More proof

Here a screen shot of one of the songs I wrote in GuitarPro:



Here a photo of the girls' football team, another school's team and I (in the background, red shirt):



Here a download link to one the vocal covers I did, credit for the real song goes to Demolisher, the original is titled Windy City Takeover.


http://www13.zippyshare.com/v/65273987/file.html

Here a photograph of one of the puppies brought to our sterilization campaign to be vaccinated, with one of the DAWG members in the background:

Proof!

I needed to include more proof of my CAS program, so here goes my poetry :)

http://anecdotesofadyingking.blogspot.com/

Hopefully photos from the DAWG sterilization, football and other activities will be coming soon!

Update

Hello again,

a part of this year has already passed. I have started and even finished some events along the way, and will use this post to update on my activities and define my goals for future activities.

Creativity:

I have finally managed to improve my singing techniques. I have managed to reach the high-pitched tone range of shouting vocals, which means that I will now be able to try out more vocal covers of a broader range of songs. My goal for this will be to do covers of at least 3 more songs before I finish this school year.

Bass: I've been lucky enough to get my GuitarPro working again just yesterday. It is a program that enables me to view songs' tablature as well as the notes that go with it, meaning I have both musical and non-musical notation of the songs, which will help me figure our rhythms of songs. This program is very helpful in learning songs, so I am looking to learn at least 2 more songs. I have already fulfilled my goal of learning one more song, because I figured out a song by ear (Sonnet of the Wretched by Chelsea Grin), which is an accomplishment that I am very proud of, since it was the first time I've ever tried to play something by ear.

Writing: thanks to my Extended Essay, I have been able to improve my writing. My goals have been met: structure and breadth of topics have both increased. I have also succeeded in supplying my friends' band with further lyrics for their songs, which is amazing!

Guitar: now that I have GuitarPro running, I will use it to learn a few more songs. i will probably stick to chord-based ones, because anything else would be too evolved for me. Nevertheless, I want to try and challenge myself with a finger-picking song (e.g. Falling Slowly from the Once soundtrack). I have met my goal of learning how to play Children of Divorce and can now move on.

The poster design that I referred to in my last post has helped me with my visual art class. I have now moved towards producing more poster art, and my previous design has given me a strong foundation from which I can work.

Action:

Sadly, the boxing elective has not come around yet. It will be interesting to see whether it will after the December break. Since this seems unlikely to happen, I have approached a teacher at school and asked him whether he would be willing to lead an American Football elective, because he used to play it actively. He happily agreed. I've never played American Football before, so this should be a challenge. If it does happen and I get to join it, I will set a goal then, rather than set a goal now that can not be met.

I have been coaching the girls' soccer team, we are almost through the season. The final team is about to be selected, and I have had fun coaching the girls. Not only have I coached the girls, but I was also given the opportunity to repeatedly be a referee for their matches. I also did this at a few matches last year, but I feel that I really improved in comparison, because I have been paying more attention to fairness and technicalities, such as foul throws. I have succeeded in motivating the girls to be a confident team player and help them improve their understanding of the game. My goals have been met, so I will use the next few weeks to extend this effect as much as possible.

I have been working out every week and am already noticing the differences. I have grown stronger, but also more endurable. I've played two football matches this year, during the first I was exhausted after just the first twenty minutes, whereas I played almost the entire match the second time around. My fitness is improving, and it has helped me improve my health. I have not really been sick this year, definitely less than five times. In comparison to last year, that's a huge improvement. My health has improved, so my goal has been met. I will keep up with all my work for Action to keep it that way.

Service:

DAWG has been going very well this year. We organized a movie night, where we put on a movie and sold food and drinks. This event was not a challenge to plan, the challenge was and still is in learning how to motivate the younger kids. There is one boy in our group that says he is willing to work, but doesn't really do anything. He shows up late to the events, seems uninterested in what we do and really doesn't put a whole lot of effort into anything. My goal from now on will be to change his mind and get him motivated and involved. This should help me improve my leadership skills.

