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

Update

Hello :)

It's been a while...

So far my CAS has been going pretty well. 

For Thursday's activity, we've had the kids in school 4 times now, of which I missed one. We haven't shifted from playing football just yet, but want to do so soon. In the course of this activity, I've taken on a leadership role, determining the exercises we do with the kids, taking the lead in the warm-up and stretching, etc. During the first session, we played a game of football with all of the kids, just to see where they stand in terms of their skill and what we need to work on. After this, we were aware of the fact that we had kids with ranges of all sorts of skills, some of them were very good, others could barely kick a ball. What I proposed to do after that, was to split up the bigger kids and smaller kids and work with two different groups, seeing as there was a huge difference in physical appearance as well as skill. The others agreed, so I spent one session practicing shooting skills on a traveling ball and one session on corners and crosses. I've tried to make the players communicate with each other, which isn't always the easiest thing to do, since they don't understand much English and we only have one Sri Lankan in our group, but I feel like they're starting to get the hang of it. The kids seem to be having fun and developing their skills rather quickly, they've lost their shyness towards us already and aren't scared to try and communicate even without being able to speak English very well. In the rest of this year, we should be able to get other sports teams in on Thursdays as well, we should be getting a basketball group next, which means that I'll probably let Filippo take the lead, since he's the basketball player in our group.

A while ago, Grace approached and asked me to have some private coaching sessions for football with her, because she really wanted to make the girls' team this year. I gladly agreed, so we had sessions on Mondays and Wednesdays after school. We worked on simple ball handling skills, passing, some shooting and crossing, but also on how to hold a ball and defend it against attackers. My goal for those sessions was to get Grace to be on the traveling team for SAISA.

At one of the sessions, the coach of the girls' team asked me to come in and help him to coach the girls' team during the week, because he'd seen me work with Grace. I agreed, setting myself the goal of helping to improve the girls' techniques with the ball and making them more confident on the field, but also to improve my own coaching skills, since I'd never coached such a big group of girls (around 20). So far I've had roughly over 10 sessions with the girls, helping them out as a group and individually, trying to develop their skills on the ball. I've been following the instructions that coach Shipley has given me, demonstrated exercises and walked around the field, helping the girls improve. It's been very fun so far and I've seen girls improve hugely. In terms of myself being a coach, I've turned out to be a rather strict one, shouting out advice on the field and really pushing people to their very max, which I think is good, because the girls need to get used to the pressure of SAISA games, since some of them have never been in one. Last week, the selection of the traveling 16 was made, and I was very glad to find out that Grace made the team, which means the first of my CAS goals for this year has been fulfilled.

Every second Wednesday morning, we have electives in our school. I joined the Wall Climbing Elective, with the intention of overcoming my fear of heights. In order to do so, I want to climb the top of the wall at least once, no matter how hard it may seem. I've never done wall climbing before, so this was a new experience for me. As of last week's Wednesday, I made it to the top of the wall, which made me very happy. That means that I've therewith fulfilled my goal for wall climbing, which will not hinder me from putting effort into climbing the top of some of the harder parts of the wall.

Our band practices are going well so far, we still practice together, but probably won't be presenting in school anytime soon. We were supposed to perform for the UN Day, representing the European countries, but one day before the event we were kicked out, because, apparently, we were "just loud noise" and "little kids were getting bored". Maybe that was just because we hadn't had a sound check yet, and because we were the very last group to rehearse during the dress rehearsal, which means the kids had sat there for more than two hours already. But ah well, you never know, right? That performance would've meant the fulfillment of my goal for the band, but now I'm actually very much against performing in school, because we were kicked out of our performance very rudely and I don't see why we should be begging the school for another performance, when they're the ones who should be glad that there are musicians in our school who are willing to play. Too bad.

I've talked to some of the officials of DAWG, who now want me to join the elective already, which I'll have to discuss with the responsible teacher, Ms Wolff. I hope that I'll be able to switch from wall climbing, because that would mean that I could already start working with the group of kids that is in that elective, but also help out the seniors, since there's only two of them and they're handling a group that purely consists of 6th graders. My goal for DAWG would be to continue working towards a sterilization and maybe help set up a step-by-step plan on how to achieve exactly that, which would help whoever would be taking over the elective after me.

Cya ^^

First Day of CAS

Today was my first day of Community, Action and Service at OSC.

I had originally joined the group Habitat for Humanity, but was then approached by a fellow student who asked me to join his CAS activity, which was still to be set up. All I knew was that he planned to invite students from local schools to come in on Thursdays and play football, basketball or any other sports with them.

On our first day, we came up with a statement, specifications for the group of people we wanted and a plan for all the Thursdays right up until December break. I will upload the statement and other information as soon as i have a digital copy of them on hand.

I really look forward to work with the kids and let them have a fun experience while learning knew things about football, since that is the sport that I will be teaching and organizing along with three other members of our CAS group: James, Adrien and Maisoon. 

My personal goal for this activity is to improve my own communication and leadership skills, along with some skills at football. A teacher can always learn by teaching. I also want to fulfill the CAS activity's goal.

Additionally to Thursdays CAS, I play the bass in a band that consists of four OSC students: Filippo, Adrien and Francesca. We meet at least once a week to practice, mostly songs written and composed by ourselves. Our big goal is to perform somewhere before December, so that we gain some experience with performing on stage, since some of us don't have any.

For myself, I want to improve my skills with the Bass, but also as a lyricist and communicator within the band. In the heat of discussions about songs, since music means a lot to every individual, it is often hard to communicate ideas in an understandable manner and I wish to improve on this.

I'm planning to try out for the SAISA football team this year, aiming to achieve the post of Team Captain. This has always been a dream of mine and I will work very hard to reach for it. On top of that I want to switch to the DAWG elective once this semester is over, since I've been in it before and now the group desperately needs someone with a little experience to take over leadership, once the 12th graders have their exams coming up.

Overall, I think I will be enjoying my career in the CAS program at the OSC and hopefully be a role-model to others and make people's lives a little better :)