UN Day- 2018

(Early warning, this will be a long post) COMUN held OSC’s annual UN day event on October 5th, as it has been doing of years now. I have as a Comun veteran taken part many times but this is the first time where I have been a leader, the first time I have had influence over the course and quality of the day. While I did help with the overall organization of the day, my main responsibility was ensuring the quality of the 6-7 PowerPoints. Besides that as a DP1 theatre student I had to devise and performance a skit for the day. Besides this I had to deliver speech to encourage more people to join MUN, I had to help collect interviews for the days videos and it did not stop there, I had a lot of work to do. By undertaking this challenge I am following the CAS learning outcome of “Demonstrate how to initiate and plan a CAS experience” as a leader in the activity, I am also showing “Commitment to and perseverance in CAS experiences” as this task had many challenges that required patience and dedication to get through, besides that I also “demonstrated the skills and recognized the value of working collaboratively”, and of course as was the point of the day we “Demonstrated Engagment with issues of global significance”. This may seem a bit much for one post, but it was a heavy time.

The Preparation

Step 1: Choosing a UN day theme, this was meant to be the easy part but  it really wasn’t, using the UN sustainable development goals (SDG’s), prominent world issues and to some extent our own interest we went through dozens of possible themes over a range of topics, we discussed sub focuses within feminism (fifth SDG, ), education (fourth, quality education), poverty (first, no poverty) etc. Finally we settled on a focus on “Youth and Green Technology” through this we could tackle the SDG’s of “No Hunger” (2), “Clean Water and Sanitation” (6), “Renewable Energy” (7) and a few others. There was another issue with this other than an excess of choice, but I will get to that later.

Step 2: At this point we had to focus on scheduling for the day, we being me, Anuda, Taneishq and Pankhuri, all of us holding leading positions in the OSC Comun group. We planned things out for a flag parade (where all the schools 43 different nationalities would be represented in a short march, an in classroom learning session based on our themes, a break for them where they would sample foods from the represented nations (but this is organized by the school’s parents) and at the end an assembly with many lengthy speeches.

Step 3: We began making lesson plans, this is where the problem mentioned in step 1 started. We are expected to plan out teaching sessions for the different sections of the secondary school from grade 6-12 (though we divided them into three groups based on size (6-7, 8-10 and 11-12), this sessions will focus on global issues in line our theme and are meant to be fun and interactive incorporating numerous different aspects of the topic. Originally the choice for themes was kept to the leadership and a few veteran member and I had thought it was settled, but when we launched into lesson plan discussions with the rest of the group the whole thing broke down. Their was a nearly even divide between members of the general group in favor of the green tech theme and an entirely different more humanitiarian topic. This would normally not have been an issue, but then members of the original leadership suddenly revealed their doubts on the topic leading to long and proctracted debate taking up multiple sessions. This went as far as people suggesting that we focus on the green tech issue in the 6-7 and 11-12 grade range while 8-10 which was the grade range most of the dissenters were in charge of focused on the topic of feminism, effectively requiring us to follow multiple themes on the same day. Eventually we went back to the Green tech theme but there were more issues…

Step 4: We had settled on our topic and divided into three groups based on which grade ranges we were teaching, all focusing on a different aspect green technology. while mine focused on green energy, others focused on how tech can be used to fight global warming and another focused on transport. For me this was a fun collaborative project, the only issue was getting people to come to the outside of session meetings (we needed extra time for thework). As my group consisted mainly of younger kids I had to work a lot on their presenation making skills, everything from making a uniform design scheme, to limiting text blocks (my rule was  maximum of three bullet points at a max of sevenwords each, there were a few exceptions but it went well), to a dozenn other things… It was very fun.

Step 5 (problem): Over three weeks all of our three groups had focused on our topics and built lesson plans filled with videos, a PowerPoint and numerous fun learning focused activities, and the transport group had a few issues with theirs. Because of these issues and certain deadlines, we needed a new plan fast. Anuda and I decided to tackle it as we figured it would be faster than working with a whole group, we refocused it on agriculture instead of transport and in one long evening to night session made a new lesson plan. It was a success.

The Day

Step 6: The day had come… skipping past some of the previous events ill get to my favourite part of the day, the lessons. I should say that though I was in the green energy 6-7 group in designing the lessons, I was teaching in 8-10 but this was alright as I had with Anuda built the agriculturally focused lesson plan for this group aswell. Anuda and I were presenting together to our group who were about a third of the 8-10 grade range (other pairs handled the rest of the range), we started confident, had our faith in technology shattered, but found our way and ended well. We could not access the projector system and this was especially frustrating as Anuda’s main role during that time was tech support for us and all the other groups, yet ours was the one that could not be solved, not even when the real tech support was brought it. We had to go through the entire first querter of our lesson plan without the tools we initially planned on using, but we still managed to do our work and eventually they got the projector started. We did a fun lesson and finished by asking the kids to design their own green house, it went well.

Step 7: Finally we went through the assembly, I made a speech attempting to drum up new recruits for Comun, we showed them some UN focused and green technology focused videos, Pankhuri our secretary general made a speech on Comun and the UN, we did a lot of different things. There was a lot of presenting and speaking and then, and finally, it ended. It was a good day, and I went home, and slept. Because I was dead tired.