Thanks to the movie night and the food we sold during the primary play, we now have sufficient funds to start our sterilization campaign. If we succeed with this, then we will not have to run DAWG next semester, which will give me more time for academic work. I think this is a very good thing, because it has been years since any group of DAWG members has managed to put on a sterilization campaign in the first semester, which makes me proud of our accomplishments. However, the organization will not be easy. Therefore, my goal for DAWG is to make the sterilization campaign happen this semester rather than next.

Additionally, I went on a trip to the Mama Papa Home, an orphanage for mentally and physically challenged children. We went there during our IB Orientation trip in eleventh grade, many plans were made, but none of them came through. So a group of us got together and organized a trip to the orphanage to play with the children and spend some time with them. We took the CAS coordinator of our school, so she could witness the conditions of the orphanage first-hand. Shocked by this, she agreed to make something happen.

After lengthy discussions with other leaders and people involved, we will probably try to organize either regular visits to the orphanage including every-day cleaning supplies, or a one-off visit with a few doctors, so the children can receive medical care for the first time in years.

My goal for the Mama Papa Home is to make sure that something will happen. I don't mind what it is, as long as I know that there will be people here next year who will carry this on and ensure that the orphans are not forgotten.

That's how far I've gotten this year, with a few months to go.

Paul

A New Year, a New Start

Hi there :)

Now I've started my final year of high school. During this year, I will obviously continue being involved in CAS in numerous ways, which I will outline in this post.

Creativity:

Last year, I fulfilled my Creativity part of CAS by playing bass, singing and writing. All of these will continue this year. However, things have changed. I brought my sister's old guitar with me after the summer and started playing it. I've never really played guitar before, which means that this will be my hardest task in the next few months, until graduation.

My goals for my Creativity activities are:
Singing: evolve. I spent several weeks with my friends during the summer, some of which are vocalists in bands. I got advice from them, as well as new music to inspire me. I have new ideas and want to take the next step with my voice: I can do low growls, I can shout, but I can't do highs. Highs are screams that are high pitched. They've always been the hardest to do for me, because I always end up hurting my vocal cords, which is not meant to happen. My goal is to cover at least one song that utilizes several types of screaming in such a way that it is presentable to people who listen to my kind of music. No one else will like it, anyway.

Bass: I have gathered some detailed experience about playing the bass and the role of the bass in the hardcore/metalcore genre, which means I now have a better idea of what I want to do. My goal for playing the bass is not aimed very high though: I want to improve my technique and cover at least one song of the genres mentioned before. part of improving my technique will be to master the "spider walk" which is a warm-up that requires finger movement and placement. I also want to learn how to mute my bass strings while playing with a pick, which is something that none of my bass-playing friends knew how to do.

Writing: over the summer, I have already started pursuing one of the goals that I have set myself: I want to stylistically evolve from using simple structures to paying more attention to detail. I want to extensively consider the choice and placement and diction within my work in order to make it more effective. My work has already been complimented by many readers, but I want to take it to the next level. One accomplishment that I've made over the summer was that one of my friend's band is using two of my pieces as lyrics for their songs. They will be recording an album soon and once done with it, providing it for free on the internet. This means that, at least in some way, my work will have been publicized. Furthermore, the band (called The Offshore Burial, visit their myspace!) will be recording the instrumentals to one of their songs and send it to me so I can write lyrics for it. I never actually thought that I would get this far with my writing! You can read everything I've put up on my other blog.

Guitar: since I've only just started playing the guitar, my goals for it won't be too hard. Because I have played the bass, playing guitar is not as hard for me as it would be for an all new beginner, nevertheless it is still very hard for me. The different sizes of the strings mean that I need to be much more precise with my finger placement than on my bass. My goal for this activity is to cover the song "Children of Divorce" by Jonny Craig, which you can listen to here. I think because I have only just started, it makes sense to set small goals, one at a time rather than to say that I want to be playing Canon in D by the end of the year. Once I can play this song, I will move on to the next.

