The CAS learning outcomes I achieved were: 1 2 3 5& 7.
Komorebi was an insightful event as I learned a lot of things about life, myself and school. Being the Project co-coordinator, I gained knowledge about all the 7 continents and along with it, I learnt how to plan an event and manage it. While working with the continents, I often helped them out while making the connections to our language learning outcomes and purpose. There were few simple connections that we could make to part 2 of language learning outcomes by just exploring various text types and on the contrary when we were trying to connect it to part 1, we faced a little difficulty. However, along with our teachers’ guidance and some researching, we came up with pretty good connections between language and cultural contexts. In some continents, the connection was made to popular culture while in few it was made with evolving traditional recipes and how globalization leads to intercultural sharing of resources. It was surprising to see how deeply connected the countries were. Few countries had words adopted from other country’s culture while others had festivals which were originally from other countries. This helped us achieve the international mindedness concept of IB.
Besides the event’s content, there was a lot to learn for me as I had to coordinate with all 14 leaders, management team and sometimes with the participants as well. This event helped me identify my strengths and weaknesses. While working with the leaders, I received an email from a frustrated leader who was obviously losing his temper due to various reasons but he chose to get it out on me. I was surprised by my reaction because if I would have received this email a few months ago, I would have lashed out at him the same way he lashed out at me in the email. Despite the fact that the email was really offensive, I went to our teachers and got the issue sorted because there was no point in acting the same way as the sender and extending the issue. My teachers asked me not to take it personally and not let it affect me but it did affect me because I don’t think it was humanly possible to ignore such bitter words. But, I feel proud of myself for not taking a hasty decision and letting the teachers help me out. Being short tempered was once upon a time my weakness but now it has changed and I manage to keep my cool. I was able to overcome this weakness by taking similar leadership roles at my school as well as out of school. I was also able to help the leaders to work together by being a good listener, listening to both the sides of their stories when there was a conflict and then coming to a conclusion.
Overall, I think I did my best to make this event a success and if there was one thing that I could have done better, it would be to make each and every group as creative and informative as any other. On the day of the event, I observed that there were one or two groups which lacked in few areas and I take it on me. Next time, whenever I take a leadership role, I will try to communicate with all the groups myself instead of relying on my colleague and assuming that the work will be done without supervision.
