CAS. Many know this to stand for Creativity, Activity and Service, the three general criteria that students must strive to meet with the experiences that they garner during their time in the IB Diploma Programme.
I, however, know it by a different name: Career Advancement Scheme.
Because CAS is really a way to allow students to develop themselves, and make them more competitive for University, higher education and their career, because of the way it lays out, broadens, and develops a student.
This is my experience with CAS, and the learning outcomes I have achieved by doing it.
Learning outcome 1: Identify own strengths and develop areas for growth
The CAS experience most representative of this learning outcome for me is my experience learning kickboxing. With the removal of physical education from the school curriculum, the opportunities for me to be exposed to physical exertion became much sparser. My already frail physical body would not be able to handle another long, continuous length of time in pseudo-stasis. I therefore planned to find some sort of sport for me to get involved in, to make up for this newfound deficiency. As I do not really enjoy playing ball sports, I hoped to find an activity that wouldn't require much interaction with external objects, something that would really allow me to get hands-on with the sport. I, therefore, approached my friend with a background in kickboxing, who agreed to teach me some of the basics of kickboxing. Unbeknownst to me, there were quite a few people in the school who were also involved in the sport. However, despite the violent nature of the sport, the people were extremely courteous, allowing me to practice with them.
After the experience, there are still many things that I want to continue to improve on regarding my kickboxing skills. I am still very inexperienced, something that can be seen during my spars, and am prone to mistakes. I realise that what I have been able to learn within these few months barely scrapes the tip of the iceberg. However, working on these skills with my friend has awoken a passion for martial arts in me. In fact, martial arts has now become my new main source of exercise, and I will definitely be continuing with this for the foreseeable future.
Learning outcome 2: Demonstrate that challenges have been undertaken, developing new skills in the process
The second learning outcome, I believe, is best represented by my experience in the Seussical, where I helped as part of the stage design team. The Seussical is a musical put on by the 8th graders. However, in order to facilitate the musical's planning, development and execution, we 11th graders were employed as assistants. As I do not have much experience with visual design, and am not too proficient at it, doing a lot of work that required a sharp intuition for this stuff was at times very challenging. However, I saw this as an opportunity to engage with this area that I was not very familiar with, and in the process, improve my skill for art and design. In addition to this, I was fortunate to have many fellow students and classmates more experienced in this field who were willing to help during the initial stages of the creation process and instruct me on the intricacies of the craft, giving me a set of skills that would greatly benefit me in my solo creations.
Some of the areas where I lent a helping hand were:
Painting the grass. There were these little 2d grass cut-outs that needed to be made and placed only the edges of the stage, to function as grass. I made them. The real challenge here was cutting the grass so that they looked natural, yet dynamic. When I first started with these, I cut the grass evenly, as I had only had experience with well manicured lawns. However, I was quickly informed by my classmates that what I had made was terrible, because the Seussical would be set in some place unruly and wild, like a jungle, where there would be many animals, and less manicured lawns. Therefore, it required some guidance from others as to how I could make the grass feel as though it was wild and moving: making uneven tops, curvy shapes, and multi-layered colours. I do believe that I rather mastered the art of collaborative grass creation as we completed our quota of grass.
Creating the little trees. As those who have perused Dr Seuss' many works, one common theme among them are the so-called "lollipop trees". I believe that we had originally wanted to procure real trees for the musical, but as no such tree existed that we could so conveniently utilise for our props, we had no choice but to create them ourselves. Something special that we did when making the trees was establishing what was essentially a factory line. We realised that it would be better to have each person repeatedly do the same thing, so that they could increase their skills at that one thing at an increased rate, as well as enable them to settle into a nice rhythm where they could essentially enter a state of flow: no longer having to be conscious of their actions. I am proud to have been one of the members of that assembly line, sawing wooden sticks to create the trunks. However, one point in which I differed from others was my ability to be flexible. When a bottleneck appeared in the insertion portion of the assembly line, I was able to fluidly adapt myself to the needs of the workers, and fill in the vacuum that had manifested.
Fish creation. Dr Seuss has truly created fish that resemble humans more than many humans do. However, when it came to creating these fish ourselves, I must admit that I was not as capable as Dr Seuss was. I needed extensive assistance throughout most of the steps, and I was only able to accomplish the most brutish of tasks, with much of the finer work being left to those more capable. I feel as though those fish were of a higher plane than me, and it was only with the collective effort of many of my peers, that I was able to faintly scratch the bottom of it. I will say, though, that there was something that I am very proud of. I drew the face of one of the fish, and I fully believe that the fish I created, was the fish that had the most charm, and a certain playfulness to it that I think many would find more welcoming.
