#ibcas

It was very different from the other two we’ve done – this time it involved no planning. It was devoted entirely to reflection and drawing conclusions from all the experiences I’ve had. 

Most of what I said in this interview is already here on this blog in individual reflection posts or in my big final reflection. CAS was definitely something new for me but I don’t regret trying it (well, it was not entirely voluntary to try but I don’t regret it anyway). There are definitely some downsides to this system, which we talked about during the interview (especially the supervisor system!). However, I think my coordinator was slightly surprised when I said I generally liked doing CAS. And I did – it’s still somewhat surprising for me too.

Anyways, this is the end. Of the blog, at least – it’s not like I’m going to stop doing stuff I would do for CAS just because I’ve finished the IB. I’ve enjoyed putting these posts out, even if there was just one person reading them.

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.

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:

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:

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.