Out not with a bang but a whimper

It seems like it has been ages since my last blog post, but I guess that is what the Christmas season does to you.  Everything gets so busy, but even though I haven't posted in a while, I've still made quite a bit of progress on the CAS front.  I guess the most pressing CAS update is a review of our dodgeball season... we lost our last match, winning one game and losing two.  It was a disappointing defeat, but we played quite hard and made them work for the win.  All in all, I think dodgeball was an enjoyable and interesting choice for an action activity.  I now know why they have two separate divisions for girls and guys... Aid and Pat rocked, although us girls weren't too shabby ourselves.

Dodgeball superstars, right here

We were both gracious winners and losers, and I think we represented IB well towards the rest of the school.  We worked really well as a team, and I believe that this whole dodgeball ordeal has brought us closer together not just within our class, but with the grade twelves as well.  We may not have ended the dodgeball season with a bang, but we improved a lot from where the IB team was last year, and I can't wait to continue the tradition in 2013!

Swimming in post-its

Things with yearbook have been moving along steadily.  We've decided to hold an art competition to find the perfect cover for our yearbook, a plan that has been approved by administration, so we'll be getting that underway soon.  Other of our ideas were vetoed by the higher-ups; we wanted to make a Facebook group where students could submit their pictures for yearbook use -- carefully moderated, of course -- but unfortunately it was deemed against school policy.  I've been taking some photographs myself lately, both of Movember and Spirit Week, but my current greatest undertaking is creating a comprehensive layout for the book.  Six pieces of paper, eighty-eight small boxes, sticky notes galore, rulers, pens, last year's book, calculators... I quickly found making an outline is no small matter.  It also involved much more math than I'd anticipated; our school has decreased in student population substantially since last year, but with the help of my trusty GDC I was able to determine how many pages I would need for both grad and student photos -- down two of each from last year.  I tried to leave us as much leeway as possible for unknowns that may spring up later in the year, with one extra page for clubs and one-and-a-half extra events pages, and also to give some groups that are usually under-represented in the yearbook a little coverage, such as a split page for drama/art, an IB page, and a full page for student council near the beginning instead of just an entry in the clubs section, not to mention a page for our yearbook committee at the very end.  I tried to deliver on my promise of more fun content as well, with a page reserved for a best of 2012/2013 survey, sports candids, general candids, a page both for chem free and for chem free awards instead of just one split, a page for the runners-up from our cover contest, an extra fun page for either confessionals, imagine-ifs, or whatever other sort of quirky thing we decided to run, plus I still found room to include all the vitals from last year.  Our next committee meeting is tomorrow at lunch, and hopefully everyone will be happy with what I've come up with.  I know we have a few people on the committee who love to hate change, but with any luck they'll like this layout just as much as I do.

IB victorious

Today marked the Dodgeball debut of IB Dodgin, and we had very large shoes to fill:  last year the IB team lost their first game in thirty seconds.  With such high expectations on ourselves, the nine of us were determined to lose with a shred of dignity.  We didn't.  Instead, we won.  It was a great team effort, and when Morgan hit their last player, we all flooded in from the sidelines, high-fiving and hugging her like we had just won the championship instead of the first game in a round-robin best-of-three match.  The grade twelve team we played against were determined to not lose to a bunch of IB nerds, and they came at us in the second game with a vengeance.  Patrick was a star, and we won again.  We had not only lasted longer than our predecessors, we had won our first match.  I'd love to stop the chronicle there, since our second match of the day involved us getting creamed by the grade eleven athlete preps, but we still put up a good fight.  They were really nice about it too, congratulating us on our previous win after the game, and we were all still ecstatic from raising the bar for future IB generations.  I really felt closer to the grade twelves too, becoming fire-forged teammates with Natalie and Megan, and anything done with my grade eleven classmates is always tons of fun.  Our next game is on Tuesday against a team that supposedly we should have a close game against, and if we win that match, we'll make it into the finals.  Go IB!

Breaking bones and boundaries

Alliterative titles aside, hopefully there won't be any fractures in our near future, but you never know in the world of Dodge.  Our mild-mannered squad of IB nerds have thrown our hat in the dodgeball ring in the name of becoming more involved in our school (and for CAS), and who knows where this (potentially ill-advised) decision will take us.  Dodgeball is kind of a big deal at our school; aside from the biannual musical, I'd say the annual tournament is the most hyped event.  I didn't even consider participating last year; I'd played dodgeball before in gym classes, of course, but I'd never really thought much else of it.  I'm decent enough for phys ed, but playing in a competitive tournament like this is going to be a new experience entirely.  We do have a few secret weapons up our sleeves:  since there is no co-ed league, somehow we managed to talk the coordinators into letting our team play in the girls' category despite having a few boys, and also we're quite likely to be underestimated due to our aforementioned mild-mannered-nerdiness.  Or maybe appropriately estimated, but we do have quite a few athletes on our team (myself included), so perhaps we will have some sort of element of surprise.  In any case, it'll be a great opportunity to bond with our class, the grade twelves, and a few of the Pre-IBs, as well as interact with the school at large, and it will definitely be a step outside my comfort zone.  Our first game is on Thursday; later updates as events unfold.