Reflective Journal 5

Greetings! You are early for the Reflections this week! ;D So, I reflected on by far the most taxing GRACE Lesson for now! You might want to skip about 2-3 lines as it's completely redundant.
`¡™£¢∞§¶•ªº–≠œ∑´®†¥¨ˆøπ“‘åß∂ƒ©˙∆˚¬…æΩ≈ç√∫˜µ≤≥÷`⁄€‹›fifl‡°·‚—±Œ„´‰ˇÁ¨ˆØ∏”’»ÅÍÎÏ˝ÓÔÒÚƸ˛Ç◊ı˜Â¯˘¿`¡™£¢∞§¶•ªº–≠œ∑´®†¥¨ˆøπ“‘åß∂ƒ©˙∆˚¬…æΩ≈ç√∫˜µ≤≥÷`⁄€‹›fifl‡°·‚—±Œ„´‰ˇÁ¨ˆØ∏”’»ÅÍÎÏ˝ÓÔÒÚƸ˛Ç◊ı˜Â¯˘¿

See what I mean? Anyway, the has-beens Perfectionists started off with moving over to the Math Homeroom minutes after the bell rang, some were in a "hurry", while some were strolling. So, our supervising teacher, Miss Florence Lim, forgetting to bring the keys to the Math Homeroom with her, which in turn caused us to have to have the GRACE Lesson outside the Student Recreational Centre (SRC) which seemed very inappropriate for a hot day such as that. Which reminds me, Miss Lim told us during GRACE Lesson 4 that Hot Pink is the "new" black. and we should incorporate that color in our T-shirt designs. So We sat outside the air-conditioned SRC, which was still open, or maybe it was at least being tidied up from all the mess caused by both the Lower and Upper Secondary recesses.

This week is by far the most awesome reflection week ever! The Unstoppable Perfectionists (UPs), which you will get to know more of have gotten some guidelines on what is expected on their individual reflections on "Taking Stock". This really simplifies the minimum of 1 hour I spend on each reflection, although this one might actually do the same. Normally, I would have to browse through the tens of guiding questions which are readily available as a resource on the GRACE Info Site. After that, I would have to narrow it down to 4 or 5 and begin my reflection!

Taking Stock

What have we done so far?
This is indeed a difficult yet easy question to answer, all I have to do is just read through the previous reflections and worksheets. Speaking of worksheets, I urge all 7 of the other UPs to download the previously FILLED-IN worksheets and save them either in your Mac or on an external storage device. This will help in ways that you will never imagine...

According to my oh-so magnificent memory, the first GRACE Lesson was about "The Boring Beginning" (yes! I do label lessons with names). We all know that administrative work can be a little bit boring, but GRACE's wasn't so boring. We Perfectionists (has-beens) had to decide on our group name, motto and meaning. We also had to tell Miss Lim through GRACE Worksheet 1 something about ourselves. We had lot's of fun messing around with them and finally settled with the Perfectionists whiel the Unstoppable Intelligence had not gotten it yet. The bell suddenly rang and we were told to do it as homework. :(

GRACE Lesson 2 was much more engaging as we had to think of a topic that interested us and had to do with the community. For a minute there (or 2), everyone in our group was actually thinking! That was so not Nigel (Zhi Yu) to think so hard! Then Miss Lim had to disrupt our train of thoughts, which our form teacher (Ms Gao Wei) used to say: “写作时不要被别人影响，管好自己，不要让别人打断你的思路。” That was in Secondary 1 when Mr Teng Chai Chew was our form teacher :D Carrying on, we couldn't have ignored Miss Lim right? So we chose to pay attention to her and choose our topic later. She gave us some really great suggestions, which were so original that we decided to be the batch of Secondary 2s that had the "originality to start things". We were told that those suggestions were never used before as GRACE only had one choice of topic in the previous years, when it was called "IPW". You will hear more about our "originality to start things" soon.

