CAS 2017

My friends and I participated in the French Fest which took place in International School Aamby (ISA), Amby Valley. This fest was a competition between various schools from all over India. My personal involvement in this fest was to collect data and make the presentation. I was expected to complete my research on time and update the team on time. This helped me with punctuality issues which I often struggled with. However, ISA made me realize that there is no excuse for lateness and everything I do should be on time otherwise the entire team will be at a loss. French as a subject is difficult for understanding and it had been only 7 months since we started  learning the language. This fest in whole was a very difficult task to prepare and present, but we undertook this challenge. Every school which participated in the fest were well organized and prepared for each and every activity. This really scared me because we were very less prepared against the other schools in the activity. Before the fest actually took place i used to think that the fest will be extremely easy and there will be a max of 1 or 2 school participating, to a max of 10-15 students, which will make us winning very easy.

During the fest I felt very excited about meeting students from different schools and cities and on the other hand I also felt scared because of the tight competition we will have to face during the fest. In this fest I perceived the difficulty that the students face when they have to manage an event such as this and the level of preparation they need to do before hand to entertain and inform the students and teacher from different schools.

I had hoped that I will learn many things from participating in this activity such as, understanding the language, the type of activities which can be organized for a language fest and the problems and difficulties faced by students in managing such a fest. There were times I felt that I was finding myself to be out of my comfort zone, like I prefer not to dance / participate in group activities, but I did things out of my comfort zone which made me feel very thrilled and glad.

After participating in this fest I discovered that my personal strengths are to adapt to different situations and to change my plans on the last moment successfully. The area that I need to improve is controlling mass students when I am supposed to do an activity. This fest overall was full of enjoyment for me and the others, there were many fun activities organized by the school to keep us entertaining constantly.

Teamwork and leadership was the key for our great success in the fest. It was because we work collaboratively with each other that time in ISA was fun all the time. There were competitions such the “presentation of stall” which would have been a debacle – in which we were suppose to decorate stalls and present a particular country. We also kept the ethical considerations in mind, we did not cheat at all or break and of the fest’s rule. “Win or lose, we will not cheat” was our moto in the fest.. I later on understood that, in this project I have wasted alot of resources such as paint, paper and chart paper even after many warning from ma’am, we kept on continuing with our project and wasting resources. I also think that the resources that we wasted could have been reused by other students to complete their activities. Earlier I could not easily work collaboratively with others but after doing so many group activity, I could easily work collaboratively with my team in ISA and enjoy it at most. Also, we we had not shown our commitment and perseverance in this activity we could not have achieved such good comments from the examiners and at most we could not have even completed the activity. Overall my experience in this fest was stupendous!

My trip to Naggar was the first trek in my life, and overall experience was terrific. Well, we did face a lot of challenges in this trip, such as the cold weather with thin air high mountain climbs which were kinda dangerous and much more, but if I keep all the problem/difficulties aside my experience in Naggar was marvelous. My initial thought for this trip was that

a)It will be very challenging – the weather conditions

b)The treks will be very dangerous

c)We had to travel on the bus for 15 hours continuously which will be extremely tiring, but the fact is all of my paradigms were proved wrong. Even in the bus, we did entertain you and the teacher did help keep busy by making us play different activities on the bus.

In Naggar, I participated in mainly all the activities except one, ‘the storytelling’ because I found it boring. I participated in all the physical activity even though we were given the choice of backing off and relax in our rooms because I knew, that the reason I came to this place was not only to enjoy with my friends but also to explore a new place. I made a lot new friends on this trip, maybe because I was able to open up that talk to everyone openly which I am not able to do in school. In the  trip, we helped each other in cleaning our rooms, in the trek and by keeping each other busy all time. In this trip I was able to make a friend circle, which I would adore for life. I also learned many things from this trip – the culture of people living in the Northern suburbs of India, the unique art of specific villages by visiting the galleries there. The visits were awesome. We were also instructed to take special care of nature as we were shocked seeing the amount of garbage and dirt in the city. We also learned that we should start to work on preserving the nature than polluting it – this was the ethical concern and global significance we noticed on this trip. In my previous trips with my family and friends I had a habit of polluting the environment around, by throwing garbage on the road, but on this trip – I made an aim that I will not pollute the environment, especially by throwing garbage on roads. This aim was proving to become a lot difficult for me initially, but after showing some commitment and perseverance, I was able to achieve this aim of mine. The trip overall was terrific and I would have regretted the decision of not being a part of this trip.    

I and the other french students had planned a french cooking fest, in which we had to cook french food. This activity proved to be a tad bit (aka a lot) challenging as managing so many students in the school kitchen, where half of them don’t know how to cook or where the utensils and ingredients were kept.

