Like every year, our school took an initiative for us to teach the underprivileged students from a nearby school. This time, i taught dance for all the 6 sessions that took place and it was a great event and I was very happy to see the students having fun with their friends and enjoying what they were doing.

LO1- One major strength I noticed was my patience. Since the dances were new for the students, it did take them a little while to learn and due to that my friends did get impatient, while I wasn’t and that was a good thing since I was there to help them. 

LO2-  One of the major challenges I faced instantly was communicating with the students. Since I don’t speak fluent Hindi or Gujarati, it got a little difficult. Despite that, my friends were there to help me with it and we then divided the work equally between the four of us and it got really easy. 

LO4-  Since we had our school on the weekdays, we had to come on weekends and it did get a little difficult along with other classes and school work. It required me to wake up early on both Saturdays and Sundays for 3 continuous weeks. As each session passed by, I realized that the workload started rising and it got hard to manage but then I used to remind myself that the community service is for a good cause and that helped me go through it.

LO5- Working in a team really made it easy since there were about 40 students in dance and doing it solo would have been a very hectic task. We as a team decided to divide our work into 4 parts since we were 4 girls and then that made our job easier since all of us did things we were good at. Since the students had to learn, someone who could speak fluent Gujarati was needed and that made our task very simple.

LO6- The issue that these services helped towards is quality education. To me, just studying doesn’t do justice and some sort of physical activities are needed every once in a while. The initiative taken by our school really helped this issue since the students were given the option of a lot of things and it was up to them to choose what they wanted to learn. This not only helped them, but it also helped all the volunteers as well. One of the things I learned was patience is the key to success since it did take us a long while to teach them the dance, but at the end of the service, we were really satisfied with how happy the students were. 

To conclude, this service helped me realize how important teamwork is and how you should be grateful for everything you have. The learner profile characteristics achieved are open-minded since everyone has a different opinion and style, and I had to accept it.