One thing I had forgotten to mention last year, was my poster design. I had designed a poster for the band mentioned above and printed 20 copies of it, to bring with me to Germany. I paid for the posters myself and made sure that the band gave them to their fans for free. I used photoshop and several images to create it. During the process of it, I got to know photoshop a lot better, learned how to use gradient layers, blending options and several filters. Here the poster:



Action:

Last year, my Action creativity involved lots of things: playing football, training football, working out on my own and pilates. For this year, these have slightly changed:

I will, or am hoping to take part in the boxing elective. This is an after school activity. I've never done boxing in my life, which means that this will be completely new to me. I will wait until after my first few lessons to set myself a goal, because I have no sense of what to expect from it, but I'm sure that it will be lots of fun and also give me an impression of what real boxing is like. I've never even done any martial arts in my life, so I'm looking forward to this.

I have already talked to Mr Shipley, who will be coaching the girls' team this year, whether I could do that exact thing with him. He gladly agreed, which means that I will be training the girls' football team during their season, at least once a week. I have to make sure that I can keep up with my academics as well, which means that I will be flexible with how many times a week I will take part in the practices. My goal for this is to become a better coach on one hand, but also to better my own skills in football. Last year I think I did an okay job training the girls and it was great fun, but I want to have a system and make sure that I know what I'm doing, because it seems to me that this is the kind of thing I might enjoy doing way past graduation. I want to make sure that all of the girls know what they're doing technically as well as strategically, because I noticed last year that many of the girls had the technique that was necessary, but didn't quite know where to go or where to play the ball.

Additionally, I will work out at least once a week. Over the summer, I made up my mind and said to myself that I need to "buffen up". I have been at a constant weight for about a year now and I think it's time that I get bigger. This means that I will be asking the PE department to make sure that I can use the weights in their room, as well as I will be working out at home. After my injury shortly before the SAISA boys' football tournament, I was told by the doctor that my muscles were not strong enough, so my goal is similar to what it was for pilates: gain muscle. I have already taken steps towards this, I've sat down with my parents and talked about a protein and carbo-hydrate diet, which will help me achieve my goal. I had done intense research on this topic, to make sure I don't make any mistakes. In my eyes, the most useful information is to be found on this site.

What will happen to me doing pilates is still unclear, because I don't know whether the instructor is still here. If she is, I will certainly continue doing it ever Wednesday night, because it helped me a lot last year. I will state my goal once I know whether it will be happening.

Overall for Action, I hope to become a healthier person. As a high school senior in a rather western setting, it'd be considered normal to go out on weekends and have drinks with friends. I do not drink, nor do I smoke. I even go so far to refuse to eat anything that has alcohol in it. I think this is a very healthy way of living and will help me stay healthy. Why do I need to stay healthy? Because in the IB, being sick is very bad. If you miss out on a few days, it's already hard to catch up. With all the deadlines and homework, being sick is really not an option. My planned activities for Action will help me avoid this as much as possible.


Service:

Last year, I was the leader of two CAS activities, of which one was more successful than the other, DAWG being the more successful one. This year, I will remain as leader of DAWG. Due to schedule changes, all Wednesday electives are now in the afternoon, but because our supervising teacher from last year is already supervising one other CAS activity, we had to reschedule: we had a few talks and decided that we will choose a few people (group of 8 or 9 people) to work with us on another collection of food for the animal shelter, as well as another sterilization campaign. We also decided that we will only meet every second week, because even when we only met every second week last year, we still had some days where we had nothing to do, since everything was already done. Meeting in the afternoons now means that we can be very flexible with our meetings: we can meet for a shorter or longer period of time. This will help not only to maximize our efficiency, but to motivate people. I have already "recruited" this year's DAWG members, now we just have to hope that those people will be the ones in it.

As mentioned above as well as in earlier posts, the goals for DAWG will be to complete another food collection for the animal shelter and another successful sterilization campaign. This year, we have to make sure that enough vaccines are available for the dogs, because last year we ran out very quickly.

This DAWG activity deals directly with global issues of street dogs as well as insufficient health care for animals around the world. Being in DAWG has made me much more aware of this, even seriously consider being active in animal rights groups such as PETA after graduating. It has not only let me learn many new things, but also opened my eyes to things I didn't see before and changed me as a person.

