As a part of a school event, every year our school hosts astounding farewell evening for Grade 12 students who are going to begin their new excursion of life, the event is completely lead by Grade 11 students. Hence this year, it was our responsibility to host such beautiful event for Grade 12. I didn’t know many people in grade 12, however I was still willing to participate in this event. Out of all the given options I chose hosting as I personally had never done it before on such large platform hence I found the perfect opportunity. One of the reason for choosing hosting was also that it is a task that required the most interaction with people, which I am really good at. Just 3 weeks before the farewell, me, Anusha and Aashvi (other 2 host) started writing the script with the help from our teachers. Adding on our task also consisted of coordinating with all the other performance, food and decoration as we needed to know each and every detail about the event as we were the host. On the day of event, we successfully had performed and the grade 12 students enjoyed it a lot. Almost all teachers complimented us!!
Learning Outcomes achieved:
LO-1- Identify own strengths and develop areas for growth
From the previous school events and MUN’s, I got several opportunities to host events and public speaking as well. Hence, I had experience in public speaking and hosting formal events too however I’ve never spoken in front of Grade 12 crowd hence I was bit nervous. All in all, this event helped me gain confidence in hosting an event and be more interactive with audience. Additionally, I am not really good at writing scripts myself and I’m very proud that my team and I made the entire script ourselves.
LO-2- Demonstrate that challenges have been undertaken, developing new skills in the process
The only challenge I faced was to make the script as flexible as possible, so that my team and I are ready anytime to make adjustments to the script. As the flow of the event kept on getting changed due to some or the other factors and we had no option rather then editing script. It was really stressful while writing the script again and again, nevertheless I always did my best to stay active throughout the whole process also with the help of my partners I was easily able to come up with interactive ideas. While scripting I was able to enhance my linguistic skills and also my team working skills as we were 3 people working together, it was a great opportunity for me to develop my skills.
LO-3- Demonstrate how to initiate and plan a CAS experience
Whole grade 11 had to plan the entire event themselves, hence we came early in to school to plan the entire event and work on it. With the help of my team mate and my teachers, we divided ourselves into different groups according to our work and then, as per the groups like dances, games, music we created deadlines to complete our tasks efficiently so that we save some time in our hand for any end moment changes. I planned my deadline including my school tasks which including pending task of school and preparing for script, getting the script approved with the teacher and lastly, practice with my co-hosts. Also, as we were the hosts, we had some more tasks of checking up with everyone else’s deadlines as our script was primarily depended on other group’s work. I really regretted that I skipped on few deadlines, however thankfully my partners were kind enough to complete my task as well hence there processes went smooth.
LO-4- Show commitment to and perseverance in CAS experiences
For scripting and to rehearse, my co-host and I came early-in to school for over a period of a month to practice for 55 min, 5 days a week for a month. This was extremely challenging as I am a guy who sleeps 10 hours everyday and waking up 6 am was really difficult as often I felt lazy to wake up and kept on snoozing my alarm again and again however I showed up for all the sessions and didn’t skipped any meeting, this showed perseverance and commitment towards my experience.
LO-5- Demonstrate the skills and recognize the benefits of working collaboratively.
Hosting such an huge event like farewell without a team is impossible and even without working collaboratively as well. When the entire grade works together, the task get super simple. There were situations where my batch mates refused to work and it really disturbed the overall process of the event. While scripting, there were arguments on the details of script and who will speak which dialogues as we were 3 hosts hence it was bit difficult to provide equal dialogues to everyone, however I tried my best that everyone of us gets equal amount of dialogues and minimize the chaos. Apart from these small issues, all the team leader of groups cooperated with us which made this event wonderful.
LO-7- Recognize and consider the ethics of choices and actions
Making a script for farewell is really an tiring work. As in the very beginning I thought that I should directly take existing scripts of farewell from the internet and just making few adjustments without our informing to my teachers about it. However, I thought it is an very irresponsible thing to do and also it is even unethical. I realized that if we wanted success in the event then we should do it with complete integrity and 100% hard work. Hence, we made a plan of writing the script with some jokes and puns specific to grade 12 students. So made sure that we had an original script with all our hard work, so that other grade 12 could connect to it and remember this event even after their gradation.
My key takeaway from this CAS experience is that I should always learn to to accept idea from my team-mates and be flexible with everything as it will help me grow as a person and it would be really beneficial for me in my corporate life as well. I also learned to accept challenges and face it, which help me gain confidence in myself. I skipped my classes and worked hard to make this event a success. Lastly I learned to be more reflective and always chose the ethical choices.
