Year 8

Year 8 Advisors' Corner

As we reflect back upon the academic year of 2020-21, what better way to capture the experience than by asking the students for their perspectives on the highs and lows:

Nurul Izzah Khairunnisa (Nisa 8B)

HBL is clearly a unique experience for all of us, myself included. HBL has been a time where you can only listen to explanations through calls, ask questions by sending emails, and interact with your friends with social media. While the abundance of free time was definitely fun at first, as time went on, it turned into a sort of trap, where you could become lax with your responsibilities.

For me, the best thing about HBL is also its worst; everything is up to you. Not saying that it didn’t have its enjoyable times, and I’m sure the teachers did their best to try to make the experience better. In my advisory class, during Morning Advisory and Fri-Yay, my advisor would start the call by playing a song that we could sometimes request ourselves. While Morning Advisory is usually a simple “what news we have today”, we would sometimes play short online games and compare our scores. In Fri-Yay, we would usually watch movies using streaming devices, usually of our own choosing. Of course, it wasn’t perfect, and we couldn’t become as close as we’d like to each other because we were online, it was a somewhat relaxing time.

As for YLMs, while the event is usually formal, with an agenda, such as SA presentations or others, we would sometimes do fun activities. One of the most memorable was a Kahoot trivia quiz where I was involved with the event creation. I didn’t get to answer the questions, but I did help make them, and seeing the interactions between my classmates and the funny parts of the questions was very entertaining. It would’ve been great if we had more of those activities before the year came to an end.

HBL was an intriguing experience, its daily events included. It was, however, a great effort to make things more enjoyable in these different times.

Najwa Mayra Aridya. (Najwa 8C)

HBL has been a new experience for us all, whilst learning everything from home. HBL has had its ups and downs, it is a great time to manage our time to finish all the work independently. The downside of HBL is that we don't meet our friends and teachers face to face and it has a different atmosphere on how we learn in class and communicate with our friends. Even though it is harder to communicate with them, there is Fri-Yay and YLM, where we get to bond as a whole year level with our friends and teachers and do activities together. The activities can be watching a video, showing our work/hobbies, playing Kahoots and more.

We also get to bond as well in our morning advisory class where there is a daily check up on how we are and some prompt questions to start our day. YLM, Fri-yay and the morning advisory made the HBL learning atmosphere fun and gave us an opportunity for us to bond together. Thank you to all our teachers, for being the best towards us for this HBL learning. The HBL learning is a new experience for us all and has been hard to do everything online. We appreciate that all of you have always checked up on us and our day, and are doing your best to help and teach us with all the topics this school year. Overall thank you for all the hard work and everything. We really appreciate it all.

Emir Rajendra Surjono (Emir 8D)

This year, despite being fully learning from home throughout the entirety of the academic year, I was able to learn effectively, progressively and also even have some fun in the classes. I had good experiences in morning advisory as the teacher would always try to make it interesting for the students. Fri-Yay was also interesting as we would hold class games sometimes and even had a YLM where the entire year level would play a game together against each other which I personally found fun both organizing and playing. In normal classes, the teachers would always include games or other activities that would make HBL more interesting for the students. This allows us to focus more on the lesson and not get bored in the class. Overall, this year’s HBL has been fun despite having to stay at home. I believe that GJS did a very good job at organizing the students, teachers and staff throughout the quarantine period. Creating an effective online learning environment for both students and teachers.

Have a safe and relaxing summer everyone!

Year 8 Team

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