Other than DAWG, I will be taking up chances to help people out every now and then. I have asked to take part in a build for the Hope for Humanity elective, for example. I did it, because I want to open up to other things, learn new ways in which to help my community and share with people who are less privileged than we are at this school. I enjoy putting a smile on peoples' faces.
I don't have a goal for this build, because I don't know what to expect and what exactly it is that we are trying to do. I just want to help out where I can, give back to the country in which I've been a guest for three years now.


That's it for now, I will post every now and then and give progress reports :)

Smile,

Paul

Summary of 2009-2010

This is where I give an overview of what's happened this year and what'll happen next year.

Creativity:
I've engaged in band practices, improving my bass playing skills and my creative writing (mainly poetry) skills. Next year, I will continue most if not all of these on a weekly basis. My approach towards these three things has been rather stagnant, I've been active whenever I felt like it, but I think overall I probably put in more than the 50 hours that were prescribed in the past. I feel accomplished, because I've managed to meet all of my goals in all of these areas.

Now I need to set myself some goals for next year:
Despite the increasing workload, I will continue playing the bass in a band and on my own, just as much as I will continue writing. By the end of the year, I want to be able to play at least 10 songs on my bass by heart. One of the bigger goals I will set myself is to try to go further with my poetry. I no longer want to only have it on a blog, but much rather get it in book form. I don't quite know how to be realistic, but maybe I can even find a publisher!

Action:
This year, I've trained girls for football, played football myself, was part of the wallclimbing elective and participated in weekly pilates classes. I've met many challenges, especially in pilates and wall climbing, because I had never done either before.
Next year, I will not be doing SAISA football, because my parents want me to focus on my studies. I will however continue going to pilates class every week, as well as I want to start going to a gym once or twice a week to build up external bodystrength.

Service:
For service this year, I have lead a football CAS activity, as well as the DAWG (Dog Awareness Welfare Group) elective, which also is a CAS activity. I've encountered numerous challenges along the way, because I was new to dealing with kids who couldn't speak english (football) and new to dealing with kids much younger than myself (DAWG). In the end, I think that DAWG turned out much more successful than the football activity, because I had more help from others, especially our supervising teacher Ms Huijnen. Thanks!
Next year, I will continue to lead DAWG, the goal for which is to complete another sterilization campaign and improve some of the conditions I discussed in earlier post.


Altogether this year has been very successful. I am proud of what I've accomplished. I've faced uncomfortable decisions and fought through them and am looking to continue this next year.

Have a great summer Mr Lockwood and thank you for all the patient guidance!

A few additions:

What global issues do I deal with?
I mostly deal with this in my Service part of CAS. Since I'm a leader of DAWG and am part of a team that organizes a sterilization campagin every year, I therewith deal with the global issue of street dogs and cats. Stray cats and dogs that live on the street are common in many countries across the globe, their size in population increases every day. By organizing a sterilization, we are helping people in our own community to decrease the number of stray cats and dogs. An animal that is sterilized can no longer reproduce, hence for every animal sterilized there are less stray animals around Battarumlla.

What are my challenges?
I'm mostly challenged with my Service activity, because it is the first time that I've ever had to lead a group of people that mainly consists of younger people. They tend to be very indisciplined, have a very small attention span and are hard to motivate. So far, I have always preferred working with people my own age, but I am sure that I will learn a great deal from the choice that I have made.
I'm challenged in my Action, because I have never done pilates before, but also because the group of people with whom I do it are mainly middle-aged women. This can get rather uncomfortable for a teenager like me, yet I have already started to feel more at ease around them. I am also challenged by the fact that my body itself is not used to any of the exercises we do, so it will take me a while until I am familiarized with all of them.
The challenge within my Creativity is one that I have complete control over. I think that the goals I have set myself for both my writing and playing my bass have created challenges, simply because I want to meet them in due time. My writing has already started to improve, maybe I will even post some of my work on here some time, yet I never stop pushing myself to learn new things, expand my vocabulary, improve my structure and improve the breadth of my topics. For my bass playing, I have started to select songs that are much more challenging than what I have played in the past. Since I have a 4-string bass, there is a restriction to which songs I can play, yet I am planning on buying a 5-string set and mount it onto my 4-string, so I can start playing songs by bands like Despised Icon, Whitechapel or Carnifex.

