MINing of Life

Sunday, 1 June 2008

14th Student Leaders Convention @ Hwa Chong InstitutionY

If you were to ask any participant in 14th SLC about Day 3, I bet 95% of the respond will be monotonous and rather boring. Oh well, basically the programme for the day was

8.00am-8.15am Reporting and Attendance taking
8.15am-8.30am Briefing by Concept Committee
8.30am-10.30am Cluster Meeting A
10.30am-12.15pm Cluster Meeting B
12.15pm-1.00pm Lunch
1.00pm-2.00pm Consortium Meeting A
2.00pm-4.00pm Address by Guest-of-Honour
4.00pm-4.30pm Reception
4.30pm-5.30pm Photo-taking and Debrief

So everything was basically just like yesterday's meetings. We were to work on the chosen Action Paper by Varinius. However, Firminus, my group felt that our idea on the "Next Top (role)Models" was pretty interesting, engaging and enriching, hence we submitted a formal ammendment form to the Cluster Director, Darren Choo.
So the cluster meetings were just on comments, ammendments and agreements.

Consortium meeting was more of a sharing seesion between the 3 clusters under Developing Affective Education which covers my cluster's Cultivation of Leadership, and the other 2 which are Betterment of Ethics and Promoting Creative Thinking.

We were addressed by the keynote speaker, which was the reason why we had to be in our blazers and court shoes. That took up almost the entire afternoon, and it ended off with photo-taking.

Day 4 started off quite monotonous as most of us were sort of "switched off" after 2 days of brain-cracking meetings. As a cluster, we had to look into the other 2 Cluster's Action Papers and make ammendments to improve on it and the best Action Paper out of the 3 Clusters will be used as the chosen Consortium Action Paper. Practically everyone was too lazy to kill anymore brain cells, so whatever ammendment was made, hardly anyone commented and objected. Eventually because we had a comprehensive, engaging and effective Action Plan, which met the objectives of the whole idea of Developing Affective Education, our cluster's paper was chosen!!! The others simply just corrected the language (so that it's more formal -.-''') or canceled away the new, creative ideas to stay in the safe-zone.

We ended of the convention (refering to the meetings) with the Closing Ceremony whereby the 2 consortiums came together and hear each other out. The other consortium was focussing on Strengthening Fundamental Education. Also, each of the Cluster Directors gave their speeches (words of thanks and their experience), followed by the Consortium Directors. These Directors were the Chairpersons of each meetings.

Darren Choo, our Cluster Director, the Hwa Chong guy who's about 1.8m tall person, who almost hit the projector connected to the ceiling said this:
"Regarding to one of your questions, why didn't I laugh when it was really funny, that's because every time when I wanted to laugh, you guys would already be laughing, so I had to scold you guys."

Tan Yu Quan, our Consortium Director, also a Hwa Chong guy who's the overall in-charge of the Concept Committee (in other words, the meetings and brainstormings), and was quite strict and firm on maintaining decorum and formality, said this:
"... ... And I received notes with tortises drawn on them... ..."

This entire 4-day long event was wrapped up with a Grand Finale concert. Immediately after lunch, our cluster was preparing our performance. Though we already had plans on doing the ketchup dance, our performance in-charge told us that there was a change and that the initial time frame of 7 minutes was lengthen to 14 minutes. So group Constantine came up with the 舞娘 (wu niang) dance. We also prepared 2 songs from High School Musical, We're All in this Together and What I've Been Looking For together with the dance. However, the performance time frame was suddenly cut back to 7 minutes, so unfortunately, we weren't able to perform the High School Musical part which we'd put a lot of heart into learning the new dance steps.

Anyway, here are the pictures and videos...