Short story of CAS

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August challenge 3

Today has been the day of noticing areas for improvements. 

Starting from my daily workout, I’ve noted that I can barely remember exercises that I’ve been doing yesterday and all my workout is basically trying to repeat that. Which is not looking the best, taking under consideration that I’ve managed to recall only 3 of them without help. Also, I think that most of exercises I’m doing is focusing on my arms, as due to my knee injury I was pushed into thinking that it should be saved from any bigger effort. But now I think that apart from preparing daily routine, so I wouldn’t need to spend so much time on trying to figure out what to do next, I should also spend a while on picking up right exercises so my arms and legs would have more less equal amount of effort. And also, apart from planning up particular exercises I think it’d be good idea to plan up timing since I noted that I’m a bit too ambitious and I tend to push myself too hard when I feel energetic and resign after just few seconds when I feel lazy.

When it comes to my Duolingo course, according to my plan I need to level up 5 skills per day to be able to finish the course by the end of the year. In theory, it sounds like not much, taking under consideration that one skill at first levels is like 4-5 lessons. But as I’ve levelled up some of them more, I’ve noted that later on they have more and more lessons, what makes it long and boring routine. I was more thinking that I should spread it into few shorter sessions instead of one long one, but I’m afraid I’d end up with not completing daily target if I wouldn’t do it all in the morning. 

Similar problem occurred with my reflections and studying. For past two days I left both of those activities for the end of my day, which results in me doing them with low effort, and basically only to complete them. I think that tomorrow I should rather try pushing my study time to the early morning hours and setting up reflection writing time for some particular hour like 8PM or so. 

Also, I think it may be the beginner problem, but I’ve just realised that doing all those daily activities takes me basically whole day and in close future I’m supposed to spend 8 hours at work meanwhile. I know that it probably just requires a bit of time for me to get used to doing all the stuff day by day so I’d get some fluency and manage to do them in shorter time, but deep in my mind I start to be a bit afraid that I’m trying to put too much pressure on myself at once.

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August challenge 2

Today surprisingly I’ve spent most of my day on doing sports, as my boyfriend offered to help me home workout as it’s kind of his thing. I know that I didn’t happen to do any kind of sports over a long time now but I still managed to perform better than he did with few exercises, what surprised me a lot. Also, even after few hours of doing various exercises, I don’t really feel like I’ve done anything. I suspect it’s connected with my history with swimming but I’d never think that it may influence my performance even so many years after my last serious swimming session. 

Apart from that I’ve spend over an hour on calculating how much Spanish I need to do daily to finish Duolingo course by the end of the year and on actually doing it. Turned out it will be tough one but it also wasn’t as unpleasant as I suspected it to be. Then I’ve studied some subjunctive and I must admit I still don’t get it even a bit, but I’m quite sure it’s because I have negative attitude towards it and because I’ve started to do it so late in the night, so I expect some improvements during next few days. 

I’ve also managed to go through two more chapters of first book from my reading challenge. The book itself is about self development and I’m already quite sure that I’m going to use some of its ideas in my everyday life, although I’m surprised that reading it and going through its exercises brings me so much joy, as I was always finding this kind of books boring and kind of... humiliating as it meant I would need to admit myself that I have some sort of problems which need to be resolved in this way. 

When it comes to additional improvements I think I’d need to find time for writing my reflections at the different time of the day, as I don’t feel that my thoughts are very clear at that late night and what I write doesn’t seem to be very consistent or particularly interesting. But in the end, isn’t this challenge about spoting such things and improving them?

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Goals for August monthly challenge

After finishing IB I had two months when I didn’t particularly have to do anything. I thought that I could do something meaningful with that time and finally get to doing stuff that I always wanted to try but it turned out that I’m only becoming more and more lazy. Some point I found post about challenge which was concerning doing something you really wanted but never had time to do for 30 days straight. And inspired by that, I decided to start my own monthly challenge and repeat it every month during my gap year to make it as meaningful time as it is only possible.

So today is the first day of my challenge. In order to track my progress I started bullet journal in which at the end of one month I’d write down my current long term goals and short term means to achieve them during next month. Then, basing on this goal list, I’ve created colourless graphics and diagrams which everyday I’d fill with colours if I achieve my daily goals or with shades of gray if I fail to do so.

