Xiyuan, Wei (Jonathan), Grade 11
UWC China
More than 12 distance learning weeks passed during this Coronavirus period, and as many as 2160 hours have elapsed. As time progressed, we slowly began to adapt to remote learning.
One day, I was checking through my inbox when suddenly an email caught my attention. I was shocked, to say the least–school was reopening. After May 6th, students were permitted to return to UWCCSC.
I was thrilled upon this good news. I missed working at school, and the excitement made me dig for more information regarding our return. The school had sent out instructions to check the information regarding the district we lived in. As was instructed by the school, I did so, and that’s when I became utterly shocked. The district that I lived in was the only district that was marked as a high-risk area. This meant that I was among one of the few people that could not go back to school.
With the rush of disappointment going through my mind, all the fun-filled memories of the first semester started coming back to me. One of the most memorable moments was my theatre performance. That was certainly one of the most stressful and enjoyable events that I dedicated a lot of my time to. We, as tenth graders, had two theatre classes taught by a theatre teacher called Ilinca, and one of our End of the Unit assignment was to collaboratively organize a performance. The performance consisted of 9 individual plays. Due to the limited number of students, each of us had to participate in three plays. The month before the actual performance was the toughest month, and we had to rehearse almost every day after school. As the days passed, I became even more stressed. The timeline that the performance date created required all theatre students to build time-management skills so that we could balance the time for rehearsal and the time for doing homework. That month went really fast, and finally, the day for the performance had come. Ilinca said that this year’s FP mid-term performance had the largest audience ever. Instead of being nervous, I was unusually calm when the final performance started. Even when I was performing on stage, I was barely aware that it was the final performance going on. Everything went pretty smoothly, and only minor errors occurred. After the performance was over, people came up to us complimenting our performance and acting; I felt overjoyed.
Something else closely related to my UWC experience is skateboarding. There is a huge tradition of skateboarding in UWCCSC - about 40% of people know how to skateboard really well, and around 20% of people are beginners in skateboarding. If you ever came to our campus, you would notice that a lot of skateboards are parked on the ground floor of every residential building, each stood against the walls. However, many skateboarders didn’t park their skateboards neatly. Instead, they just parked them wherever they wanted. This problem caused students to think innovatively, and create projects to propose to the school. Some students wanted to design signboards that indicate designated areas to park the skateboards. Some other students wanted to design a lane specifically for the skaters to park their boards. Unfortunately, neither of these solutions have been implemented on our campus yet. People are still parking their skateboards anywhere they wanted.
However, in the UWC spirit of looking on the bright side, if you were to walk into our campus, you would find a beautiful skateboard at every corner, patiently waiting for their owner.
One day, I was checking through my inbox when suddenly an email caught my attention. I was shocked, to say the least–school was reopening. After May 6th, students were permitted to return to UWCCSC.
I was thrilled upon this good news. I missed working at school, and the excitement made me dig for more information regarding our return. The school had sent out instructions to check the information regarding the district we lived in. As was instructed by the school, I did so, and that’s when I became utterly shocked. The district that I lived in was the only district that was marked as a high-risk area. This meant that I was among one of the few people that could not go back to school.
With the rush of disappointment going through my mind, all the fun-filled memories of the first semester started coming back to me. One of the most memorable moments was my theatre performance. That was certainly one of the most stressful and enjoyable events that I dedicated a lot of my time to. We, as tenth graders, had two theatre classes taught by a theatre teacher called Ilinca, and one of our End of the Unit assignment was to collaboratively organize a performance. The performance consisted of 9 individual plays. Due to the limited number of students, each of us had to participate in three plays. The month before the actual performance was the toughest month, and we had to rehearse almost every day after school. As the days passed, I became even more stressed. The timeline that the performance date created required all theatre students to build time-management skills so that we could balance the time for rehearsal and the time for doing homework. That month went really fast, and finally, the day for the performance had come. Ilinca said that this year’s FP mid-term performance had the largest audience ever. Instead of being nervous, I was unusually calm when the final performance started. Even when I was performing on stage, I was barely aware that it was the final performance going on. Everything went pretty smoothly, and only minor errors occurred. After the performance was over, people came up to us complimenting our performance and acting; I felt overjoyed.
Something else closely related to my UWC experience is skateboarding. There is a huge tradition of skateboarding in UWCCSC - about 40% of people know how to skateboard really well, and around 20% of people are beginners in skateboarding. If you ever came to our campus, you would notice that a lot of skateboards are parked on the ground floor of every residential building, each stood against the walls. However, many skateboarders didn’t park their skateboards neatly. Instead, they just parked them wherever they wanted. This problem caused students to think innovatively, and create projects to propose to the school. Some students wanted to design signboards that indicate designated areas to park the skateboards. Some other students wanted to design a lane specifically for the skaters to park their boards. Unfortunately, neither of these solutions have been implemented on our campus yet. People are still parking their skateboards anywhere they wanted.
However, in the UWC spirit of looking on the bright side, if you were to walk into our campus, you would find a beautiful skateboard at every corner, patiently waiting for their owner.
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