Diploma Week

Human Interaction is the theme of our first Diploma week. I’ve heard that we have two per term, others coming up will be World Religions and Peace and Conflict etc... It’s part of the AC Diploma, that we’ve completed these weeks of workshops and discussions to understand ourselves better. It shares some of the same missions as the IB Diploma but also others as well.

I really enjoyed the last three days. I thought it was a perfect time to stop and take a break from codes and reflect over something so meaningful. It was also extremely useful in allowing me to introduce myself and have conversations with people that I’ve seen in the cafeteria and such but aren’t in my house and I have no service, activity or codes with so haven’t actually had the opportunity to talk to and get to know in some way. It gave me an opportunity to reflect on the last five weeks that I’ve been at the school and what I plan to do for the rest of my two years here.

On Monday and Tuesday morning we were woken up at 7:30 by one of our second years and walked down to breakfast at 8:00. For the next 45 minutes we sat in our house tables and our tutors joined us and had simple ‘early morning’ chat. We then all had a beginning session with a man named Alex Fradera from 8:55-10:30, sadly I didn’t think about bringing my notebook so I have no substantial notes of the lecture.

I then went to a workshop by a man named John White from 11:00-12:15 about leadership.

Some interesting quotes he read out were:

·         ‘Follow me. Lead me. Or get out of the way.’

·         ‘Good leadership rests with the leader, being themselves more of the time but with skill.’

·         ‘Leadership is using our personal power to win the hearts and minds of people to achieve a common purpose.’

To do anything we must be able to check off three things: Vision. Passion. Action. If we have two of the three that’s quite good, but we must have all three to complete anything.

Finally the last thing that we spoke about were the five stages of conversation

5. Ritualistic and Cliché – ‘How are you’ conversations that are really more of a social etiquette

4. Gossip and Fast – weather, sport, neighbours,

3. Ideas and Judgements

2. Emotions and Feelings

1. Peak

To summarise I found his lecture very interesting, one of those that you think about after you leave the room.

After lunch I had Alex Fradera, the man who did the initial lecture with the whole of the first year. We did more little activities and such where we had to interact with our peers. Splitting into partners where we had to invite them to a picnic and they had to keep denying, then another scenario where they kept agreeing to everything and you had to keep coming up with more things to do. Also there was certain activity where we had to talk about our Half Term breaks, which I was one of the three that did, and we had to talk but also try to keep everyone’s attention – keeping eye contact with everyone in the group was very dizzying but I think I did fairly well with giving everyone attention.

My last workshop for the day was called Culture and Consumerism and it was lead by Luke, a second year in my house. We spoke about the way in which human interaction is used in advertisement.

The example that we watched first was of coke in the 1970’s, how it tries to make you think that Coke is related to having happy moments, they try to make us feel that we have an emotional attachment with the brand. This was interesting for me since – though I would not say that I’m excessively into brands- there are some things that I do like and will buy with less hesitation because of the brand. Brands are less about the ‘ER’ (whiter, better, shinier) and more about how you belong to that brand nowadays- becoming more of a cult. (Though the things rarely fulfil your needs so you have to inevitably go back for more.)

It’s funny how we are manipulated so they get money off of us, usually with the prospect of human interaction but really we’re leading ourselves into a more ego-centric world.

The next morning after breakfast we the whole year again had a workshop with a man named Miles Harrison. He didn’t tell us much about his history but he was actually very inspiring, he was handicap in that his arms stopped just below his shoulder and he had hands there, but he was able to do everything (yes, sometimes differently) that we were doing. –I don’t feel I explained this in the best way; I’m trying to make the point that though he had a disability he didn’t at all treat it like one.

 The workshop was called open space. We were given a few minutes to talk with three or so people around us about something that we want to change in the world. After people came up and spoke about these things and we wrote them down and put them under letter A-Z. It was amazing to hear some of the problems that people want to combat. The list went from things such as:

·         Having News of the Day in our cafeteria to be more aware of world issues

·         The drinking culture in Britain and how to change it

·         Making sure 100% of the money that is given to charity goes to the correct places

·         Having cultural food in the cafeteria, prepared by different national groups

·         Kidnapping in Bangladesh

·         Is Internet a Human Right?

·         Is China capitalist or communist?

·         The VISA issue- should we really be prevented from travelling where we want?

We then split into a group that interested us and for the rest of the session spoke about the issue- the problems and ways to resolve it. I did mental illness in countries and the way society views the patients. Some of the people in my group spoke about how mental illnesses are dealt with in an amazing way, such as in Denmark they grow up with them in the same school, it’s common. Whereas, in Tibet and the Maldives they don’t acknowledge the people with mental illnesses and send them to live in different parts of the country, usually from lack of understanding of their problems. It was a really interesting discussion and I was glad to be a part of it. 

