The Start of In-Person Cultural Exchange

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We have now done two in person sessions of the Cultural Exchange service group. I am writing this post about them together because in many ways they were part of the same process. The group of Rural Children was divided into two groups, and we did the same presentation for both groups. For that reason I think of them as the same unit.

On the first session the rural schools arrived at the car park ten minutes early, and Matthew and I only managed to get there five minutes early (he was slightly ahead of me.) That meant that they were already there, and we had to begin organizing immediately. We messaged the rest of the group to go to our first point, and lead the visitors across the school to where we would begin presenting.

Our agenda went like this:

Introduction and snack in the SMPR (Secondary Multi-Purpose Room) until 16:00,

Divide into two groups lead by myself and Matthew at 16:00 then move into two other classrooms (both in the language acquisition department) and do activities with the visiting children until 16:25.

The introduction went well, I gave a slow and simple speech about my hopes for the program and some history of it after Matthew gave a technical introduction, then we directed them to the provided snacks and we started going around making small talk. Or rather, the rest of the group started making small talk. One of my big difficulties in life is that I suck at small talk, so this section was very difficult and awkward for me. Fortunately it ended fairly quickly.

At 16:00, Matthew named all of the students in his group and they started moving, and after they were all out I took everyone who remained to the other room. Helping me lead my group was Aran, who is actually one of the service Co- Leaders but for this session he let me take the lead.

Our first session was about introductions to yourself and your family. We had the kids right their names on nametags and then introduce what emotion they were feeling.

The plan had been to do an activity that involved saying your name plus and adjective that alliterated with it, but as a person whose name starts with Z I know that to be a bad game so we skipped it and went right to emotions. I mentioned that I was somewhat worried about what would happen because it was a new experience for me.

The second activity involved everyone standing in a circle and saying how many people where in there family, their siblings ages, number of pets and that type of thing. With the first group we had them throw a ball, but that didn’t work so well because they kept throwing it to students from their own school so it kept going to the same people. With the second group we had them hand the ball around the circle which went much better.

We didn’t actually have that much time for activities, and they were still incredibly shy and all actions were tentative ones, but still it was a start and we got everyone participating. Next session is about Halloween and is much more interactive, which hopefully should let us have a better second session.

Presenting the Debate ASA

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T
The Audience’s view of the Debate Club’s Presentation

From the beginning of the year the Debate Club has been planning to host a Books and Cookies. Books and Cookies’ are presentations held by a member of the OSC community every wednesday at lunch time in the library, focusing on that person’s profession or interest. Mr. Luvinzu, the Debate club’s supervisor, thought that a Books and Cookies would be an excellent platform to show off the progress everyone in the club has made.  My co-leader and I reached out to Ms. Lockwood, the librarian and scheduled a date- Wednesday the 25th of October.

We spent the two sessions of the ASA before the 25th preparing, choosing a motion and dividing into teams. I became of the two team captains, with a randomly selected group of other students including Vansh.

The motion Mr. Luvinzu came up with after discussing with the class was “Masculinity is dying, not evolving.” Initially I thought that seemed too presumptive, but I realized that masculinity is such a broad topic that a narrow motion is kind of needed- and as I discovered later, the motion isn’t that narrow.

Masculinity

At the beginning of the research process my team did not know which side of the motion we would be on. That meant that we formed arguments to both propose and oppose the motion. Initially I thought we would only have three speakers per team, but later we clarified we would have four. This changed how I structured our arguments.

Roughly what happened is that I outlined what each speaker would say, then the other people on my team chose which speaker they wanted to be and then elaborated and found examples to back up each argument. There was some confusion about if they could have their phone when talking, but I clarified the answer which was that they could have their phone while sitting down but not while giving their argument.

After some internal discourse, we chose which team would argue which side at the end of the session before the books and cookies, which because the ASA was on tuesday was the day before. This gave us a full night to plan and emotionally prepare.

The actual debate went really well. Because of poor communication with our peers most of the people who showed up were middle schoolers who were less informed on the topic, but still they were engaged. All of the speakers successfully gave their arguments and filled their time, and the discourse happened. It wasn’t quite as tactical or planned as more experienced debaters would manage, but it went pretty well.

