#thecasdiaries

[please-let-me-pass]

Final CAS reflection

Almost two years ago I started the IB, which also meant starting my CAS. At first, I did not know how I was going to manage it on top of all the assignments, studying and projects. Turns out I kind of did manage and it was not really that bad.

I quickly noticed that doing CAS was not as difficult as I thought it would be. It was actually my first lesson I got out of the whole experience – doing stuff outside just studying is valuable and not a hassle. Writing this, I realize that I did not do all of the things that have appeared in my portfolio because I had to but rather because I wanted to. I wanted to go swimming again. I wanted to write more. I wanted to do something that would make me think that I’m changing the world for the better. However, without CAS, I probably would not have done any of that. I discovered that I tend to undervalue everything that does not directly contribute to my academic achievement and find school-related excuses for not devoting my time to things I actually enjoy. This is a bit of a sad realization, but an important one nonetheless. Now that I have identified this weakness, I will look for methods to improve.

Because of the fact that CAS was mandatory, I made more time for writing and I’m happy I did. I could never imagine myself to be anything other than a writer and I always say that, however because of school and my fear of academic underachievement, I rarely write anything. The writing activities I did for CAS – translating a play, Poetry Writing Month and Writing Summer Camp – were a great opportunity to remind myself why I love it so much and why I should do it more. Constantly thinking about duties, chores and responsibilities is draining, even for someone like me who likes studying. Indirectly, CAS helped me get back to the (serious) hobby I love the most.

Apart from that, CAS has certainly put me ’out there’. Many things I did pushed me out of my comfort zone in different respects. The first experience, translating a play for the local theatre, was a difficult one because I was not sure of my skills and afraid of failing an important task. Instead of withdrawing, I powered through it and did my thing without being a disappointment. Swimming was a challenge I devoted a whole blog post to – it sometimes got too upsetting for me to manage but in the end, I did it. Poetry Writing Month was similar in this respect, as at first, I was terribly afraid of putting bad attempts out there for people to read. In the end, it helped me gain some perspective and see that I do not have to be perfect to enjoy writing. Finally, my CAS project pushed me to work with other people, which was never something I liked to do. I must admit, I still hate it, but working collaboratively on a CAS project helped me see the point of group work and this is very important to me – there is nothing I hate more than doing things I don’t understand the purpose of. This changed and I believe it will continue to change. I’m very much looking forward to it.

I also felt, when doing activities like the Amnesty Letter Writing Marathon, the I Support Women, Not Sweatshops workshop or my CAS project, a strange sensation that I get rarely and I’m thankful when I get it. I felt needed and helpful. I often think about my position in society. As a member of a heavily ostracized and ridiculed minority, I’m not a stranger to systematic discrimination or daily viciousness from other people. At the same time, I have it good in life – I get to live in a country free of war, I get to eat every day, I get to live in a proper house with both of my parents, I get to have a computer to write this document on. I’m privileged in many respects but I also know what it means to not be. This is why I feel activism is important, and CAS has helped me engage in it in different ways. When preparing the ALWM, reading about the people we were writing for made me upset like usual but I was able to channel that energy into doing something more than just feeling helpless. Same with my CAS project – organizing a campaign made me feel that I was no longer unproductive. ISWNS workshop, on the other hand, was a fantastic opportunity to get educated and to feel a part of a community. Even though my letters, t-shirts or posters might not have changed the world, they have certainly changed me, in that I felt that ’helpful’ feeling. I have discovered it and now I will seek it further in similar activities.

I feel like I have developed my creative and social skills infinitely and I certainly did not expect that. I also improved my organizational skills, however not to the maximum – I admit that I could have done a much better job with consistently documenting my activities and this is something I will need to work on.

As for the learning outcomes, I can confidently say that I have attained all seven of them.

[please-let-me-pass]

Summer Camp and my CAS experiences there

There comes this special time once a year when I go on a summer camp. This may sound like a typical activity teenagers engage in while on holidays but allow me to explain why it’s special for me.