These descriptions are becoming too long so I’m going to breeze through the rest of the day. I did two other workshops – My teenage brain made me do it by a lady named Selena Sermeno and again with Miles Harrison I did a workshop on strategic planning. In strategic planning we spoke about how planning is an unnatural process, it is much more fun to simply do something à and failure then comes as a complete surprise.

When planning you have to have three ideals in mind:

Where are you now?

Where do you want to be?

How are you going to get there?

 It also has to be SMART – Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Reasonable and Time.

The end of the day I did a workshop called Creative Lines with a script writer named Dan Anthony on how our conversations, emotions and ideas are used in interacting and connecting with others.

Wednesday morning we had a house breakfast! MMMM. I filled up on yogurt and granola, kiwi, banana, grapes and a small chocolate croissant.

I then had another session with Dan Anthony called Where do Ideas come from? Which to be honest I didn’t particularly enjoy. It didn’t seem structured or interactive enough for me to really appreciate it- for a big portion of it he read from the book Treasure Island.

Our final workshop was a very emotional one for me. I was in a group with 6 Morgannwg housemates and 7 Whittaker co-years.  After doing a few fun activities of telling stories of how we were given our names and if we were a tree what type we would be-more so to help us to get to know and remember something about one another in a unique way- we got down to the real reason we were there.

We had to write a poem titled ‘Where I am from’. We all go through homesickness in different ways, apparently after the initial month is when it starts to kick in. For me, it’s very sudden, very intense waves of it. I can go from being super happy and loving being here to wanting to be back at home under my bed covers knowing everything is how it used to be, why on earth would I want it any other way? I truly don’t regret coming, and know if I was to leave and go back home I’d be forever questioning it and wondering what these amazing people are getting up to without me- but at times I feel far too distant from home and miss the aspect of seeing people.* Anyways, my poem simply brought out a lot of those feelings. I’ll type it up and put it onto a blog entry soon- I wouldn’t say it’s an amazing poem, written in the space of five minutes and all; it is just very personal and brings back many memories of my beloved island.

-          Even so it was really nice to hear how others loved their homes just as much as I love mine, that they are going through similar situations. Some people read it in their own language which was quite neat too- I heard poems in Spanish, Finish, Portuguese and Norwegian as well as many in English.

*I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned there not being Wi-Fi on campus. The only reason really this upsets me is because I wish I could Skype with my parents and close friends.

*Other workshops that I didn't get to do but my friends said were really interesting and I wish I had were:
Body Language, China's Culture and Human Interaction and Interpersonal Relationships

And that was our first Conference! I’m finished my first day of First-Aid today and will take the test sometime tomorrow morning.

Tomorrow evening at about five I’m going on a various trains with a girl in my house named Proma to meet up with my best friend in Exeter for the weekend while she meets up with one of hers.   (I actually could have left earlier, but was told the First-Aid would take longer, darn!), so won’t get in till about 9:00/10:00 tomorrow evening. Incredibly excited!

-also can I just say these blogs probably have dozens of errors in them.  I type them extremely fast, simply how I'd tell a story in my head. I rarely proof read- my reason is with the time I have to do it I figure it's more about the quantity of things I can say! But I do apologise.







----I know this post has already become far too long. However a boy in my house wrote an article about the first conference for the school newspaper called INK and asked me to check over it. I thought it was really good in summing it up - probably far better than what's above:

The second diploma period of the year.  The first week free since the start of codes.  And yet, somehow, they managed to make our lesson-less days longer, more packed with a steady flow of information, and much more exhausting than most would deem appropriate.  In a Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday the visiting lecturers, second-year workshop leaders, and my peers taught me more about interaction than I’d learned in years of regular schooling.  But what else should one expect, coming to a college where interaction and communication are even more important than the rigorous and brutal IB?  No place other than a UWC would offer its own diploma based solely on your ability to interact with the world and learn, culturally and spiritually, from the expansive, diverse student body.  With workshops ranging from leadership qualities and the ethics of technology to nonverbal communication and looking at the intra-personal relationship, what would have been a boring and repetitive conference anywhere else creatively looked at nearly all aspects of interaction.

Interaction, maybe as much as food and shelter, is a necessary factor for human survival.  The ability to interact intelligently is the separating factor between us and the squirrels throwing conkers at your window.  In a modern, global culture, interaction occurs across continents at the click of a mouse and the tap of a keyboard.  Interaction is not merely about communicating with others, but about understanding how to communicate with yourself and knowing how you yourself communicate with others.  Why do teenagers interact in often reckless and volatile ways; what’s the biology behind these actions?  These are all issues we examined in unique and interesting ways, along with myriad other topics.  The Human Interaction Mission Initiative was not at all a bad way to start off two years of conferences and diploma periods.  And it was certainly not a bad reason to miss a week of codes.