I am happy with how this went. The Debate ASA still has work to do, but this was an excellent step.

The library recorded it, so here is the link.

 

I went to Singapore and Learned how to be a Clown because I hate algebra

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Me during the second workshop

I am a higher level Theater student. I didn’t start out this way- at the start of eleventh grade, theater was one of my standard level subjects.To get the IB diploma, students must take three subjects at a higher level. This means that you need to pick which three subjects you are most interested in or you think will be most useful to you. At the end of tenth grade I picked Economics, Literature and Math.

I started doing higher level math on a course that was essentially pure math, focused on equations and algebra. I didn’t like this course very much, because I am much more interested in statistics and probability- in my spare time I read about economics and politics, two very stat and probability heavy areas. Unfortunately, OSC doesn’t offer a statistics or probability course at a higher level, so if I wanted to switch I would need to pick a new class to be my third HL. For various reasons, the only one of my subjects that worked was theater, so I became an HL theater kid.  Theater is by far and away the art subject I enjoy the most, and also ties in fairly well to a career in the political space. Knowing how to give a speech and be compelling on stage is valuable if you want to run for office.

Every year, OSC sends a group of students to what is called the International Schools Theater Association (ISTA). ISTA is a series of workshops on theater run by various field experts, with students from schools all over a certain region (in our case Southeast Asia) forming “ensembles” and moving through the workshops as a group. It is the big theater focused trip every year- all of the kids seriously interested in acting and presenting stories go on it.

I switched to HL theater the week after ISTA 2022. I was concerned about it at the time- I was wondering if I was allowed to take HL theater if I hadn’t gone on ISTA. It turned out it was fine, but still I had this nagging sense that I hadn’t really committed to learning the course because I didn’t go on the trip. This sense of insufficiency compelled me to immediately jump on board when Ms. Jackson sent an email asking which students where interested in going on ISTA 2023 without doing any actual research or learning what it was. Eventually, it was a week before the trip and I decided to actually learn about what I had signed up for, asking and getting basically the explanation I provided above, as well as the fact that ISTA 2023 was being held in Singapore.

I have gone on school trips before- in 7th grade, at my old school I went to China for a Debate Competition called the World Scholar’s Cup, and I actually went to the follow- up event held in Yale the next year event even though I had moved to a different country, traveling internationally on my own from Sri Lanka to New Haven and meeting up with my old school friends at the hotel. Since then however, the only school trips I’ve been on where either field trips that lasted less than a day or grade- wide trips that everyone went on and were slickly organized and time budgeted down to the half -hour. In short, ISTA was the first subject- specific, non in-school trip I went on since Middle School. So I was excited.

I would say I was nervous, but I have flown internationally on my own before and the flight from Sri Lanka to Singapore isn’t that long (only about five hours.) So I was mostly excited- excited to see Singapore for the first time, and excited to do something artsy for the first time.

Also adding to my anticipation was that at the beginning of twelfth grade, my family decided to become vegetarian to see if it worked for us. The cognitive dissonance had grown to great to bear, and Sri Lanka has good vegetarian options because of it’s Buddhist majority. Going to Singapore was the first time I would eat vegetarian outside of Sri Lanka. Getting to Singapore was totally fine. I had packed efficiently, carefully folding all of my clothes so they would fit in a single carry on plus some personal items in my backpack, and I got to school just fine.

We left for the airport on a bus from school, and our group began bonding immediately. Fortunately one of my fellow twelfth graders (Eloise) was on the trip, as well as someone I knew from the Debate club and a family friend from the embassy so I knew and had existing relationships with other people on the trip. Everyone was nice and civil, and the bus proceeded to the airport okay. There was one thing that happened on the bus, though. After being annoyed by the people behind me for making noise doing a running joke I realized something. I was on a trip made up entirely of people who had self selected for being willing to lean into an annoying bit. Fortunately I am also one of those people, but it was a change in my thinking about the trip.