From July 6th to July 17th I was in Poronin, a small city in the South-East of Poland. People usually associate this region with sports, activity and sightseeing because it lays in Poland’s famous Tatra mountains. Lucky for me, a person who hates mountain-climbing, the camp I went to is rather stationary and has nothing to do with sightseeing. It was a Creative Writing Camp (or Writing Camp; or Literary Camp – I don’t know the proper name in English). People like me go there for eleven whole days to just get inspired for writing.

That’s it, that’s the whole thing. That’s the fun.

During my time there I wrote ten (!!!) short stories that I’m really proud of. They were all inspired by prompts our instructor gave us. One task, for example, involved choosing a well-known tale and then writing a story that would change the meaning of the original tale. I chose Beauty and the Beast and imagined an alternative version where the relationship between the two main characters is not based on pure love. Another task I really enjoyed was to write a story with a protagonist that the reader would hate after reading the whole text. I wrote a scene from the perspective of a guy who was so bored that he did not stop a kidnapping that took place in front of him. 

You can access the Google Drive with all the texts here.

(They are in Polish, though. I promise I didn’t just write 10+ pages of gibberish to put it on the blog. If you don’t know the language you just have to take my word for it.)

The creativity part of this experience is pretty much self-explanatory – it helped me get inspired and let me gather new, unexpected ideas for directions my future writing could go in. However, this experience also has its service part.

During this camp, the participants have to demonstrate their work for others to see. This year, we decided that we would do an exhibition of the texts we wrote. This sounds like an easy way out but in reality, it’s far from that for a couple of reasons. First of all, we only had one day to organize the whole thing. Second, an exhibition of written text might quickly get boring – prose requires extended attention and detailed reading (poetry too, but it is shorter and more easily digestible).

I was one of the people who organized the entire exhibition from a technical and visual standpoint. We arranged the texts in a way that they were grouped by genre and signalled it with coloured pieces of paper and announced to everyone that they could call the author’s name if they wanted to talk to them about what they wrote. I proposed creating a wall of poetry, which turned out to be a great idea – the poems got their own space which made it easier for people reading them to get through all of them. We also came up with the idea to pair some texts with pictures painted by kids from the art section of the camp, which made the exhibition more appealing to the viewers.

Photos belong to Przystań Wyobraźni on Facebook.

We had lots of work to do with printing the texts, formatting and assembling them for the exhibition but I felt really good doing all of it. I liked the task and the fact that I could contribute something more than just my writing made me proud. People who came to the exhibition were interested in what we wrote and some were even surprised that they did not get bored. 

This CAS experience was a very organic one, however I still consider it to be important – I usually do not engage in group work and tend to focus on one task (in this case, writing). I’m happy that I put myself out there.

I realized the following learning outcomes:

[please-let-me-pass]

Swimming - a short update

Yes, I know I was supposed to write this update a long long time ago. There are some reasons as to which I did not. During my individual consultation with my CAS coordinator, however, I understood something that lets me write this post.

As you may remember, my last swimming update was glowing with optimism. I was genuinely happy to not miss any training day and I felt accomplished. Well, after that post things have taken a slightly less pleasant turn.

In short, I managed to complete most of my training plan, as I did not get to week 15 and 16. My biggest issue was consistency – I missed a lot of training days and this slowed down the completion of the plan. I still enjoyed swimming but sometimes the fear of entering the locker room was too overwhelming for me to go to the pool. 

In the end, I feel like the thoughts I was supposed to beat, beat me instead. I’m still proud of what I did in those first four weeks but I simply did not manage to attain my goal. I still feel largely insecure. My stamina has slightly improved and I felt the physical benefits of swimming but it was not enough to convince my brain that going to the pool is fine. I dropped consistent swimming altogether after 14 weeks of the training plan (approximately 18 real weeks).