My single-time goals for this month include simple things, as writing CV and motivational letter or signing up to animal shelter. Repeatable ones for August are doing Spanish course on Duolingo, reading a book per week, studying and doing sports daily, improving my cooking skills and reflecting upon my challenge in here, in order to spot things which could be improved for the next month.

As for today, I’m surprised that waking up at 6AM, doing fast workout at home and then leaving to skate was surprisingly easy. I’d never suspect that I could find in myself so much motivation towards doing something I actually don’t really like. Although, I’m also surprised that I was completely muscle-dead after really short workout, which didn’t really include anything challenging.

Another thing that surprised me much was that in the morning I had some sort of adrenaline rush connected with starting new challenge and doing those sports and some official things later on didn’t pose much of a challenge for me at the time. But then, midday came and all that motivation all of a sudden disappeared somewhere and I wasn’t able to do my daily study or try cooking anything during my day. I’m curious if the same thing will occur tomorrow or was it just being overwhelmed with doing things after such a long break.

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CAS Final Reflection

I believe that the day has come to sum up all my CAS experiences and see if it truly was as profitable as I was told it’s supposed to be. 

Activities

For last two years I’ve done a number of things for my CAS, since none of them never felt like this right thing to do. I’ve started with what I felt good with at the moment, so with drawing, skating, shooting, teaching maths and learning how to play guitar. Most of those activities stayed with me throughout all my IB, even though many times I didn’t feel satisfied with them and I was looking for alternatives in calligraphy, swimming, baking, cooking, photography, sailing, pool, learning and teaching languages, cycling, running, dancing, board games, WOŚP, taking care of kittens and many other activities.

Goals

In many ways, I didn’t manage to achieve the goals I’ve set at the beginning of my IB. Due to overwhelming amount of academic work and ever-returning wave of stress and guilt whenever I tried to do anything apart from studying most of the things I’ve done were done only to satisfy CAS requirements and to not fail this IB component - it wasn’t really for me. So in the end, I didn’t learn how to play guitar, my skating skills didn’t improve much, some point I quit shooting, drawing and teaching maths. So honestly, I’ve failed to achieve all the goals set. But in return, I think I’ve achieved way more than I’ve expected. In desperate attempt to fulfil CAS I’ve discovered my love to languages, which is likely to be crucial in my future career. CAS has also helped me with discovering what I really want to do in the future as research for my Extended Essay would have never been that wide and interesting if they weren’t conducted with help of my skates.

What I’ve learned

Even though I think that in many CAS areas IB as such has stopped my development, there is one field which I consider especially beneficial. When it comes to both teaching and learning from other people, CAS has taught me the patience needed to explain even the most difficult tasks and finding the most creative and the simplest approach or model to explain it. I think it’s extremely valuable skill, as basically all my future depends on my ability to gain and give knowledge.

Benefits for future

As I’ve already mentioned, the biggest benefit for future I’ve gained from CAS is actually discovering what I want to do and how to connect it with my dreams. I don’t think I’d ever get interested in sustainability and languages if it wasn’t for CAS.

Most challenging activity, with the largest impact

This credit surely goes to my CAS project, so to the series of workshops for junior high school kids, aiming to help them with choice of high school, show variety of learning methods and give useful hints which I regret I didn’t know before going to high school. It was most challenging as at first I was struggling to get my team to work and there was a number of formal requirements which from my point of view didn’t have any real life usage. Also, for me it was really challenging to actually go to some school’s headmaster and negotiate terms of such workshops. I consider it to have the largest impact on me as I planned to conduct workshops about IB also, but the headmaster didn’t allow it for one, single reason - IB is not available in his city, and due to low teaching quality of city schools too many children are already studying in another cities, so his mission is to stop them from leaving city schools. It was the first time when I’ve fully realised how selfish people can be and that for some of them self-convenience counts far more than the best interest of others.