The flight was also fine. The lowlights were when I had to move seats to allow people to sit next to who they wanted to leaving me on the other side of the plane from the bin my carry- on was in and when I had to eat a chicken meal because they were out of the vegetarian one. (I ate it because I figured that some cognitive dissonance is better than being tired and hungry in an unfamiliar airport, and chicken is the most environmentally friendly meat anyway.) The highlights were that I slept through half of the flight and spent the other half reading (and finishing) a new book I was interested in but hadn’t been able to read yet. (The Sunlit Man by Brandon Sanderson)

We got to Singapore alright, and while there were some logistical issues in corralling all of the people on the trip, we got through the airport unscathed and made it to the hotel. It was late so for dinner we went to a mall nearby the hotel for food, and after some soul searching I decided to get a vegetarian Whopper from burger king. That night my roommate (the embassy friend) turned out to be a maniac and decided to go to the gym at Eleven PM. That left me to spend the next hour showering and settling in, which was nice.

The next day was the start of ISTA. We awkwardly stared at the other school groups in the lobby of the hotel before we got on the bus and went to the Host School, Dulwich College’s campus. We gathered our surprisingly small (less than one- hundred people) group into the surprisingly large auditorium. We were given programs and snacks (As a vegetarian I was given the general “dietary restriction” snacks, which I felt was unfair) which told us which ensembles we would be part of.

Fortunately, Eloise and I were in the same ensemble, meaning I would have one person I basically knew in my group. After some speeches and some basic activities on stage with the full group, we split into our ensembles and went to our first workshop. My ensemble got unlucky, and our first workshop was the “here’s how to apply everything you’ve experienced thus far to your studies” workshop. As we hadn’t experienced anything at that point, the workshop ended up being a watered- down exploration of how understanding the audience’s perspective was. That is a valuable lesson because in theater it is easy to get caught up in what you, the performer and creator is feeling without concern for the people watching. That is very bad, because the whole point of art is for people to watch it and understand it. So the workshop was still valuable, just somewhat more disjointed.

Seperate from the intentional lessons of the workshop, I learned one other thing. I hate improv. As part of it we were paired with someone from another school and we had to improv a seen of escalating conflict with only minimal preparation. The guy I was paired with wasn’t helping much because he didn’t seem to grasp the idea of leaving room for your partner to improvise (you know, improv- it’s the whole point) but still for the rest of the trip whenever we had an improv activity I would just stand there like a deer in headlights. My reaction time just isn’t there, I like to think through the beginning and ending and how they connect, I like writing a script and deliberately planning. Still, knowing what I naturall enjoy and where my comfort limit lies is valuable. So I did learn something very useful from the first workshop.

After a shockingly fun lunch of making new friends with people from other schools came the second workshop, which I enjoyed a lot. It was about staging playtexts, which is something I really enjoy. I like taking a script or a story and then turning that into something. That is the part of theater I enjoy, and that workshop was great. I can’t really say much because that workshop was just a series of things I enjoyed thinking about, with one exception. We had to to physicalize our first idea about how to portray something, which as I had discovered before is not my brain likes doing things. That was a pretty small part, though. Overall that activity was awesome. In the end we split into two groups and staged a section of an old malaysian play, and personally I think my group did it much better.

Almost all of the meals we had were in Dulwich College’s cafeteria, which was fun. Notably, for vegetarians they simply made the same meal as everyone else but with plant based “meat” which was really nice. I sat with my newly forged friend group at these meals, which was much more pleasant than I had initially expected. It turned out we were at an event for people interested in theater, which meant all of us had at least one shared interest. That night, the entire group went to a professional performance of Romeo and Juliet. The performance was good but that production had decided to interlace the play with short musical sections which were incredibly hard to interpret and I think for some people broke the flow. I felt they built an atmosphere, but it received mixed reviews. People also made a big deal of how reviews said it was incredibly provocative somehow, apparently including some extent of nudity. That turned out to be entirely false- I felt it was entirely fine, if not something I would take my little brother to.

The next day was very similar- group introduction in the morning with some activities on stage, then splitting into ensembles for our first workshop. My group’s first workshop was one I had heard a lot about from other ensembles- the workshop on how to be a clown. One of the theater experts who ISTA had convinced to do a workshop was a professional clown, who notably was dressed like a normal person for the workshop. She went over some of the basic ideas of being a clown, as well as the techniques.

