, since Sinhalese is the mother tongue of our host country. For this time (after school on Thursday), we thought we would stick around and take part in some lessons (last week we partook in German lessons), and hopefully learn something about other cultures and languages, in hope to further the spread of language and culture (engaged in issues of global importance).
We also wanted to continue our lessons with Pre-School and Grade 3 from last year, as Kevin (my colleague) and I felt like the class and us, as a unit, have made quite a bit of progress, thus it would be a shame to let that go to wastes. We already I have been able to create a basis foundation with these classes, both educationally and mentally, and thus it is optimal to continue to teach them since we could progress much quicker (working collaboratively with others).
However, we are always willing to teach any other kids that want to on Thursdays after school, as we are always willing to spread the language and culture of our host country throughout our community, and give back to our community (engaged in issues of global importance). Also, we have already gained a better understanding on how working kids goes (from our previous experience with the other classes), and thus feel like we have a better understanding on areas for improvement and development with our lessons (such as we need to incorporate more games and activities to engage the kids to learn better and make it more fun for them). Thus, we feel like we can do a better job than when we first started, as we have developed new skills from our previous experiences.
Hopefully, this new start will provide for good, fresh start to the new semester!

First Week for Pinhole Photography

On Friday 13th, we had our first session of pinhole photography. We began the lesson with a short and detailed demonstration on the physics behind pinhole photography and the origins of this type of photography, giving everyone a better idea of what we could expect to come and how this type of photography works. 

Pinhole photography dates back to the 5th century B.C., in China."The philosopher Mo Ti (later Mo Tsu) was the first – to our knowledge – to record the formation of an inverted image with a pinhole or screen. Mo Ti was aware that objects reflect light in all directions, and that rays from the top of an object, when passing through a hole, will produce the lower part of an image ." (See reference below) 

Later, we began to try out our first photo, with Mr. Lockwood, initially giving us step-by-step instructions on the process to produce a successful photograph goes. Once we were confident enough, we moved on to taking our own photographs. I started off with taking a simple picture of a stuffed falcon, that I found in the art room, thinking it would be suitable for a picture.

Each of us timed the duration we exposed our tin can (our camera), and proceeded back to the black room to produce the photos. The initial photo was decent in my opinion, as I was able to capture the falcon quite well. However, Mr. Lockwood pointed out that I would would probably need more exposure time to make the picture more sharp and a bit darker (increased awareness for areas of growth). So taking his advice into account, I later tried the same shot, except with more exposure time (Results shown below). There was a problem with the production of the photo along the process, as clear line smudges started to appear, and I have yet to pinpoint the problem (increased awareness for areas of growth). 

First Attempt at Pinhole Photography

Second Attempt gone wrong

I haven't done anything like pinhole photography before, so it is quite a new experience for me and something that I am relatively unfamiliar with, but I also think this is a great opportunity for me to develop new skills and undertake new challenges, and push myself out of my comfort          zone.

Work Cited

 Grepstad, Jon. "Pinhole Photography History and Guide from Photo.net." Pinhole Photography History and Guide from Photo.net. Photo.net, 1996. Web. 16 Feb. 2015.

Service: Last Few Encounters for the Semester

For the last couple weeks, Kevin and I have been continuing our Sinhala classes with Pre-School and Grade 3 kids. It has been quite a success for both, us, and the kids. And we hope to continue these lessons into the next semester  (showing perseverance and commitment for activities), as it is a good learning experience for both of us, and we can continue to help cultivate language and culture in our community and give back to our community (engaged in issues of global importance).
We have continued to become more comfortable with the kids and vice versa (work collaboratively with others), thus giving us the opportunity to teach more challenging lessons for the kids. We also got to improve on leadership skills (developing new skills), which is a great as we hoped to take this opportunity to improve on this particular quality, mentioned in my previous post on service. Over the weeks we planned and initiated further lessons and taught both classes various words. Grade 3 learned more about fruits, animals, basic sentence structures, pronouns, etc. While we taught pre-school about Christmas, animals, the senses, etc., incorporating them through various games like charades and pictionary to keep the lessons entertaining ad well, as we are teaching young kids.
Overall I think it was a great semester for both us and the kids, and we look forward to the next!