Most enjoyable and rewarding activity

For me it was surely language meetings, as they brought both my English and Spanish on whole new level. Even though I was studying both of them as my IB subjects for almost 1,5 year before I went for my first language meeting I kind of feel that back then it was purely academic skill - I could communicate in both languages, but I was lacking this fluency and openness to random conversations. The meetings were enjoyable for me because it was basically discussion on topics I like with people with completely various points of view, so it didn’t feel like I was putting in it any effort. But despite of that I think they were the most rewarding as after roughly half of a year I’ve developed this fluency and ability of switching between languages without any problems. I also started to notice some similarities between languages and when I started to learn next one, studying process turns out to be much shorter and understanding of the language and its grammar comes much faster.

Developing aspects of personality

During IB I’ve many times noted changes in myself, which includes development of such traits as curiosity about the world, willingness to help others, high ecological awareness or interest in various cultures and languages. However, I don’t think this development is caused purely by CAS. In my opinion, it’s driven by IB as such, especially by the pressure put on research conducted by the student himself and solving problems of global significance.

Realisation of things about myself

There are many things about myself that I’ve became fully aware of due to CAS. The biggest one that I’d like to change is that if I don’t have really strong motivation to do something (such as incoming deadline x) then I become very lazy and I’m likely to not do this thing. It also made me realise that sitting all day at home and learning theoretical knowledge simply is not what I’m meant to do, because all the knowledge I have and find useful comes from practical learning, which I was always trying to connect to CAS.

Seeing things in different light

Of course I do see CAS in a bit different light now. I regret a bit that I was always treating it as something worth less attention just because you don’t get any marks for it. I was always pursuing higher marks instead of my personal development and now I see that it should rather be the other way around as in the end my marks don’t count that much and in comparison to other people I feel a bit boring and like I don’t have much to offer apart from some random knowledge from subjects I’ve studied... Knowledge which is already starting to flee from my mind, while all the CAS experiences I went through are likely to stay there for longer.

Learning Outcomes

And in the end, it’s time for my favourite formalities. I believe I’ve identified my own strengths for example during language meetings or skating, as I’ve learnt that I’m good at those things and I’ve developed areas for growth as learning basic slaloms gave me abilities to learn more complicated ones in the future and language abilities I’ve already acquired allow me to study next languages with relatively low effort. As I’ve mentioned, I’ve both demonstrated how to initiate and plan CAS experience and that the challenge has been undertaken and new skills has been developed in the process during my CAS project, what I have described earlier. I think I’ve also showed commitment and perseverance with many activities such as calligraphy and playing guitar, which both I have continued for most all my IB time, putting all my effort into learning them, despite of moderate outcomes. When it comes to both recognising the skills and the benefits of working collaboratively, I think that my attempt with sailing was the best example of it, since only thanks to cooperation we’ve managed to get our ship out of the shoal and the fact that we did it proves that I posses the skill. I believe that the best examples for engagement with issues of global significance and recognising and considering the ethics of choices and actions are both my CAS project and WOŚP. CAS project, as it concerned problem of education and I’ve struggled with understanding the ethics behind headmaster’s choice to not show his pupils better perspectives for the sake of his own convenience and WOŚP as it concerns health care and the ethics of giving money to organisation about which there is ongoing discussion what amount of the money is actually used for its purpose.

Connections to IB Learner Profile

According to IB, IB student should be open-minded, caring, knowledgeable, thinker, risk-taker, communicator, balanced, principled, reflective and inquiring. And the big question is if and how CAS helped me to become like that. I’m sure that endless hours of writing reflections helped me in becoming thinker and generally reflective person, since whenever I experience something even a bit interesting almost automatic process of putting that into CAS reflection starts in my mind. I also don’t have any doubts that it helped me to be more open-minded, communicating and caring, because as I have already mentioned, it helped me to develop various ways of passing knowledge in order to get to every single student and during language meetings I’ve increased my confidence in various languages. I’m also surely more inquiring, knowledgeable and risk-taking due to IB, however I’m not sure if this part comes from CAS itself or IB in general, as I associate those two traits more with my academic work than with CAS experiences. On the other hand, I don’t think that CAS helped me with being more balanced and principled as despite of best attempts I was always doing all reflections on the last moment and I never managed to balance out academic work with CAS experiences.

Conclusion

In the end, even though I think CAS is a great initiative I think that due to academic pressure and my poor time management I was not able to benefit from it much. However, I plan to continue developing this blog and undertake new CAS-like activities since I think that without all this pressure and all the formalities to follow it will be quite pleasurable for me and hopefully will bring more benefits in the future.