Particle effects. I cut up piece of cloth into little squares to serve as snow, mud I think, and carrots. Due to the simplicity of the task, I had plenty of time to ponder ways in which my task's efficiency could be increased. With my partner, we created a systematic approach to the cutting, which would ensure that pieces were created at the fastest speed possible, while maintaining their integrity and usability.
Painting a box. I painted a box with someone else, and it turned out a lovely, even white colour.
Overall, I believe the period in which I was doing the Seussical to have been one of the best periods of my life. During this time, I was able to deepen the bond between myself, and my fellow classmates, with many opportunities to collaborate and create something that we were all extremely passionate about. In some ways, I believe that what I will really treasure from my time in the Seussical is not in the musical itself, but the journey to making it happen, all the little things that I created, and in all the friends that I made along the way.
Learning outcome 3: Demonstrate how to initiate and plan a CAS experience
Many of my CAS experiences were initiated and planned by me as an individual. However, the experiences that I think I was the most instrumental in the planning phase of, were my experiences with hiking in the various mountain trails of Taipei. My typical summer holiday involves very little outdoor activity. Although I have yet to suffer any adverse effects from this lack of exposure to the outside world, I was unwilling to risk it in the holiday from grade 11 to grade 12. My solution to this was hiking mountains. Taipei has many hiking trails located all over the city, and I thought a hiking trip with my friends would be a fun way to spend a day outdoors. Many of my friends were in the same boat as me (not enough opportunities for exercise during the holidays) and this seemed like the perfect course of action. Not only would my friends motivate me to take this step, they would also push me to try my best during the hikes, and not just take the trail easy as I might if I were alone.
In total, we planned 3 hikes, each taking up a full afternoon, along the Datun Mountain System: Junjianyan Hiking Trail, Jiantanshan Hiking Trail and Xiangshan Hiking Trail. This was the first time I had gone on a hiking trip that was not part of a school trip, and so I was initially skittish about planning for one. However, preparations were completed with relative straightforwardness, particularly since there were a few amongst my friends that already had some experience hiking. Choosing the hiking trails was the step that warranted the most planning, since it not only needed to be long enough to hike for a whole afternoon, it also needed to be befit the range of skill levels present in our group. It was only through some thorough discussion that we were able to land on the three hiking trails stated above.
Learning outcome 4: Show commitment to and perseverance in CAS experiences
The CAS experience that I have shown the most commitment to and perseverance in, is my participation in the High school acapella group. Mr Lai announced his intention to start a high school acapella group, and I was on of those who joined. This was not actually my first time as part of a singing group, but it was my first time singing acapella and at such a high level. As such, I had a lot to learn. I consistently turned up every week at Monday, 4:30 pm, to practice acapella with the group for a full three years. During this time, I have not only learnt about how to sing. My commitment to this group over such a long period of high school life has allowed me to witness its growth and changes, while I, all the while, have steadily improved my singing skills.
Such is my commitment to acapella, that I frequently undergo other experiences outside of the group, such as in my performance at Sport's Day, 2020, performing the song "Isn't She Lovely" by Stevie Wonder. I accomplished this with some of my fellow acapella group members with the same commitment to music as me, who were responsible for holding regular meetings/practices on school days in a shot timespan of just over a week before the actual performance. This result, however, was not the result of just that week of practice. It was the result of years of perseverance in practice, teamwork and mutual understanding that characterise the HS acapella group for me.
Learning outcome 5: Demonstrate the skills and recognize the benefits of working collaboratively
I believe that every single one of my CAS experiences involves some level of collaborative work, whether it was working together to achieve a common goal, or drawing on the support of others to complete a personal goal. However, the earliest experience where I realised the power of this collaborative work took place at the beginning of the eleventh grade, where I, along with two of my classmates, were approached by Mrs Burrow to hold an analysis workshop for the ninth and tenth graders. My main motive for accepting this task was not just to undergo another CAS experience, but also to learn. According to the learning pyramid, a graph that shows various approaches to learning and the retention rates of each, teaching others has the highest retention rate of all the approaches to learning. I, therefore, wanted to utilise this opportunity for the purpose of further improving my own analysis skills.
