Let's see how far we've come

A reflection on my first quarter in IB CAS, to be submitted to my program coordinator. A general summary of my activities thus far are as follows, interwoven with an analysis of my experiences in attempting to reach the program's delineated outcomes.

The first and arguably most substantial of the activities with which I've become involved over this initial portion of the CAS program is yearbook. Last year the school yearbook suffered a notable dearth of student involvement, and upon the retirement of the previous yearbook coordinator last June, September began with no organization whatsoever on who would take responsibility for the 2012-2013 yearbook. Staff were unwilling to shoulder the burden of such a project on their own, and with no central body to organize it, the first few months of school passed with the issue altogether ignored. Throughout junior high school my friend Jessica and I thoroughly enjoyed participating in our school's yearbook committee, but the lack of opportunities for student involvement had left us disillusioned last year. Upon discovering that the book was now in limbo for this year, the pair of us created and submitted a proposal for the formation of a new yearbook committee, and after a time our proposal was ratified.

That is not to say that everything after that point was smooth sailing; on the contrary, I would say that this is the activity in which I have encountered the most obstacles. In any committee one will no doubt find many conflicting personalities, and dealing with the concerns and agendas of a multitude of different people has been without a doubt one of the most difficult and most educational experiences I've encountered thus far in CAS. I've learnt that, no matter how well formulated a plan and how passionately you desire to be able to follow it to its conclusion, when working with others, compromises and sacrifices are inevitable. Initially, our plan had been to make simply an IB yearbook, and it wasn't until that idea had been irrevocably vetoed that we even imagined concerning ourselves with this project. One of our biggest changes we wished to make to the previous yearbook format was to release the book at the end of June instead of the following September to enable yearbook signings, but despite heavy advocacy on our part, that plan was dismissed by school administration.

However, every failure presents a new opportunity, and being shut down in these fashions opened the doors to new possibilities and workarounds. Without being dissuaded from constructing an IB yearbook we would never have dreamed of taking on the entire school yearbook, and being forbade from changing the date of the books' release forced us to entertain new possibilities: we now plan to purchase signing pages that arrive in June and can be attached to the books after they arrive in September, enabling us to have the best of both worlds.

Through yearbook, I've interacted with numerous other people as well, in a more collaborative sense than the vetoing dynamic that comes with trying to sell a proposal to one's higher-ups. Sometimes, working with people on equal footing proves to be even more of a struggle. Some students on our committee desire to keep the book exactly the same as it has always been; others advocate radical changes. Some want a formal and professional book; others want it fun and 'not boring'. Balancing such viewpoints is a large task, particularly when you're in a position of relative authority yet are younger than some of the other committee members, who think that by virtue of their age they should get the last word. Nonetheless, Jessica and I have thus far proved fairly successful in incorporating the ideas of others and our own ideas, as well as keeping things moving and not getting too behind or stagnated. Most fall sports had almost finished their seasons by the time our proposal had been approved, but we still were able to act quickly and get everything photographed that was required, helped in no small part by Mr. Toms, our teacher supervisor. I personally designed the outline for the book, which proved to be no small task, and as a committee we even decided to create a cover contest to garner more student interest and involvement in the yearbook. All in all, thus far my experiences in yearbook have been both a learning experience and a relative success, and I anticipate this feeling will only continue as we get closer and closer to our final deadline and the unveiling of the product that we have been working so hard to provide for our school.

Out of all the CAS activities I've done, only two have reached their completion at this early stage of the program, and they therefore most definitely warrant some discussion. The first of the two was GISHWHES, a week-long experience I undertook along with an assortment of my classmates around Halloween. I was in a sense the leader of this project, and in that way I found it a bit more exhausting than it would have been had I merely played a part. I came across the event online, the offbeat acronym standing for “the Greatest International Scavenger Hunt the World Has Ever Seen”. It is an annual event embracing creativity and insanity; in teams of fifteen, one attempts to create the strange items from an oversized list, aiming to accumulate the greatest point total out of all the teams from all across the world. While for most of my teammates the event began when the list was released, my adventure started as soon as I first clicked on that link. My first challenge was to convince fourteen of my classmates to join forces with me, which wasn't as simple as it initially sounds. Some people didn't want to be involved, others were unsure, and the deadline for registration was fast approaching. With mere days prior to the cutoff only a handful of us were registered, and with so many people changing their mind from in to out to in again, I was finding keeping everyone organized hectic enough, and the activity was still yet to begin! There came a point where we realized that we weren't going to have enough people from our class to fill a fifteen-person team, and I eventually had to petition for members from the grade twelve class as well. It was a manic few days as I struggled to get everyone registered in time, but all was well that ended well.