The reason I’m posting this update is that I now understand I can. I talked to my CAS coordinator about my failure during an individual consultation (I did not tell her anything before that). I thought that if I admitted to failing something this huge I would fail CAS. We talked about it and, even though it might sound a bit cliché, I understood that failure is not a bad thing here. Challenges we take on are sometimes too ambitious for us and everybody has a different capacity for what they can and cannot do. What we should do is not give up but reflect on what went wrong and try again or attain this goal differently. And, no, I won’t fail CAS simply because I did not finish my training plan. I was relieved.

So, yeah, that’s how it went. I rediscovered how fun it is to be physically active and I will definitely look for ways to implement it in my daily life (spoiler: I will tell you a bit about it in my activity reflection!). Going back to the pool is something I feel like I can do but I have to give myself more freedom to fail, as it is clearly difficult for me.

This experience let me attain the following learning outcomes:

[please-let-me-pass]

CAS project: long-overdue final update

Long time no see, CAS friends. I’ve had a lot going on, but you already know this story. Anyways, you might be thinking ‘where did his CAS project go?’. You might even be thinking that I did not finish it. Well, in this case, I’ve got a surprise for you – the project is done and it went well. I present to you the last part of it in this long-overdue update.

After we came up with the final ideas, I put my somewhat-existent skills to use and designed the posters to be printed. It took me almost five days (again, my skills are only somewhat existent) but I had a lot of fun coming up with different designs. You can see all the designs here.

Here are my two favourite posters I made out of eleven that were included in the campaign:

Translation: #thoughtsandprayers? Do not rely just on hashtags. Choose your representative to make the change on the 13th of October.

Translation: [upper text] that’s the way it goes sometimes. [lower text] Give yourself the right to complain. If you don’t vote, you can’t criticize the choice others have made for you.

In the meantime, my friends found a printing office. It was in a local Work Inclusion Institution, so the price was relatively cheap and we also felt like we did something good choosing this company in particular. My partner took our posters there on Tuesday and they were supposed to be printed by Friday. We also sent the grant application that our Assistant prepared.

On Friday, we claimed the posters from the printing office and hung them up at school. Here is the proof.

And here are the proud creators.

The campaign lasted for a week before the election on Sunday, October the 13th. From our observations, it seemed that people were interested in reading the posters on the first two days. One person commented that the campaign was probably prepared by the government or the city council, which, not gonna lie, was somewhat flattering. However, we did not hear much discussion about the election, at least not above the normal level.

We took the posters down after the election. 

Now for the sad part: we did not get the grant we applied for, as we did not exactly fit the criteria. I think we would have got it if our campaign was planned for a wider audience apart from just the students and teachers at one school. Such a campaign would be good to organize in the future – if we ever do something like this again, it would probably be aimed at more schools.

Another part that did not exactly go as planned was the evaluation. We wanted to conduct another survey that would ask just one question: ‘did you vote in this year’s election?’. We figured that it would be good to wait for a while so that people would not associate the immediate survey with the campaign – we did not want the results to be biased. However, we never got around to doing it in the end.

Evaluation:

Nevertheless, we sat down together after the campaign was finished. We agreed that we were pleased with how the project went. Our preceding survey showed that there was a need for something like this, so we ultimately feel that this was a good direction to go in. From what we observed, people were interested in our campaign, however, we did not see clear engagement. We concluded that next time, that is if we come around to doing this again, we will have to prepare something more than just posters – could be a meeting or a tutorial.

During the evaluation meeting, my partner expressed some concern to me that she felt like the task sharing was not exactly fair. She felt like me doing all the posters was really just me doing everything that was important in the project, whereas she mainly did the research and planning tasks. I said that I did not think so and we talked a bit about it. In the end, I managed to convince her that planning was essential and that tasks were distributed equally in terms of difficulty and responsibility. However, we both agreed that we should probably split responsibilities differently so that we could be engaged in all aspects of the project equally.

We established that we could have done much better with getting the grant and that we missed out on an important opportunity with that. I proposed what I said earlier in the post and my partner agreed – the project should have had a wider audience not only for the purposes of the grant but also to encourage more people and expand our initial goal. 