Basketball....After while!

The last couple weeks, I've been participating in basketball (planned and initiated activities), a continuation from last semester (showing perseverance and commitment in my activities). 

This semester we only have half the court, so mainly we have been playing half court basketball, a variation of full court basketball. One consequence of this half court is now the area is more crammed with people, thus it is more difficult to play, and requires a lot of skill and teamwork to succeed. While last semester I focused more on leadership skills and basic skills (like lay-ups or three point shots), this semester I have been and will be focusing more on more intermediate skills and teamwork and communication within the team, as that is what I feel needs more work (increased awareness of areas for growth and development). 

Through the past few weeks, I have mainly focused on improving on my teamwork and communication with my team, so that we could make better plays and make more points.So far, I have seen more improvement in the communication within my team and myself, which lead to more points, which my team and I were pleased about (developing new skills). Also I think this improvement in communication has also improved my overall leadership skills. In the meantime, I have also been trying to improve on skills, however, this is a bit harder than communication thus the results are a bit slower. Yet, I think with enough perseverance it will be possible! 

Service: The First Couple of Encounters

The last few weeks we started our first service 'encounter' with the primary kids on Thursday 23rd and Monday 27th, with Grade 3 and Pre-School D respectively. Making us engaged in issues of global importance, as mentioned in previous in my previous service post, since language and culture are dying in the modern world, and although we are not influencing the encouragement of language and culture on a large scale, we are doing it on a small scale and every small bit counts. Also we are giving back to the community we live in.

Our first session was with the Grade 3 on Thursday, Kevin (my peer and co-worker) and I we quite unfamiliar with type of service work, especially since this service is relatively new within the community, and we had to exercise high leadership skills since the kids were much much younger than other candidates we had led (example: me in after school basketball), but we saw this as an opportunity to develop new skills on this particular quality (undertaking new challenges). But, overall, I think it went pretty well, we focused on introducing ourselves and getting to know the kids a bit better, while giving them a feel for how the Sinhalese classes will be like. We planned and initiated to teach them how to say 'my name is...,' 'my age is....,' and the basic colours all in Sinhalese, and the kids caught on surprisingly well; I think one the main reasons being we, as a group gelled really well (working collaboratively with others), and also since the kids were really good group.
Later, next week, we had a session with Preschool D, Kevin and I had a similar plan with Preschool as with Grade 3, get to know the kids and introduce some basic terms (but a little less due to the younger age). However, when we arrived it was a lot tougher than we thought, as the kids were a bit active and yet extremely shy of us. So we had take the lesson a bit slower than anticipated. However, we taught them 'my name is...' and the basic colours in Sinhalese, however most of them could not remember. Thus Kevin and I decided we should refresh their memories about things we had learnt the week before, every week. But we saw real potential in all the kids, from both Grade 3 and Preschool D.
Judging from all the excitement and fun from these last previous two session, I can tell there is a lot of good things to come from these kids and our service!

Kevin and I with some of the Preschool D kids!

First Couple Weeks of Ping-Pong

The last couple weeks I have started to participate in the Ping-Pong after school activity, on Wednesday. This is something I have never done before (undertaking new challenges), so I thought it would be a great area to try out, especially since many of my peers play Ping-Pong (developing new skills).
When I first started, Ping-Pong was really difficult, which was unexpected since it seemed like a ‘relaxed’ sport. This really proved me the English saying: “Never judge a book by its cover,” which I really took to heart.
However through the sessions, I have quite a lot about Ping-Pong and its techniques and skills. I learned the rules of Ping-Pong quite quickly and easily, which was a good start. I also learnt more about, from my peers (collaborating with others) how to hold the Ping-Pong racket, how to serve, and how to direct and handle the ball. Soon I was able to play matches better, and win some as well, in both singles and doubles games.

Starting the serve and game

One thing that was really difficult about Ping-Pong, was strength and control of one’s strength. Since the Ping-Pong ball is relatively light, it travels really quickly, quite randomly, and further than one expects, so this took me by surprise, since in most other sports I play strength is quite necessary, and thus I lost quite a number of points. Although, through the sessions I have improved on this skills of control, it is still something I need to improve on further (increased awareness of areas for growth and improvement). 

Me in 'action.'