Level Camp 2008-Part 3

So there came the long and boring campfire which lasted at least 3 hours. When it was over, my back ached and my thighs were numb.

For our class campfire skit, we did a parody of a video from youtube which I have never heard of and a class song which others seem to think is good based on spongebob's F.U.N. song.

Then, I was so glad that the campfire was over and went to sleep, this time better thanks to my jacket which I used as a pillow. There are more than one way to use a jacket:) Surprisingly, unlike the previous night, my feet did no feel so cold

In the morning at around 5:30am, my alarm clock rang. Then, I was still feeling sleepy, so I did not care much about the sound, however, the my alarm clock was those sort that would start to ring louder and louder, so finally, I decided to stop the ringing in fear of waking up the others. Unfortunately, I did not know how to turn it off and my prediction came true. Fortunately, Ben was slightly awake, probably due to the ringing too and helped me turn it off-by removing the battery. Looks like I have not really learnt from my lesson-not to do things at the eleventh hour. Remember the time when my group almost failed a presentation due to last minute work?

I slept quite comfortably for the rest of the time. I woke up at 7am, half an hour later than the others. It is amazing what a jacket can do.

There came breakfast and then clean up. These were followed by a series of dance performances and uncomical comedy performed by camp instructors to pass our time. Most of my class was at the back either playing handphone games, talking, or playing simple group games waiting for dismissal.

At last, dismissal. How relieved I was to be leaving the camp after a dull 3 days and 2 nights.

I have learnt several things. From Double or Nothing-No solution is perfect, but it would be good to combine several of them to mould them into better ones. From The Third Morning-Never do last minute work. In addition, I have also been proved wrong-No one was really using the spiderwebs for any of the activities (except for climbing 2 metres up and singing the school song as loud as possible in the middle of the night). I have also learnt that CDANs, NsHometeam whatever you call it, isn't actually a campsite, but only a public chalet whose residents' only form of entertainment is the television and the playground in Pasir Ris Park. Anything more and they would have to pay for the canoes etcetra for themselves. We did not have to do that last year. All facilities were built in into our campsite-Abseiling, canoeing and the flying fox. You name it, they've got it. Lastly, I found out why this camping activity was free and fully subsidised by the school.

That is the end of Level Camp 2008. I wished I had never looked forward to it.

A screwed presentation

It is only today when I realised how not having proper teamwork can cause unforeseenable failures.

During English lesson, Dillon, Nicholas, Hurberg, Leon and I were supposed to present our group work on the analysis of "To kill a Mockingbird". Only the previous night was the content of our presentation sent to me, when I was already in a sleepy mood. So I slept without bothering to check my email, assuming that the rest have completed their parts properly...which they did, only nothing was compiled. There is no blame to be passed around, but I thought that the presention slides were ready too.

Thus, the next day (today), we met in the computer lab to compile everything into a wordy powerpoint slides not worthy to be called a presentation. During our preperation for the presentation, I realised how messy the parts were and because i was only in charge of the summary, I did not have a minor clue on the organization of the rest, neither did I know its content. (I supposed there were a few others who did not either)

It ended up as a disaster for me as I contemplated how to explain the parts I first saw, sort of like an impromptu. Worse still, grammar and structural mistakes due to eleventh-hour compilation were everywhere so I did not know what I was talking about either.

I pondered about this for a while after the passing of this catastrophic mess. I think that the problem lies that instead of doing groupwork, we did 'splitwork'. Simply put, we split the work among ourselves such as editor, I/c of A, I/c of B and so on. We did not actually come together to think. Do, edit, pass...that was all. After the first person have completed the main content, it would not be very nice for the editor to change the content entirely if he disagrees, and now he would have to consult the previous. Troublesome and time-consuming, isn't it? At times, by doing 'splitwork', points done by different people might also contradict each other.

What we could have done? I thought it would be good if we could come together for an hour, brainstorm on the main ideas, discuss them, pick out the points, and only then, do we split the work, work as in doing the compilation of ideas.

We would probably fail this presentation. I have really learnt a good lesson about what teamwork is really all about. This presentation we have done, is none of that.