Our conclusion was that we enjoyed the project overall and it brought a sense of accomplishment to both of us. Even though we have made some mistakes, the first part of the project went smooth and everything was organized well. Although we probably will not be able to do another campaign before the presidential election (May 2020 – a date dangerously near our final exams), we could do it for some other related occasion. We would be happy to expand what we’ve already done and work with more people, as we felt like we did something important.

Final reflection:

I think most of the things we planned panned out just right. I’m happy we had a good plan for the entirety of the project – without it, we probably would have been much more overwhelmed. Overall, I have a feeling that organizational and time management skills were my strongest point in this project. I was also happy to use my creative skills a little bit when designing the posters. It was a new experience and I’m now aware that I have a useful skill. If any opportunities for designing posters come my way, I will be happy to take them in order to improve further.

In terms of my collaborative working skills, I think I have improved slightly. I generally dislike group projects, as I like my plans realized exactly how I envision them to be. However, I know that I would not be able to conduct such a campaign myself. My partner is infinitely better than me when it comes to calling places, asking questions and setting appointments at printing offices, so I was grateful to have her alongside. I still feel like group work is sometimes unnecessary, however, I can now see that it is nice to have a couple of people working on a project where they can fulfil their niche.

This project was an opportunity to realize all seven learning outcomes of CAS! I’m really proud of that fact.

[please-let-me-pass]

Poetry Writing Month: final reflection

A month ago I started a challenge which required me to write one poem every day. I finished it yesterday (sort of) and I want to share my thoughts on what I’ve learned because of it. 

As I’ve written here before, poetry never was an easy thing for me to write. Each time I wrote a poem in the past, I held myself to a very high standard and was almost never satisfied with how the texts turned out. This month, through the PWM challenge I wanted to achieve the following goals:

1. Improve my ability to write at will and not only when I feel an overwhelming need to do it 2. Improve the quality of my poems 3. Gain a fresh perspective and distance to my own writing, so as not to judge myself so harshly 4. Explore a range of topics I never touched upon in my writing

I have to say that even though I came short of three poems and therefore didn’t finish the challenge, I am proud of myself. I am also genuinely surprised that I achieved almost everything I wanted to when I initially planned the experience.

At first (and this can be seen in my first update) it was very difficult for me to sit down and write. The poems written in the first week all took me a long time to finish. That was mainly because I felt uninspired and like I didn’t have the special factor in me in the moment. I’m glad to say that I’ve seemingly overcome that problem. As I wrote in the fourth update, the last four poems were written at will (that is, I wrote when I had time and the emotional capacity to do something other than just cry and sleep - I told you last week was pretty rough). I also noticed that during this month I experienced much more spontaneous surges of inspiration than I usually do. It seems that forcing myself to write everyday actually had a positive influence on my overall creativity and I didn’t anticipate that.

When it comes to the quality, I have mixed feelings. I wrote my favourite poems from the challenge on August 1st, 5th, 11th, 13th, 17th and 24th, so there’s really no pattern emerging here. Overall, I don’t think there was a massive improvement in the quality. That being said, I feel like this is compensated with the achievement of the third goal. I can freely say that I grew less judgmental towards my poetry over the course of this month. At the beginning I caught myself being hesitant every time I thought of putting what I wrote out to the internet. I feel no such thing now. Believe me when I say I didn’t expect it to happen but I can really say that I’m less perfectionist when it comes to writing now and I think this will eventually help me in getting better.

Because of the fact I had to write every day, I had to come up with different things to write about (duh). I thought I would run out of ideas by the fifth or sixth day but gladly, that didn’t happen. I’m not sure how much I consider the range of my topics to have broaden but I wrote some about some things I’ve never touched upon before. I always struggled to write a poem about anger and yet, I did it in August. I produced eight (!) haikus, a form I was hesitant to try out and I’m happy I did regardless of their quality. I also never write anything that rhymes and in August I did that two times. 