A few days after that, I kept thinking about GRACE, as if it was my major subject and knew at one moment that the T-shirt suggestion would be our topic! Once Again, this has been an instance of "originality to start things".

GRACE Lesson 3: It was all about some guiding questions that we were going to answer in the next lesson. The concept of guiding questions is to be your guide along the task, so why not make them as relevant as they can be? The guiding questions were mostly form us, though I admit 1/4 was from Miss Lim, no doubt about that. The subjects and skills used were also need to be filled in. So then suddenly a extraordinary question popped out of Yen Wee's mouth! He asked me if the two groups could be combined to form one big group since we were both going to do the same topic. Miss Lim told us that he had to ask and confirm it form Mr Peh, the HOD of Special Projects at the school. So just with that, the bell rang again... It always goes off at the most interesting parts of the GRACE Lessons.

During GRACE Lesson 4, we went on to elaborate and answer the guiding questions. The answering part was easy and so was the elaboration. So it took us like only 15 minutes to finish. Then Miss Lim informed us of the "consequences" and price that cam with a group mergence More work would have to be done, more impressiveness and more blood perspiration. We accepted this and went onto doing the administrative reordering of things, shifting of blog posts, reassigning of roles, etcetera... So We were combined as the Perfectionists as a whole.

PAUSE! The more I reflect, the more I feel that I am just doing a summary of what really happened during the previous GRACE Lessons and I'm posting it in a super long post! I should take a deep breathe and think. Has helping in the setting up of our class stall this entire week gotten to me, that I just have to much to say? Maybe.

Finally, during the most recent GRACE Lesson (5), we talked about assigning roles, with their own degree of "intensity". For example, research, publicity, logistics, presentation and many others of which I will not go into. The datelines required were simply corresponded with our very group schedule instead of the GRACE 2010 Info Site one as our gorup operates at a fast (very) pace, with the tight schedules which forces (brings) out the best in the us. Miss Lim then asked us about a change of group name. She felt that Anthony's suggestion of Unstoppable Perfectionists was a great suggestion and urged us to change to it. Adrian then made a "huh?" sound and she asked him why he did not want to change the group name. Did he have no dignity? She

END! No need to read the reflections' summaries any longer D:

What do we want to do next?
Well this answer has already been answered about 1 week ago, when I posted the UPs schedule that i got from Miss Lim which proves to be very efficient for a group of Secondary 2 students. So if want to find out more of our schedules, please refer to this earlier post: CLICK ME (On either CLICK or ME only). If you want to see the worksheet version, please CLICK THIS (On either CLICK or THIS). If you are lazy, then I can't help you, it's not my fault! D:

What have we learnt?
Personally, I feel that the whole purpose of GRACE in the first place is that it is a method of self-discovery, through various methods with the help of Personal Learning Devices (PLDs), also known a the MacBook. This is like a miniature path of life, taking on roles of real working adults, with the guidance of a teacher. There are bound to be things that one can learn from these projects, some of which may be more useful in life than others. Let's take a look at what I have learnt.

I have basically learnt more about time management since the beginning of GRACE, trying not to spend more than 1-2 hours on every reflection. This time, I have broken the record as I type in my involuntary attempt to write the most detailed, expressing reflection I have ever made. I am sure the skills learnt will be a useful tool in later parts of my life as so it has started taking place gradually, as I learn them from the not so ordinary classroom teaching method, one that involves on 8 students, 1 teacher and their imagination.

Gaining these invaluable experience and skills, helps us to get a rough idea of what it is like to really organize events and collaborate with external agencies. We might even get to meet Obama! How interesting would that be? A Lot!

Just to help you people out there get a better understanding of my reflection, in a really short summary, I just want everything we plan to go as expected or even better! So, 23rd of February will be the T-shirt submissions to Miss Lim, while that depends on the fate of our project as well as a some aspects of the new blog shop which will be up once we have started it!

While I understand that the Chinese New Year is coming up really quickly, we should all look back to see what we have accomplished in the past Chinese Year. With that I end my reflection with a huge bye!

Gavin

BYE