United Nations day is a day where we celebrate our diverse OSC community. The day involves an assembly which addresses a theme, which this year was gender equality. It also involves a flag parade, a buffet lunch with food from across the world, a session of learning about gender equality, and a performance about gender equality. This year’s UN day was a lot of fun compared to previous UN Days, because this time I was involved in almost everything that happened. Rather than learning, this year I was teaching the younger students about gender equality. Also, as seen in the photo below, I was involved in the UN day performance which focused on gender equality.
Photo Credits: Gecko Net
In theater class, Matthew, Emily, Anargi, Rika, and I had been preparing our collaborative theater project for a few weeks to perform on UN day. We had to undergo a month long process to prepare our self-created performance to address the UN day theme. I already wrote an essay on this process, so I wont talk about it too much. We went through a lot of pain to make changes and perfect our performance, and after we performed, the audience told us that it was very successful.
Our performance was about 8 minutes, and so it would be a lot for me to fully explain it. Some of the most important scenes included a scene where we all had toys associated with our genders, and I then swapped my car for Anargi’s doll, which was the opening scene. We the proceeded to use our artistic knowledge to add some elements to fulfill our intention which was to inspire the audience and raise awareness. We included some scenes regarding stereotypical jobs for men and women, and stereotypical relationships between men and women, while linking everything back to our topic and artistic intention. I learned a lot from this project like how to work in a small group to create a performance, and how to apply my knowledge from the ISTA trip to my work at OSC. This was an extremely challenging task to pull off and I gained lots of confidence through this task. This was the firt time I had performed to a large audience in a small group of students, and I was nervous before the performance. Now, I feel happy that I completed this challenge because I feel much more confident after performing to the whole secondary school.
After the performance, I then went to the classroom and taught a group of 6th and 7th graders about gender equality in education. We had prepared for this for a few weeks by creating our presentation and practicing. I was the group leader in a teaching group with two 7th grade girls from COMUN, Zubeyda and Lizzie. We made our lesson very fun and interactive, so that we could keep the students focused on the topic by making them create posters, small skits, and we gave them a little quiz at the end to see what they had learnt. They performed very well in the quiz and stayed focused throughout, showing that our lesson was successful. Despite me being the teacher, this helped teach me how to be a leader and teach a classroom of students. This was a new challenge for me, and I had fun trying to teach the kids about a serious topic which they weren’t so interested in. I feel like a better leader after teaching these kids, and I am glad that I accepted and took on the tough challenge.