I’m finishing this challenge being more inspired than I was before and with 28 new poems - a number that I’ve never dreamed to produce in such a short timespan. I can say, with confidence, that I will continue writing poetry. Maybe not every day but certainly more often than I did. I know now that I can do it. This challenge has also taught me a little something about time organization - plan your time! There were instances where I sat down to write at 11pm. Regardless, it was fun. And helpful. And inspiring. And now I’m proud.

This was a creativity CAS experience. I spent about 15 hours writing these poems. Here are the learning outcomes of it:

And I promise, promise, promise to post the activity update and the holiday CAS experience soon. Also, the update on my CAS project is coming today!

[please-let-me-pass]

Poetry Writing Month: fourth (and final) update

Welcome to the last update on my challenge! This is the second to last post on this CAS experience.

First of all - as you can see, it’s August 31st and there are only four poems here. The reason for this is that this week has been very rough for me (partly because school is about to start and I’m not ready) and I was truly in no condition to write. That being said, I still wrote something. And yeah, I’m proud of it - a month ago I wouldn’t even consider writing in this kind of situation.

Because of my mindset and all the difficult things I’ve been dealing with this week, I had found it difficult to sit down and write. However, these four poems you see here were made kind of organically - I just felt the need to write and so I did. I’ve never experienced this before. It has always been a challenge to somehow confound all the factors that needed to be present for me to write a poem. That being said, I find the quality of the texts below very questionable. I guess I’ll leave it for you to decide.

August 24th - In the sun I like this one the most out of this week’s batch. It’s about a mother who leaves her son in the sun. At the end, the child comes back to her to get revenge for what she’d done. I like to use sun in my poems - for me, it’s a symbol of dangerous enlightenment and knowledge but also of a facade of safety. The mother left her child in the sun because she was oblivious to what would happen if they became aware of everything. I wanted this poem to be about the price of pain and fear we pay for knowledge.

August 26th - The Dust I also like to use dust as a symbol. Dust is everywhere - it’s invisible to the naked eye and we only notice it when big quantities of it accumulate on our shelves or in other areas we would want clean (it can also be seen in the sunlight, and given what I wrote above, I think it all comes together in a good metaphor). Here I used dust as a representation for intrusive thoughts. They are everywhere at all times and no matter how hard you clean your mind, they will always find a way in.

August 27th - The Cycle I played a bit with the concept of the four seasons to show persistence and repetition. This poem is about a person’s anger growing to the point where it becomes destructive to its host and the people around them. The lyrical I here, however, doesn’t stop simply because they could die in the process of bringing destruction to those who harmed them - they don’t care about what happens to them anymore. I used imagery connected with nature to show how primal this instinct is at its core but I simultaneously wanted to show that it is a complex issue.

August 28th - The Triad This one is about a liar who tells stories of good and beauty at the expense of truth. Because what they tell is appealing, nobody criticizes the person for lying. I wrote this poem wanting to show how people can abuse their power (because when people start listening to you, you gain it immediately) and where this can lead them. Ultimately, those who were caused harm will come out at the top. The poem ends with the liar longing to be listened to one last time but no one ever comes to fulfil that wish for them.

Those are all the poems for August! Stay tuned for tomorrow, as I will be posting the wrap-up on the 1st of September!

[please-let-me-pass]

Poetry Writing Month: Third update

Three weeks down, one-and-a-bit to go. In this post I talk a bit about experimenting and being tired. Also, as per usual, I bring to you another dose of mediocre poetry from a self-conscious teenager.

I’m back from the trip to Prague. In fact, I’ve been back since Wednesday but this two-day period was very eventful. I have a lot of going on in my life right now and my time is saturated with doctor visits both in my town and in another city. So, yeah, I didn’t have much time to write, nor did I want to. But, regardless of the trip, regardless of the Metallica concert, regardless of all doctors and sudden appointments - the challenge must go on. Therefore, on Saturday I made the decision to experiment. 

Ladies and gentlemen, for the past week I’ve been writing haikus.

