As a part of a school event, every year our school hosts an amazing farewell evening for Grade 12 students who are about to start their new journey of life. And this year, it was the responsibility of all the students of grade 11 to host this event. Being in a completely new environment and a new school, I didn’t know many people, yet, I was willing to participate in the event. And out of all tasks, I chose that task that required the most interaction with people- HOSTING! Before one month of the event, we worked for the script of the farewell ourselves with help from the teachers. Not only that, I also had to coordinate with almost all other groups- games, dance, food, decoration as a host is required to know everything. At the day of the event, we successfully perfomed and the grade 12 students had an amazing time. Almost all teachers said that we gave the best farewell in the entire school history!
Learning Outcomes I’ve achieved:
LO-1- Identify own strengths and develop areas for growth.
From my previous school, I have been given several opportunities to host in formal events and thus, I have experience in speaking confidently in public but I’ve also spoken in a familiar crowd. And this time, I had to host an informal event in front of an unfamiliar crowd. Thus, this experience helped me gain confidence in hosting an informal event and be more fun loving. Additionally, I am not good at writing scripts myself and I’m proud that we made the entire script ourselves.
LO-3- Demonstrate how to initiate and plan a CAS experience
The entire grade had to plan the full event ourselves. We came early in the morning to school to plan the event. With the help of teachers, we divided ourselves into different groups and then, as per the groups we created individual deadlines to finish our tasks. I made my deadline along with my school tasks to write the script, cross-verify with the teacher and finally, rehearse with my co-host. Also, because we were hosts, we had additional task of coping up with everyone else’s deadlines as our scripts depended on other group’s tasks. I admit that I missed a few deadlines because of lack of time but the end all of us were happy with our efforts.
LO-5- Demonstrate the skills and recognize the benefits of working collaboratively.
Hosting a farewell is a group event and it can only be successful when the entire grade works together. There were some instances, where some students refused to work and hampered the proceedings of the preparation. Also, while preparing the script, there were a few arguments about who will speak which dialogues and I tried my best that both of us got an equal share of dialogues and didn’t fight over petty issues. Despite these setbacks, members from all the groups cooperated very well with us which made this event a great success!
LO-7- Recognize and consider the ethics of choices and actions
Making a script is a tedious job and initially, we were thinking of copying some other school’s farewell script and making a few changes without letting our teachers knowing about it. But later on, I felt guilty of doing that. I thought that if we are doing a task, we should do it honestly with integrity and full efforts. Therefore, we initiated the plan of writing the script again. We were running a late as per the deadlines, but we made sure that we made an original script and gave our full efforts so that other children could have a great time and a memory to cherish forever.
My final takeaway from the entire CAS experience was that one should always learn to adapt to new surroundings. In a new school environment, I was scared to host an informal event, but only when I participated and took up a challenge, I gained confidence in myself and had an amazing time! Also, I learned to be selfless. From this event, we got nothing, but just to give a great experience to grade 12 students as this was their last year of schooling, I even skipped my classes and worked hard. I learned to be reflective and always consider the ethics of the choices and decisions of actions I make.