This Workshop was a bit of a mixed bag, as there was one fairly long stretch of improv with a partner which I found incredibly frustrating, but overall the activities were fun. We split into groups to create random routines that we had to contextualize and recontextualize spontaneously, which because it was in a group was much easier than normal and was actually fun. We did activities based on reacting to prompts in a circle which was fun if hard for me.

The most anticipated part of the workshop, though, was the noses. Towards the end of the workshop, the instructor gave us all foam clown noses, which were cool at first but turned out to be hard to breath in because they stay on via gripping your nose. It was still fun just because we were wearing clown noses which is inherently cool, though. It is my souvenir from ISTA, plus a T-Shirt they gave us.

Our fourth workshop was much harder and more frustrating. It was about exploring the theories of Jerzy Grotowski, and was mostly composed of moving fluidly around the room. Through every workshop there had been a group of people only barely paying attention, and our instructor for this workshop was a middle- aged southeast asian woman who had trouble controlling the ensemble. I paid attention, but those people who had been on the brink before basically ignored her the whole time. That was deeply frustrating, but otherwise I took fairly naturally to that workshop. I like doing that kind of movement anyway.

That afternoon we stayed at Dulwich College’s auditorium to watch a performance by the only other workshop leader, a professional Khon performer. Khon is a traditional Thai masked form of theater, which retells stories from the Ramakien, a sacred Thai text based on the Indian Ramayana. Khon was also the focus of the fifth and final workshop, held on the third day. Our instructor (the guy who performed the previous day) is the first and thus far only westerner to become a Khon performer.

This workshop was very hard. Khon requires constant maintenance of what are basically yoga poses- stand with your knees turned and walk in a specific way and similar things. It was interesting, but I don’t have much to say about it. It was a unique experience, but it also felt very specific at the time.

The trip wrapped up fairly mundanely- we got on buses and went back to the airport. We then spent a few hours in the airport’s mall (because Singapore is the kind of place whose airport has a mall) and then flew back to Sri Lanka. ISTA was a lot of fun. I am very glad that I did it, and I feel like I am better at theater for it. I met people who were also interested in theater, and

Going to the Gym for Once

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First time I remembered to take a pic

I have been making an effort to go to the gym every week. Unfortunately there isn’t much to write about because going to the gym consists of my going down the elevator to the floor the gym is on then walking in and starting a workout- I can talk about my mentality but I don’t feel there is that much interesting stuff for me to talk about from my workouts.

Notably, this workout was the last one I will be doing with the gym attendant helping me. I remember how to use the machines and roughly which order to do that in, so I don’t need someone to guide me anymore. My feelings on the matter may change at a later date, but for now I will be going it on my own.

I do feel like this has been productive- I don’t do that much other rigorous stuff so I can’t see any direct benefits, but I am slightly tired at the end of every session, so I think it has been making me stronger and more fit bit by bit, so that is nice

When I have more stuff to report on I will make another post.

Presenting my TOK Exhibition

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Last year for Theory of Knowledge (TOK) we had to make an “Exhibition.” For the purposes of the IB this is basically just an essay about three objects and their context which all play into a single theme to answer a specific prompt you chose, but in theory it is an exhibition.

In order to add verisimilitude to the idea that this is an exhibition not just an essay with a weird structure, the teachers decided that now, a year later, we should present our exhibitions to the current class of DP 1’s.

This meant that I looked at my old document again, grieved at how terrible I now realize it was, and then boiled it down into something I could present to an audience.

My three objects were in order: a quote from the Director’s commentary of the movie Starship Troopers, an article by Francis Fukuyama in The Atlantic, and a proposed senate bill that would have made Ethanol fuel more accessible. These were in response to the prompt “What counts as good evidence for a claim.”

Whenever you see something that you think is fascist, you should know that the makers coincide with your opinion that it is not good, that is not a good statement, that is not good politics and if you see a black uniform you should know bad, bad, bad… You should not read it differently than that. We all agree with that. It is bad. -Paul Verhoeven

The quote from Paul Verhoeven, director of Starship troopers in that movie’s directors commentary is him outright saying that the movie opposes fascism. By any reasonable definition, that is good evidence for the claim that the movie is anti-fascist. However, there is still a debate about it. I referenced a specific youtube video attempting to dispute that claim. I tied this back to the prompt by saying that even though there is good evidence for one side, the debate continues- so is it actually good evidence?