If organization was key during the registration stage, it was even more so once the event began and we were faced with a list of over one hundred and fifty nigh-impossible tasks. I wouldn't have imagined an event so fueled by creativity would require such high levels of careful planning, but that it did. At this point in time we were caught in the thralls of IB, with tests and projects galore, and in the midst of this I was sitting in my room, attempting to create a stop motion film using Playmobil depicting the loading of Noah's ark; Cassy and Sawini were taking stuffed animals on field trips to the grocery store; Jessica was putting a wig on a carefully-carved Jack O'Lantern. We had so much else on our plate to juggle, yet we were taking time out of our precious schedule to engage in such insanity. I think that, above all, that was what struck me most in my GISHWHES experience. More than the organizational skills I was forced to hone, more than the unreal levels of teamwork required, it was this: what I was doing made no sense. I had a history test I could be stressing about, I had a thousand other things on my mind, but I was choosing to spend my precious evening coaxing plastic animals onto ramps made of jewelry containers. And why?

I think that it was in that moment, somewhere between the twentieth and the twenty-first time my first plastic peacock slid back down to the bottom of the ramp when I tried to set its partner down beside it, that I was pondering that question and was suddenly struck by the answer. In life; in the big picture; in ten years from now, the reason you're doing these things is for the experiences. When you're so focused on completing a task for a certain aim, often you can't see the forest for the trees, in a sense. You expect to get from A to B in accomplishing said objective; you often don't notice how the path from A to B can also give you insights into C and D and O. It's when you make time for the things that you have absolutely no time for that you learn the things you don't expect and not merely the objective B that you are planning to reach; to have a balanced life you kind of need to open yourself up to these sort of activities once and a while. I'm not much of an artist, and I'm also a bit more reserved than is required for most of your typical acts of insanity, so I suspected that improving in those two regards would be my B in GISHWHES. And it was, but even more than that I had the opportunity to bond with my classmates, improve my ability to keep everyone on task, and I became what I would consider just a slightly better rounded person. Sometimes you need to take a bit of a break from stressing out over pretty much everything to smell the roses (or dress them up in funny hats), and I'd say that's a pretty important life lesson.

The second of my completed activities was dodgeball, one of my two action activities thus far alongside playing provincial ringette. Dodgeball was a rather short season; our team was comprised of IB kids, and we're far from the school's top athletes, although we did manage to hold our own and do considerably better than the IB team did last year. I suppose there isn't too much to say about our brief dodgeball stint, but I would highlight three parts of the activity as most important towards the aims of the CAS program: teamwork, integrity, and magnanimity. Our team was comprised of students from both the grade eleven and twelve IB classes, and I therefore had the opportunity to get to know better some of the grade twelves that I had previously only known in passing. Working with students in my class is also always a great experience, but obviously much less exclusive to the dodgeball activity. Integrity is also something that dodgeball lends itself to quite well, and it is quite easy and consequence free to take either the high or the low roads. There is a referee, but with so many balls in the fray at one time, they very infrequently call someone out, and so it is therefore up to your own moral conscience whether after being hit to leave the playing field or act like it never happened. I won't pretend that the thought never crossed my mind when playing; nobody likes getting out, especially when you don't want to let your team down, but what really is the point of playing if you're going to cheat to get the upper hand? We may have lost some of our games, but we did so honestly and the ones we won were won of our own skill. Everybody in the tournament was quite magnanimous in victory, bringing me to my final point. Being both a gracious winner and a gracious loser is a very important skill to have, and it's hard not to feel respect for someone who, after defeating you in a close match, will come over and say without a note of smugness or haughtiness, “Thanks for the game! You guys played well.”

I'm also currently partaking in a few other ongoing projects: provincial ringette, as was previously mentioned, as well as writing for the school paper, and participating in a daily 750 words challenge to improve my writing skills. With regards to 750 Words, I've been finding it to provide an interesting perspective into myself in addition to increasing my writing proficiency; by writing a minimum of 750 words for the past twenty four days my total is over twenty two thousand, and upon forcing myself to write such an amount in such a stream of consciousness way I often start exploring thoughts, opinions, and ideas that I had never previously considered. Although I've been doing this exercise for less than a month I'm already seeing a marked improvement in my writing speed and quality, and I truly think that this experience is helping me gain a greater understanding of self.

It's hard to imagine three quarters still remain of the CAS program; it seems as if I have made such large strides already, and I'm excited to see how my current activities progress in the months and years to come, as well as whatever new projects I pick up along the way.