During the planning, we first thought to only keep this activity between us french students, however I felt with such few students (we were only six french students), this activity will not be fun and we will not get many dishes to explore. Then we decided to invite the hindi students as well. So, each person took four to five hindi students to help us. I personally feel that I am lacking certain leadership qualities, including managing people and allocating work. This made me nervous and apprehensive as I thought thought I would screw up this activity for myself and others, but I undertook this challenge as an opportunity to improve my leaderships skills. Cooking wasn’t my expertise either. They have gotten me into some deep trouble, thus I participated a lot in this activity so I could cook something good for that day and to improve them for the days to come. On the day of the activity, we were told that the students without pants would not be allowed to participate in this activity.

After hearing this announcement, I was horribly shaken as my whole team (excluding me of course) was wearing shorts. I was feeling terrified, because I felt that I would fail without my team. I also felt that if I would mess things up, the school might not do this activity again.. I knew I was dramatization, but at that time I was seriously panicked. However, I decided to accept this challenge with a smile. Ignoring the difficulties I will have to face in future, I teamed up with Khushi Shah at the last moment and started to cook my chosen dish, which was ‘Apricot French Toast’. During the activity, I realized that I had forgotten to order the primary ingredient – milk. I was hyperventilating inside, but I pretended to be calm while scanning the kitchen for some milk. I searched up and down, left and right, high and low,  when I finally found a pack of soy milk. I didn’t actually know how to use it, but I did anyways. The amount of commitment and perseverance I need in this activity was very high, because there were many on the point changes which was considerably very shocking and difficult. 

In course of the activity, I did keep in mind the ethical considerations and the school policies while making my dish as instead of using eggs, which is against the school policies, I used unsweetened or unsalted butter. I didn’t spoil other people dishe or cheated while making mine, hence being ethical. After a lot of hard work, my dish was ready and everybody loved it. Currently, I believe that my cooking skills have developed, however my leadership qualities couldn’t be put on show as I had to work in a pair in the end.

Visual Arts is a place where I can really use all of my creativity to create something new, such as a portrait, painting or another form of arts. My Visual Arts classes are conducted by Mr.Rahul Popaniya and Miss.Pankti Chauhan once a cycle. There are many forms of activities we were explored to by the help our teachers such as woodcut, pottery, painting and installations.

Drawing and painting have always been my area of weakness, because a) I never found it interesting b) I always lacked the skill of the art. I think my interest in arts have gradually increased after I joint Visual Arts. Our teachers made the class very lively and entertaining which made me more keen to understand/explore arts. I think after exploring many forms of arts in the span of one year, I have developed a new skill of drawing and basic pottery making. The woodcut was an activity that I was completely unfamiliar of, it sounded very easy when sir first introduced it to me, but when I actually started performing the activity I understood the difficulties and hardship the activity needed. For this activity I had to be dedicated and creative to complete the activity, also to complete the activity in the time span sir gave me, I had to work on it regularly for an hour at minimum, which was initially becoming strenuous.

For me the hardest form of art was “installation”, it is really very complicated and tiring, we needed to do many things beforehand which was a really headache; and after that we had to organize all the material, paint the blocks and all. The hardest part of the entire activity was creating a pattern of all the blocks, this was really very dense, because everybody in the team had different opinions and comments, which really made the atmosphere very annoying and disappointing, thus after a lot of argument between the team I came up with an idea of dividing the entire team into 3 groups, one group will arrange the top, one will arrange the middle and the other will arrange the bottom – each group had 2 students in it. I think this idea worked out pretty well, as after this distribution there was no more argument between the team.
This project itself carries a very important message for global importance – “Cycle of life”. We have decided to base our project on the idea of the ideal life every student must have. We have used the 3 primary colors – red, blue and yellow – and also white and black. These colors help represent the ideal conditions of an ideal life a student must focus to achieve. Every color has a different meaning in its context; for example, the color “yellow” represents youth, fun, happiness, the sunshine and other light playful feelings. It is a cheerful energetic color. We noticed that mainly all the students in the school were living a life they weren’t happy of, thus we decided to create this installation to symbolize the various qualities a student should have to live a happy and peaceful life. In this activity, we also came up with an ethical issue that should plagiarize or not. After a lot of internal discussions, we came to a conclusion that we should be academically honest and complete this project independently with only the help of our teacher. I later on understood that, in this project I have wasted alot of resources such as paint, paper and paint brushes even after many warning from sir, we kept on continuing with our project and wasting resources. I also think that the resources that we wasted could have been reused by other students to complete their activities or the we could have donated them to other children so that even they could enjoy art.

I really think I made the correct decision of participating in this activity because there were so many things that I learned; the different forms of art, skills of drawing and also how to undertake new challenges in arts. This activity was very effective and I think whatever I have learned in the span of a year, will help me in my future. This activity was very valuable to me because now I am able to build up an era of interest in arts which I couldn’t do in my past.