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Swimming challenge

This year my New Year’s challenge was to swim regularly up to my finals, so for first 3 months of 2019. Despite of raining deadlines I’ve managed to visit swimming pool once every week or two, each time having 45 minutes workout time. 

As I have mentioned before, when I was younger I was going to sport school and I was swimming many hours per week. Due to that long term extreme workout my body is used to fast swimming and I find it extremely difficult to slow down, even though I don’t have enough muscles to swim that fast nowadays. I was trying to swim around 2000 meters each time but the longest distance I have managed to swim so far was only 1500 meters. It’s at once disappointing in comparison to my old training plan and satisfying as I didn’t suspect that I’m still able to swim that much. 

In conclusion, I’m happy that I’ve started swimming, even though it was only for short time, as I plan to take a break for my finals time. It was nice to discover that built years ago muscle memory is still there. Also I have discovered that doing sports is one of the very few things bringing me joy nowadays, what is surprising as I always thought that I enjoy studying more than physical exercises.

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Long-term cooking challenge

In November one of my family members was forced to start very strict diet what forced major changes in cooking habits. As it occurred in more less same time when I decided to switch to vegetarianism I thought that I could use this situations as an opportunity to learn how to cook since it may turn out to be quite useful skill when I’ll move out for university. 

As I was a complete disaster when it comes to cooking, the beginning was rather difficult. Well, okey, it was a horrible time for me. Before that my cooking skills were limited only to scrambled eggs and sandwiches so I had completely no idea about any more complicated meals and obvious things like putting oil on a frying pan were a mystery for me. 

After 4 long months of cooking on basically daily basis I can say that my meals are starting to have some taste even when I’m not looking at the recipe. I can improvise a little and still get something eatable, even though I can still perform only a few meals. I’ve also perfected preparing cake, which creation I was describing some time ago.

As cooking was always an equivalent of dark magic for me, I am happy to say that it no longer feels this way. Of course, perfect fluency and better cooking skills will take time but after those 4 months I am truly satisfied with what I have achieved. It always seemed to me that cooking is a difficult skill that I will never be able to master and doing something about that is a great feeling, even if those are very small steps so far. 

Cooking during this time was not only a creativity for me, as I’ve spend numerous hours on trying to comprehend how particular ingredients work like but also service as most of those dishes have been prepared for family member, who was not capable of doing it on his own due to his medical condition.  

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Temporary return to calligraphy

In December I was asked to hand in written assignment. That would be nothing special if one of the requirements haven’t been that it has to be hand written. As I don’t write much by hand recently I decided to use my best calligraphy skills. It was surprisingly difficult as my hand is not used to writing much and written assignment turned out to be 4 pages long, so it took for me a few hours to write in down in ordered manner. But in the end, despite of being a huge effort for my not existent muscles and quite time consuming activity, I think it was worth the effort as I really liked the result. 

However calligraphy using pen is not that challenging as while real ink is being used so I think that in the next step I will check if I can still use ink. Apart from calligraphy challenge I’ve made it also a bit of photography challenge and discovered quite interesting way of taking photos, using only paper and light.

It made me think how easily a bit of creativity may change simple things into pieces of art. I’m wondering, is it all the mystery when it comes to creating art? Are all artists only people capable of noticing such amazing connections between simple things and beauty or is there something more to that?

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Taking care of kittens

Some time ago my Finnish friend asked me to take care of his two one year old kittens, which he had to leave at home after some hormonal treatment, when they absolutely couldn’t be alone. I’ve agreed to help and babysit kittens for few hours, but at first I needed some training as I’m totally not a cat person and cats seem like a little aliens for me. 

Beginnings were... difficult. I was completely frightened as all the memories I have with cats are strongly negative. I was paralysed when one of kittens approached me and started to play with my shoe laces. But as the hours passed by I slowly started to realise that cats are in fact dogs in permanently liquid state. Unlike cats I’ve met before, they don’t intent to scratch me all the time, don’t bite too much and for most of the time only want to throw them some toys and to pat them when they approach me.

