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