What I have learned:
In service, I have learned that leadership doesn't always work the same with everyone. Different people need to be lead differently, depending on the type of person they are. I have also learned that I can deal with responsibility much better than I had expected, which has given me more confidence in my leadership.
In my action, I have improved my football playing skills and am now starting to improve the strength of my muscles and also my own physical flexibility.
In my creativity, as mentioned, I have started to improve the structure of my writing, along with the vocabulary involved. I have also improved my finger techniques for my bass, as well as my skills involving using a guitar pick to play some songs. I have also learned how to put new strings on my bass, because I had my old strings break just a while ago and had to put in new strings.

What's Changed

In the course of this semester, a few things have changed.

I am still a student leader for DAWG, which proved to be a challenge for me. I've had to learn how to lead a group of much younger children, in collaboration with the other student leaders. Our sterilization campaign is coming up soon, in two weeks time. We have collected almost all of the money that we needed by having a bakesale during the SAISA girls' basketball event that was hosted here at OSC. I think that my goal for the sterilization will have to be adjusted, seeing as last year there were less than one hundred sterilizations. So my new goal is to just make sure everything during the sterilization itself works smoothly and handle any stressfull situations that might emerge. I want to learn how to handle the pressure that comes with such events.

Action-wise, I have undergone a slight bump in reaching my goal. I suffered an injury just one week before the SAISA tournament, which meant that I was not fit to travel with the team. I was very frustrated about this, since I had started training towards this even from the beginning of the year. I hope that I will be able to travel next year, as team captain. My new pursuit for action is to regularly participate in Pilates. I regularly have problems with my knees and back while practising sports, this is a problem that I consulted with a professional athletic doctor in Germany last summer. According to him, most of my problems come from a lack of muscles in my back and core. For these exact reasons, I have taken up pilates and will continue this for a long while. My goal is to strengthen my muscles, so that the risk of injury will be smaller for me, but especially focus on stretching my harmstrings, because these are very stiff as of now. I go to pilates once a week, it is a class with an instructor, who is paid for.

My creativity part has undergone slight changes as well. I have talked to my english teacher, Ms Abeyawardene, and asked her to help me out with my poetry, which she has gladly agreed to. She's giving me advice on how to structurally improve my writing, which is exactly the goal that I am pursuing. I still write roughly one poem or song a week, which all will eventually go to Ms A to be read and get feedback on them. I have also continued to practise my singing, which has suffered slight bumps, because I've had a cold and sore throat and therewith couldn't practise for a while. However, I am now advancing again. My goal for this particular part is to perform in my friends' band this summer, as singer. I also still play my bass, I have learned how to play two new songs and have also been practising finger techniques. My goal for this is to learn two more songs before the end of the year, so I have a steady learning curve. I will challenge myself in the way that I will choose songs that requier a slightly higher skill level than I have, which will then push my skills to exactly that level.

I think I'm well on my way :)

The New Year Begins

Starting into 2010 and a new semester at OSC, there have been some changes to my plans for CAS.

This coming semester and probably also the first semester of the next school year, I will be a student leader for the elective DAWG. The Dog Awareness Welfare Group is basically a group of people that prepare, fund and organize a sterilization around the area of OSC in order to decrease the population of owner-less dogs in Battaramulla. My goal is to learn the necessary skills I need for next school year to lead the elective on my own from Holly, who is a senior who is leading the elective as of now. I also want to have a successful sterilization and push the number of sterilized dogs and cats as far as I can, by organizing everything in detail and making sure things go the way they're meant to be. I see myself acting more as an executive figure, rather than planning things. I have mentioned these things in an earlier post. The DAWG elective will cover my Service section of CAS.