I was really surprised that for whole my life I was afraid of cats, which turned out to be quite nice creatures after barely few hours. Also, one mayor difference between cats and dogs stroke me immediately - I can’t imagine any dogs I know to trust stranger enough to put him in a bag after few hours of knowing each other while my friend’s cat was quite happy to do so.

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Winter Photography Session

In general, winter always has been my least favourite part of the year, as I completely hate any kind of cold. Apart from that it has a number of other disadvantages such as: snow, darkness in the morning and evening, depressing weather, need of wearing warm clothes and so on. So usually during winter I was just hiding happily at my home and wishing to never have to leave.

However this time I’ve decided to try some new things and try to change winter into something beautiful. During a week time I was taking photos mostly during walks with my doggie and I’ve discovered amazing thing - snow actually looks amazing on the photos. I know that for many it won’t be a breaking news but for me, winter hater since always, it’s a quite big thing.

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WOŚP 2019

This year for the third time in a row I took part in WOŚP. I was collecting money as volunteer, what basically means that I was standing in cold outside for few hours. Still I think that it’s totally worth all the cold and effort since collected founds are used to buy medical equipment, which is always needed.

However there was something dramatically different about this year’s WOŚP which I’d like to reflect upon. Starting with personal reasons, it was a day before my oral exam from polish, which was surely the worst oral exam in my career. Still, I really wanted to help with collecting money but for the sake of my grades I had to limit collecting time and for the first time with my friends we weren’t one of the last to hand in our cans with collected funds - on the contrary, we were one of the first. Even though, as it turned out later, I’ve collected way more money than in previous years I still felt like what I was doing was only to show off, that I wasn’t putting all the possible time and resources into this volunteering. From the perspective of time, I know that I really needed those few extra hours for preparation for my oral exam, but I still feel that I didn’t do my best.

The second difference comes from recent law changes in Poland. I was collecting money in a centre of capital city of voivodeship, so place where not many people live - mostly just travel there daily to do shopping, for school or work. As my voluntary work took place on Sunday there were almost no people in there as people don’t go to school or work then and due to new Polish law shops are also closed. I can say that the difference was huge in comparison to the previous years, as city seemed completely dead.

But despite of all that problems it was still great time for me and my friends, as we got to spend some time together and at the same time help a bit. During our service we’ve met an older man who said that he didn’t have any more money for us but as a thanks for our service he gave us hand-made wizened four-leaf clovers, which are a symbol of luck in my culture. I think it was the best part of that day for me - when an older man who didn’t have much himself gave us a result of years of collecting and preparing clovers.

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Skating time!

Just before Christmas with my friend we decided to go skating. Even though I know that my health condition is not the best and I shouldn’t overstrain my knees too much, I’ve decided that a bit of skating can’t be that bad. Of course it was, as it requires some particular muscles to be used and I haven’t used them since the last time I was roller skating, which was in October I think. 

But one more time I was surprised how much I’ve missed skating and how fast my body got used to it. Skating on the ice feels completely different than on the road but after some time muscles get used to the differences and the same moves I’ve been practising so much this summer and during summer a year ago on roller blades become kind of automatic and natural. As a matter of fact, after a longer while of skating, when we had to get out of the ice, walking seemed far less natural thing than skating :)

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Invasion of board games!

As my Finnish friend asked me to practise English in more calm environment than language meeting we’ve decided to take a journey to the world of starships and play some board games. As all my games have instruction manuals and all descriptions in polish apart from having conversation in foreign language I had to also do the translation part for my friend. 

I consider myself to be horrible interpreter as my skills in English are limited to thinking and speaking in this language and exclude translations from Polish. I think that in my mind those two languages exist as two completely separate things and I’ve expected the translation part to be a horror for me. And as long as I was trying to translate things word to word it was. But some point I’ve realised that I actually know those rules by heart and I can just tell my friend what the game is about. And as I did so all the problems I had disappeared. 

There is one more surprising thing I’ve discovered during that meeting with my friend. As he doesn’t speak Polish I was using only English to talk with him for few loooong hours. Then I needed to pick up the phone and I was forced to switch to Polish which took me literally a fracture of a second. But when the call ended and I needed to start speaking English again it wasn’t that simple anymore. So even though I’m learning English almost as long as Polish and recently I could say that English is becoming my primary language as I’m using it way more often than Polish, it looks like my mind automatically, without any effort comes back to Polish if it has an opportunity to do so. 

