100 Days Until Graduation

Hello, people!

As I have mentioned in my previous blog entry, 100 Days Until Graduation is one of the most expected event of the year where  11th graders have a chance to show themselves, what they are capable of and 12th graders can enjoy and remember for a long time after they graduate. To be honest, I was kind of relieved when it was finally over. Don't get me wrong, I really enjoyed being a part of this event and having a chance to know other 11th graders better. However, it was a huge responsibility and we all had to put a lot of effort to create a celebration to remember.

The first task was to think of the theme of the whole celebration. There were a lot of ideas, but the thee main ones were "the Space", "Uninhabited Island' and "Dreams". After two voting, the last one was elected by a very small margin. To make it more sophisticated, the final name of the celebration was "One-third of Life", noting that people spend one-third of their lives sleeping. It was a very promising theme, because were a lot of interesting ideas how to fulfill it.  
 

From the very beginning I knew how I wanted to contribute to celebration - I wanted to dance. However, everything didn't turn out as I planned...
 

The process of preparation we started by making four groups that were responsible for different things: theater, music, decorations and dancing. As you may guess, I signed in the last group to participate in house dance and show dance performances. Very soon rehearsals started. The meetings were usually held on Saturdays and on some Fridays after school, because it was hard to find other times that would be suitable for all dancers. After a couple of Saturdays practicing performance of house dance it turned out that a girl who had created a dance didn't have enough time for it, thus our elected dance coordinator decided not to have that house dance performance after all. Although it was a bit sad, we had more time to prepare a show dance performance. And that was quite a challenge! The guy who created a dance wanted it to be as perfect as it could get, thus we were practicing it every Saturday and some of the Sundays. Even though it was hard and irritating sometimes, it was also really fun to come to school on a weekend and to see people working on their tasks. However, on the last weekend, when the biggest preparation works were being done, I went on a vacation to Andorra for skiing with my parents. Because of this, I missed a lot of rehearsals where the rest of the group finished a big part of the performance. When I came back two days before the event, the dance was done and I had to learn it during the night if I still wanted to participate in it. In fact, I was prepared to do that, but then I found out that there was going to be a funeral of my cousin's dad on the day of the celebration, thus I wouldn't going to make it to the performance. That was how all the work on weekends went for nothing. At least at first I saw it that way. But then I realized that it wasn't for nothing. I got to know a lot of interesting people during rehearsals, I saw how plans became reality and had a chance to be a part of it.

The month before the event was full of different preparation works. Every time we had free lessons we did decorations. I also volunteered to be a part of group who was supposed to find people who had to write letters for 12th graders. It was a very nice idea that they would get letters from their friends congratulating them with the celebration. However, it was surprisingly hard, because not all of the friends of 12th graders wanted to write a letter, some of them had promised to write, but didn't do that. Thus, it was a really responsible work, because if someone wouldn't get a letter, while others would, they would fell really disappointed and we for sure didn't want that to happen, therefore we had to figure out solutions from such situations.

The day before the event most of the 11th graders were finishing decorations, rehearsing dancing and music performances and, of course, turning the whole school into a huge "dream". Since I was no longer in a dance group, there was a lot of work to do with decorations and other things. That day I did a lot of different tasks. I contributed to making paper stars and schedules of the celebration, creating labyrinths which were two of about 8 stations where 12th graders could visit on the day of the celebration. I also helped to put on a wall decorations. There were a lot of work, thus we stayed at school as long as we could. Some of us left at 9pm., others stayed until 12pm. After such a long day, next day we had to be at school on 6 a.m. or at least at 7.30 a.m.


I came at school at 7.30 a.m. and made the last preparations in the labyrinth that a had to watch during celebration, or at least until a had to leave to the funeral. In fact, it wasn't actually a labyrinth. I and one of my classmates were only creating it with two boards of plastic, but for a person with tied eyes it seemed like a huge labyrinth. It was really funny to watch, how people looked really lost and then relieved when we finally let them to found "the exit". 

When the both morning and evening parts were over, I was really proud of all the 11th graders that we all managed to create such a big celebration and overcame a lot of difficulties that occurred. Of course, there were a lot of things that could have been done better, that required more work than we put. Nevertheless, those things showed us what were the weakest parts of our work. We learnt that the celebration and the whole preparation process should have been more organized. We also could have start looking at all the decorations serious sooner, because most of them were left to be finished on the last days.

There were a lot of different comments on 100 Days Until Graduation celebration. Some people said it was too serious for a happy event, others said we could have done everything better. There were also people who liked performances and the stations. In my opinion (which may be a little bit inequitable), we did quite well and I believe that the most important thing was that 12th graders felt the mood of the celebration and marked the day when they had left only 100 days until graduation.

This activity included two aspects of CAS - Creativity and Action.