For my Action part of CAS, I am still participating in the SAISA boys football competition. We are almost through our season, there are only a few weeks to go until we go to Delhi. I did not reach my goal of becoming captain of the team, however this doesn't bother me very much, because I think that Lenard, who was made captain, deserves it more than me and is in a better position with the team. I am in the starting 11 of the team and confident on the field, I play as center back in the defensive four, which is a position I have always wanted to play in, and I can confidently say that, in the team, I am the leading defender and push my entire team by communicating as much as I can every single game. My goal for this years' tournament isn't very high, because I expect the other teams to be extremely strong this year, so all I want is to place 5th of 6th out of 10. This would still be higher than in the past two years, but I think that it is very well possible.
Once football is over, I want to start working with weights in order to build muscle and get my body fit for next years' season. I will mainly be doing this at home, using my own weights. My goal for this is to be able to do 40 push-ups in a row, without stoppping. So far, I have been able to do 30 at the most, 40 shouldn't be too hard to reach, but it's a goal that I have had for years and will now work towards completing.

For my Creativity, I have continued to play my bass in and out of a band amongst other things. I've set myself the goal of being able to play Mr Highway's Thinking About The End by A Day To Remember on my bass. This song is very challenging and harder than anything I've played so far, so it will take me a while to learn. I have also set myself the goal of covering a song called Furtive Monologue by Despised Icon as a mid-ranged screaming vocalist. This will also be a great challenge, since I have not worked with screams at that range so far and it is something new.
Additionally, I have been and will continue to write poems. I want to improve my writing in terms of diction during this semester, because I think I can work quite well with literary features, yet my word choice is lacking variety. I am very passionate about all of these things, so I hope they work out.

Overall, I feel that I'm very well covered in terms of CAS for this semester. I think I've balanced everything in terms of commitment, while ensuring that my grades will not be affected. I will not join an additional CAS activity on Thursday afternoons, because I need the time to study for my subjects. I look forward to this semester and achieving my goals.

Update from December 1st

We’re slowly moving towards the end of this semester, and therewith some of my CAS projects of this semester will come to an end.

Wall Climbing has already come to an end for me, because my parents decided the risk of injury was too big to keep participating in it. This did bother me, though I have fulfilled my goal for this elective, which I’m really happy about.

Band practices have continued to go well, We’re performing in school tomorrow, which will be our first performance. It shouldn’t be too hard, since we’ve been practicing our song for a long time and we all know it by heart.

The football CAS on Thursdays has been going okay, I’ve had some trouble getting my group motivated to work with the kids, but I also have had to miss out on some of the sessions, because I’ve had injuries on my feet or similar. I don’t think I will continue leading this activity next semester, because trying to get my group to work has been very frustrating and I simply don’t have the nerve to keep doing it anymore.

The girls football team that I coached went on to place 3^rd in the SAISA tournament, which I’m very proud of. I improved my teaching skills by heaps and had tons of fun with the girls. I’m looking forward to doing this type of thing again, because I love football and I love teaching it to people.

Besides these things, I’ve started SAISA boys football last week, which was very exciting. After the first session I was named the best player of the session, which I was very proud of. The sessions are a lot harder than what I am used to, so I’ll need to put a lot of effort into them in order to make the team and eventually even become captain, because ultimately that’s what I want to do. One thing that’s crossing my way is German self-taught, because I only recently found out that I had to have a grade for it on my semester report, despite the fact that my teacher and me were only going to start after the Christmas break. I’ll also have to take better care of my feet, because I get blisters very easily and I can’t play at my best with blisters.

I also started to learn growling, which is a way of singing used in a variety of subgenres of metal. The style I am interested in is mostly used in Metalcore, Deathcore and Grindcore and consists of a very deep sound produced by pushing air through your vocal cords, pushing it out with your abdomen. I have recorded myself growling simple lines to a song, I used the in-built microphone of my laptop for the recording, which means the quality isn’t very good. I will try and get a good microphone from someone else, so I can record it properly and upload it onto here. I’m aiming to improve my growling technique and record a few songs, working towards the possibility of singing in a band once I have finished school and am back in Germany, because people here aren’t very interested in my kind of music.

Additionally, I have been named leader for the elective DAWG for next semester, which I am very happy about. That’s one of the things I really wanted to do and I am very enthusiastic about it. I want to improve on my leadership and communication skills further and set up the sterilization, which is the ultimate goal that DAWG is pursuing. I’m aiming to have a successful sterilization and sterilize more dogs than we sterilized last year, which is a number somewhere around 150