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Freaking out about languages

When I think about the world I usually imagine it as a building with thousands of locked doors. And somewhere in the building there are keys for all the doors, just waiting to be found. I believe that recently I’ve found one of the keys and surprisingly it is the thing I’ve known for a long time. 

Language meetings made me realise that actually usually the obstacle between me and people who could be important in my live is the language barrier. Inspired by that and a few linguistic meme sites I’ve decided to start learning a new language. But for a long time I couldn’t decide, what language should I choose?

My first choice has been Finnish, as one of my best friends is Finnish and I thought that in case of any problems he could easily help me out. But obstacles have appeared almost the second I’ve decided to learn that language. The problem with me is that I’m losing motivation towards learning very fast and I must be constantly motivated. Duolingo is doing great job at that so I’ve decided that my learning process should be guided mostly by app like Duolingo. And surprisingly, it turned out that none of the best language apps is offering Finnish and those which do are quite costly. Also other learning materials aren’t very accessible and altogether with my fading motivation the situation didn’t look very well so I’ve decided to pick another language.

Then I thought that actually it would be great if the language itself could be useful for me. But without knowing what I actually want to do and where I want to study I had no clue what I should choose so for some time I decided to develop my Spanish skills. And I would probably continue to do so but... Meanwhile my fascination with being multilingual turned into some sort of obsession and speaking in only 3 languages stopped being enough for me. Deep down in my heart I felt that I need new language which I could be passionate about. 

The answer came when I started doing more research when it comes to universities I could be potentially interested in and it turned out that course I am completely crazy about is offered by university located in Netherlands. Since that point it felt kind of natural for me to start learning Dutch as it can be quite useful for a person who is considering studying in Netherlands. So far learning is going slowly but as long as there is some progress and Duolingo is keeping my motivation level high I think Dutch has quite a big chance of becoming 4th language I could speak quite fluently.

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Accidental Activity

Some time ago during English meeting with my Finnish friend we were discussing the importance of sports. He’s regularly going to a gym and in general he’s having very healthy life style which is hmm... let’s say that in perfect opposition to me.

During our discussion he gently tried to convince me to sport in general but due to my health condition the options I have are generally poor. I’m not even entirely sure what I can and what I can’t do so I surely wouldn’t risk going to a gym and from the very beginning of our discussion I’ve assumed that it won’t change anything in my life style.

And then by accident I was walking next to my junior high school and swimming pool on which I was training in the past. For a second I thought that maybe it would be nice to give swimming a shot, since not all swimming styles require huge involvement of my knees and in theory it could be quite save for my health. And the same day I have ended up on that swimming pool. 

Turned out that despite of almost 5,5 year of break my body still perfectly remembers all the swimming styles and knows exactly what to do in a given moment. The only thing that changed since then is my overall condition - I don’t have enough muscles to swim with the speed I’m used to and I get tired very quickly. But even with those limitations I’ve managed to swim 1450 meters during my first day of swimming. 

It was such a huge surprise for me that I’ve decided to try it again despite of a huge muscle pain. During the second day I’ve swum 1800 meters and during the third I have managed to get to 1950 meters. Each time during 45 minutes time interval. 

To be honest I didn’t think that my condition can be restored that fast. I still get exhausted quite fast but I have discovered that if I fight to put the maximum effort despite of that I can still swim long distances and the feeling of tiredness disappears. It’s also highly enjoyable for me as I can see huge improvement each time I go to the swimming pool. And even though in general I’m quite exhausted after each swimming session I have noticed huge motivation burst when it comes to all other areas of my life. 

So maybe the time has come to change my attitude towards sports and stop being always lazy and exhausted with life IB student? 

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Halloween!

This year with my friends we decided to continue our tradition and make a halloween party. Due to personal reasons we were not able to have a party precisely at 31st of October, so we were forced to omit trick or treat part and our halloween was mostly about fancy clothes and preparing pumpkins - so all about CAS!

I think that the most exciting part for me was preparing my costume as I decided to be a zombie elf. I’ve bought elf costume and decorated it with artificial blood and fake knife but the really hard part was make up and hairdo. 