My second object was an article from The Atlantic by Francis Fukuyama. Fukuyama famously wrote the book “The End of History and the Last Man” which essentially argued the the American Political and Economic System circa the 1990’s was the best possible system for the world. The main evidence for this was the then- recent collapse of the Soviet Union and it’s rival system. This book was extensively mocked and criticized in its own time, with an additional wave of criticism coming from supporters of “illiberal democracies” in the 2010’s. In the article, Fukuyama claims that recent events, mostly Russia’s embarrassing failure to invade Ukraine, show that he was right all along and that illiberalism is a worse system.

The points I drew from this piece of evidence is that this is an academic debate where all of the evidence is conclusions drawn from history, which is incredibly subjective and complicated. There is no concrete evidence, yet the debate continues. To them, it is good evidence.

The CFRCA was a bill that would have expanded subsidies for fuel with ethanol to the entire year in the US. Consequently, this bill would have increased consumption of Ethanol massively.

The Ethanol debate in the US is a contentious one that is theoretically about environmental impact. Basically, ethanol mixed fuel emits less carbon when burned but arguably the carbon emissions involved in produce ethanol are high enough that on net it isn’t actually cleaner. A solid argument can be made both that Ethanol is better for the environment and that it does nothing, with both sides being able to point to scientific evidence agreeing with them.

However, the senate support for the CFRCA came entirely from the midwest, which notably produces the most grain. In other words, the CFRCA was a bill completely unconcerned with the climate- it was a bill that would have sent money to midwestern states by increasing demand for their main product.

There is good evidence in this debate, but it is unrelated to the actual terms of contention. Thus, because it is not relevant to what the debate is actually about, it is not good evidence.

The ultimate point I tried to come to with my exhibition was this: Evidence is as good as it is useful and relevant to the actual motivation behind the debate. If there is conclusive, inconclusive or entirely absent evidence, people will still debate if they have a different reason to do so. I believe that all of my points add up to that conclusion.

I think I actually did pretty well, albeit not perfectly. I boiled down all of my points into a single slideshow I made on Canva, which I printed out and pinned up to the board. When doing this I noticed I had identified myself as a DP 1 and had to embarrassingly cross it out in pen and write “2”.

TOK Exhibition Presentation

My font size was slightly too small compared to the white space- an issue that came from designing it online and not in person. Other than that though, I feel like it worked pretty well.

I gave my presentation to the handful of DP 1’s who wandered over to my table (plus a couple teachers who I think understood it more) and my throat actually got pretty dry from all the talking, and I had to run to refill my water bottle.

It went pretty well, although I now think that I could have written the exhibition I sent to the IB itself significantly better, which is disappointing but that’s how things are. I also hope that I managed to show the DP 1’s who showed up all of the ways your TOK Exhibition can go- none of my objects where concrete objects, they were all pieces of a broader debate. I hope that helped someone.

Giving a Ted Talk- What Stories are Saying

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I did it. I gave a TEDx Talk at TEDxYouth@OSC. I’d even say it went pretty well.

I had to change my talk a lot over time. I knew that I wanted to talk about how all stories are political whether intentionally or not, but initially I was going from the angle that it was still possible to consume media apolitically. Unfortunately, that basically isn’t true so I really had to stretch that section. At that point my parents intervened and basically told me to drop that angle and just explain why all stories are political, which worked much better.

I removed several of the less relevant tangents that I had included only because they interested me, including a joke about the Legend of Drizzt being the male version of Twilight.  I think all of my examples in the final talk were actually relevant and useful.

The night before the talk, my mom had me write out my entire script by hand on a piece of paper. It was painful for my joints and it took over an hour, but I did it and was better for it. I had no issues remembering my script.

I got up on stage, then I gave my talk. I phrased and ordered a couple sentences in it differently, but that wasn’t that big of a deal. I moved on and it was perfectly clear. It went great. I was fairly confident about that part though- I have never had an issue doing public speaking. I don’t get stage fright, and when repeating lines my natural instinct is to stay planted in one place, so public speaking comes fairly naturally to me.