Of course, because I still had much about analysis left to learn, the other people that I worked with were instrumental in making the analysis workshop as holistic as possible for the younger students. We split the workshop into three segments: literary analysis, non-literary analysis and assessments. Each of us was responsible for one of these segments. However, once we were done dictating the contents of each of our sections, we had a collaborative meeting to assess their completeness. Here, we would supplement the insights included with our own. This extended to the presentation of the workshop as well: although there was the main speaker, the others would regularly chime in with their own inputs. This led to a very collaborative environment, where we were all working to make up for the shortcomings of the others.
I believe that the analysis workshop was a success, not only for the students listening, but for me as well. Over the multiple times that we held the analysis workshop, we were able to effectively teach the people who had come the essentials of analysis. As was previously discussed, the analysis workshop was very open to interjections from others. This was actually the most effective aspect of the analysis workshop for boosting my own learning, as the extra bits of information proposed by the others were the very areas of knowledge that I was lacking in. This meant that I was essentially able to go through my entire knowledge of analysis, and have it peer reviewed by my fellow classmates, which was of great assistance in reinforcing it. Collaboration is the key word when describing the factors behind this experience's success.
Learning outcome 6: Demonstrate engagement with issues of global significance
By far the most significant way in which I was able to engage with issues of global significance was my involvement with the MUN club. MUN stands for Model United Nations, and in the MUN club, I had to consider the implications of global issues and debate with fellow delegates of different countries to draft resolutions to deal with them. As the president of the MUN club in 11th grade, my engagement with these global issues was undoubtedly a frequent occurrence, engagements that were both deep and fiercely passionate. These can, I believe, be sufficiently summarised with my experience with HSINMUN, an MUN conference involving the aggregation of students from may schools.
In preparation for HSINMUN, there is a lot of research that needs to go into understanding the topics that will be discussed on that day. The two topics that I would be discussed as part of the disarmament committee were the development of unmanned artificial intelligence for purposes of deadly force and the establishment of a nuclear weapon-free zone in the middle east.
To prepare for the conference, I started by reviewing the chair reports, which are the reports that the chairs right on the topic, which give a general background on the topic, as well as providing information on the stances of some of the countries that are more involved with the topic in question. These chair reports are the bare minimum needed to understand the topic, but further research is needed before one can be able to fully participate in the debate. In the past, due to my inexperience with MUN in general, I was never one of the more outspoken delegates, however, this time, I was determined to be a substantial contributor to the debate. The reason for my determination is because, as a global scholar, I need to be knowledgeable about global events.
My country this time was Italy, and because Italy isn't an especially powerful or influential nation, I needed to do a bit of digging to find out my country's stances, as well as some potential allies. For basic information about the general stance of my country, searching for material on Google sufficed. However, to build further understanding, I needed to look into more official sources. These sources included treaties and agreements that Italy had partaken in, taken from the United Nation's official website, as well as some of the statements that Italy had made on the issue, which would further give me insight into which side they had taken. It was also helpful to identify the country's allies, as it would be important to take their stances into account and please them, to ensure that they would support my resolution.
Through the above methods, I was able to effectively prepare for HSINMUN, and accumulate enough knowledge to be confident that I would be able to comfortably debate with the other delegates at the event about these issues of global significance.
Learning outcome 7: Recognize and consider the ethics of choices and actions
This learning outcome was also triggered to a large extent by my involvement with the MUN club. However, this learning outcome associates itself much more strongly with the results of the debate, rather than the preparation. That it is to say, after the engagement with issues of global significance that comprises the resolution drafting stage of an MUN conference (writing a list of solutions to the problem), the next step would be to consider these solutions, and whether these courses of action are effective and ethical. The best case scenario would be both.
For example, during HSINMUN, after completing our resolution, we had to debate their usability. In short, delegates would be given completed resolutions to read through, and would submit any amendments they would like to make to them, often on the basis of the ethics of a particular clause, and the effects that they might have on the global community. During this time, the whole committee comes together to create what would be the best resolution for the current global issue at hand.
Another example presents itself from my experience as a chair at KSMUN. In the highlight of the conference our committee face a crisis. This crisis was designed by me, and the some other chairs from other committees, and we worked together to create a sudden emergency situation (a manned spaceship carrying a deadly virus back to Earth) that would allow us to combine the delegates of multiple committees together to produce a resolution to solve this. This situation carries obvious ethical considerations, and in the discussion that ensured, many delegates became obstreperous in debating whether or not we should allow this spaceship to land. I believe that the world out there carries many such difficult decisions as the one that our committee had to make that day, and I believe that my participation in the MUN club, and these various MUN events, were a great way for me to consider he ethics of choices and actions.