To be honest I think it was the first time in my life when I was doing make up since I don’t do it on everyday basis so I was scared as hell that I’d screw something up. Even though I’ve watched like a billion of tutorials how to make easy zombie make up it was huge challenge for me and took few hours, with result still being far away from what I wanted to achieve. After that I can say that make up is in fact an art - art which I have no clue how to master so I’d rather leave it alone for as long as I only can. 

Another thing I liked was preparing pumpkins. We did it also last year so I suppose I could say that I have some experience with that and the result was way better than a year ago. I can’t tell if it was caused by our experience or by special tools we have used but one way or another it was nice to discover that we’re good at something else than stressing out about exams.

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November CAS combo

Recently on language meetings I’ve met a guy who is scared of dogs but as it turned out he would like to break this fear and learn how to live with doggies around him. So as a proper IB student I’ve offered my help and in the beginning of November we went for a loooong walk with my doggie.

I must admit that I was totally surprised with how a person can control fear. I mean, I know that people have huge potential for manipulating emotions but after a guy who clearly says that he is scared of dogs I would expect some negative reaction. Instead I’ve seen only interest in the dog and a bit reserved approach - but reserved in the way as everybody approaches unfamiliar animal, not in terms of fear. When it comes to making friends I must say that I’m really proud of both my doggie and this friend of mine - for doggie that it didn’t decide to go crazy and scare the guy even more and for my friend because despite of his fear he was happy to play with the dog and looked quite satisfied with that. 

 Apart from service this walk was also a huge activity for me since usually I don’t walk that much and don’t have to run after the dog all the time. According to my phone I’ve made around 28 000 steps that day which is huge improvement in comparison to usual  5 000. And as much as I dislike the idea of sports in general I must admit that I’ve really enjoyed the feeling I had after that walk. I would never expect that tired muscles can be so satisfying.

Also I’ve spotted an opportunity for my latest creativity idea - photography. It’s still hard for me to believe that there are so many opportunities for amazing photos during simple walk in the park. I knew that photographer can make a pretty photography even from the most trivial things but I’ve never experienced that by myself before.

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Service going TOKish

Yesterday, after whole month of absence, I decided to go for a multilanguage meeting again, even though in theory I don’t have time for such things at the moment. But our never ending discussions about travelling and meeting new cultures during English B classes made it unbearable for me to not go there again. 

As all my friends were absent yesterday I decided to spend some time with guy who is perceived as a kind of special. He wears clothes which make him look like he had ran away from circus or theatre just a second ago and his behaviour perfectly reflects the way he looks like. After hearing all those weird stories about him from my friends I was a bit afraid to join him but one more time curiosity won. 

I would never ever expect discussion with such a person to be so interesting. Even though by any definition he’s a total weirdo I don’t remember enjoying any other conversation with a complete stranger so much. We’ve spend together almost 2,5 hour and during that time we’ve covered so various topics, starting with possible another forms of life in other galaxies and the limitations of human kind, through the basics of economy and human geography to planning a perfect murder and life in ancient times. I was astonished by all the connections between all those topics but what’s more important I’ve discovered a huge inconsistency in my geographical knowledge, which I’ve always considered to be quite good as it’s my favourite subject. 

Some point during our discussion the topic of overpopulation came out and the guy strongly disagreed with me that the world is overpopulated. Some regions, yes, but Earth as a whole, no. And when he asked me why do I think that it’s overpopulated I couldn’t answer him. I realised that I’ve been always taking this information for granted and never actually paid enough attention to check it out. Of course, I know that some people claim that Earth could easily manage 15 billions of human beings but somehow I got to the point that due to our current problems it is overpopulated now and we need to fight it in any possible way we can. But should I actually take such information for granted? To be honest, I don’t think so. It may be true, but could also not be so I got to the conclusion that even though during lessons we clearly talk about overpopulation I should base my opinion more on my own research than on the IB geography syllabus. 

There is one more reflection coming from that meeting. If now I see that I can consider my knowledge from my favourite subject as a bit incomplete then what about my knowledge when it comes to subjects to which I don’t pay that much attention? What about those in which I’m not interested at all?