People liked my talk. Afterwards a lot of people told me I had done a good job, and I really appreciate that. I am so glad it went well.

Me giving my talk “What Stories are Saying”

I am very passionate about stories and how they are all political, because when I was writing a novel for my personal project in middle school it accidentally ended up having incredibly obvious political themes. That experience made me realize that there is no such thing as an apolitical story, so this talk was me explaining the actual reasons why with evidence. I want this understanding to be widespread, and a ted talk was the first platform I had to do that. I am so glad I executed this argument well.

 

Notably, Ted decided to upload my talk, which they only did with about a third of the talks from TedX OSC. This was a successful experience.

Struggles with the Peacecorp Service Group

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Over the course of doing this Service Group, I have come to a discovery. I suck at having conversations. I can explain something to someone, and I can have someone explain something to me, and I can have a discussion or  a debate. But I basically can’t have a conversation.

That is not a good issue to have when talking to non-native speakers. I never know what to say to native english speakers in normal conversation, non-native speakers are another step beyond that.

The Service Block is ending soon, and I will do a more complete reflection then.

Writing a TED Talk

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I am going to give a TEDx talk.

One of my ASA’s for this block was TEDx, and that is building up to an event on Saturday. I am going to give a talk.

Senaka and Dharani announce the event
Caption goes here.

At first I was taking it decently smoothly. I have lots of ideas, so I would be able to find something to talk about.

Then I changed my mind so, so many times. For a variety of reasons that it would not be interesting to get into, I changed what my topic was going to be three times, and for entire ASA sessions had no plans whatsoever.

Then I decided to adapt a mental rant I have been working on for a while into a TED Talk, which worked pretty well. I had a script and practiced it a few times.

Then I presented the draft to my parents, only to discover that it had massive issues. This was only five days out.

My mom was nice enough to write me an outline for a better talk which I am now filling in, meaning that I will practice the talk on Saturday, and then give it that evening.

I didn’t plan well, but it is mostly working out now.

First Service Call After the Meetup (Which I couldn’t go to)

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I got covid. It was awful and I was out of commission for a whole week. My whole family was, and we stayed at home the whole time.

Unfortunately, that week was the week when the Peacecorps service group went to go see the local schools in person. So I was still at home. I was not able to go on the trip, which is disappointing.

They did basically what we do on calls but in person
A group photo that I’m not in because I wasn’t there

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fortunately it seems like it went well. The photos are from the shared drive.

But that was the finale to the last block of calls. So a new block of calls has started

And I was on the first one.

 

To be honest, it didn’t go particularly well. A logistical mishap meant that only two of the local students could get on the call, so they were massively outnumbered by OSC students. This meant that discussions were very difficult, because the bonds and shared background between the local students couldn’t help at all.

This was just the first one, though. There will be more, and they will have more local students, so they will almost definitely go better.

Walking, Looking at Birds for ES&S

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The walk my class did around the Defense Walkway

For the IB my science class is Environmental Systems and Societies. A large part of this class is biodiversity, and understanding relationships between different species. So what better way to understand biodiversity than to see it for ourselves?

We walked out of school over to an urban park walkways near the Defense Ministry’s Headquarters. It is in the city, but that area is cropland which allows lots of birds to inhabit the area. Around it we saw 19 different species of bird, and many of them were very different. Storks and Pigeons and Pelicans.

It was an interesting experience to see such a wild area and so many animals in what is a mostly suburban area. It was a relatively wet area, with basically a long pond around the farmland with some patches of wild area nearby. This meant that there was a mixture of tree birds and waterbirds. It was also about to rain, so all of the birds were moving around.

This was all relatively close to school, and there were even people. They were running and walking around the track, and people were enjoying themselves- and the birds were right there with them. Two of the storks we saw were standing right next to the track and let us stand right next to them. People and birds were enjoying the area together. This meant that it was an enclave of this type of space within Colombo, which is a very sprawling, concrete heavy city. It was an illustration to me that it is possible to build this type of space in any environment, and that people enjoy that type of thing.

And the walking was actually nice, which was an extra good thing.

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