I figured this would be a good solution because a) haikus are short and b) at the same time they are challenging to write. It’s not only about the 5-7-5 syllable structure. For a poem to be considered a haiku, it has to be referring to nature, have no rhymes and sound like a coherent sentence while being in the three-line form. I don’t know Japanese so I can’t be sure but I think this specific type of poem sounds and presents itself best in that language. It’s very difficult to write a compelling haiku so I decided not to pressure myself very much. I tried to respect the rules every time (and I hope it shows) but at the same time I am aware that these seven poems aren’t of the best quality. Nevertheless, I enjoyed writing them. It proved to be much more challenging than I thought - I figured that writing three lines a day wouldn’t be hard but it took a lot of effort. 

The goal of this challenge is to write every day and publish what I wrote regardless of whether I think it’s good or not. I have to remind myself of that.

This time I won’t be explaining the idea behind every poem. What I find appealing in haikus I read is their vagueness. For me, there is a story behind every three lines I wrote but I think it’s important that you come up with your own. What I will say, though, is that for the past week I’ve been heavily inspired by an artist going by the name of Lingua Ignota. I’ve been listening to her two albums (Caligula and All ******* Die) non-stop and found her artistry and lyrical ability to be very moving (especially in songs Woe to All and Fragrant is My Many Flowered Crown). The poems are not directly inspired by her but some themes and atmospheric qualities are similar.

Here are all the haikus in one document (because we love digital hygiene):

August 16th - August 22nd - Seven haikus with no names

Expect another update on 30th of August!

[please-let-me-pass]

The second CAS interview and plan update

A long overdue note about my second CAS interview that took place on 28th of May 2019. The reason I didn’t post about it earlier? I wholeheartedly forgot. This post also includes an update of my original CAS activities plan from the beginning of the school year.

During the second interview me and my CAS coordinator looked at the plan I laid out for myself at the beginning of the school year and reflected a bit on it. There are some things that I’ve added to the plan, some that I’ve dropped completely and some that I’ve already done/am doing now.

The main problem with my CAS work is that I haven’t started my CAS project yet. It is an important component and I do understand that I need it in order for the rest of my work to be valid. The good news is that I reflected on it and thought about my project during the holidays and I’ll have to make some changes to my original idea (lots of changes - post about them coming soon).

Other than that it seems that I’m doing well with my CAS. I may not have sticked to the original plan very strictly but during the school year I managed to take up various CAS activities and I documented them regularly. I worked on all three CAS components and my coordinator said that I balanced them well (although I could do slightly more in terms of Activity).

We also talked about my CAS-plans for holidays. I asked my coordinator whether including going to a summer camp as a CAS experience would be valid and after I explained every detail she said yes (post about that coming very soon!). Apart from that I told her about my plans to do Poetry Writing Month in August. She told me that this was a good idea and supported my decision to do it during the holidays.

______________________________________

This is where the part about the interview ends. 

As I said before, I thought about my plan and decided to make some changes.

Here is a shorter, updated version of it:

DONE: Swimming, Translating a play, T-shirt making workshop*, Amnesty International Letter Writing Marathon*, Creative Writing Summer Camp** IN PROGRESS: Poetry Writing Month TO BE DONE: Social campaign, creativity-activity blog with music reviews DROPPED: Creative writing workshop, teaching my parents English

*not originally included in the plan *post coming soon!

The reason I dropped teaching English from my plan is that my parents simply do not want to be taught by me. When I talked to them about it at the beginning of the school year they were down to having lessons but later they decided that if they ever want to learn English, they will hire a professional to teach them. I tried talking to them and persuading them but they simply don’t agree to doing that. 

As for the creative writing workshop, it was supposed to be my CAS project. I decided to change that because as of late, I’ve had a shift of priorities in my life (not to sound overdramatic but that’s true). I decided that doing a workshop would not be as fulfilling as I initially thought and that I need to do something beyond my comfort zone (something that is not writing). Long story short, I have a different idea for my CAS project now and I already have a partner to do it. There will be a post about it soon up on the blog.

That’s it for today! As I said here many times - there’s much more to come.