Ciao readers! Thanks for stopping by!
A typical week at Pearson is many things— exciting, new, crazy, and naturally, chaotic. Every day brings new learning experiences, moments of connection with the people around you, and occasionally, challenges to overcome. It's difficult to capture how all these little things come together to create a single "UWC experience", especially because it's radically different everyone, but I'll do my best to screenshot what I make of an average (yet always exceptional) week at Pearson College.
October 24, 2020
Happy Saturday! There's reason to celebrate today because it's Vic House pizza night! 🍕Earlier in the day, our lovely house parent, Jake, and several Vic House members prepared the dough and ingredients needed to make pizza in the cob oven outside the cafeteria (built by PC 38!). The pizza oven was started around 2pm and we took turns feeding wood throughout the day until the evening so we could get it up to the right temperature.
At around 8:00 after a lovely Salsa lesson led by my housemate Carlos (y46, Costa Rica), we gathered together to make our pizzas. The excitement lasted well into the night and we built a fire 🔥 in the small gazebo to roast marshmallows, sing campfire songs (+ lots of T-Swift) and make smores 🍫!
October 25, 2020
Time to get some work done and get ready for classes tomorrow! I spent the morning studying and completing some assignments before brunch 🥓 and weekly housekeeping things (laundry, house chores, etc). In the afternoon I met up with my second year from Vietnam for tea which somehow turned into a full-on spontaneous South East Asia picnic dinner bonding on Calgary House lawn. There was cool music, milk tea 🍵, great food 🍜, and of course, wonderful company 😊.
At half past 7, our little crowd dispersed and headed back to our respective houses 🏠 for house meeting where we gather in our dayrooms to discuss issues pertaining to our house and receive updates from our house parents and members of various campus working groups (ex. the Covid-19 focus group, service week planning committee etc.). At Vic House, we always open our meetings by writing down our memories from the week on sticky notes which are then collected and kept by our house parents until the end of the year. After all has been said and done, we round out house time with "good news" ✨during which we can express gratitude to housemates for things they did during that week. Occasionally, a group of us will stay a little longer afterwards for a couple rounds of Just Dance or a movie 🍿.
On this particular Sunday, we had a blast carving pumpkins 🎃 and decorating the dayroom for Halloween!
October 26, 2020
After a fun weekend, most of today was spent attending classes until 3:45pm. Then it was a short snack break 🍎 before getting back to homework until dinner. Following a quick shower, it was time for clubs from 7:30-9.
On Mondays I work on various outreach and content-based tasks for the Race Rocks Development Curriculum🌊. I've talked a little bit about it here on my blog, but in short our goal is to preserve some of the stories and history behind Race Rocks Ecological Reserve 🐬 by publishing resources online and designing a 48-hour educational curriculum that will allow Pearson students to experience an extended stay on the island.
October 27, 2020
It's Tuesday which means we're up and at 'em by 6:30 for a morning workout 👟 before classes. Every Tuesday after school we have advisor meetings where we gather with our advisor (usually one of our teachers) and fellow advisees to bring up just about anything we want to talk about. It can be an issue with something on campus, or even just a personal challenge that we'd like some advice on. Advisors are also responsible for writing comments in our term reports for our national committees, and taking our concerns to faculty meetings 📝(though an increased amount of student representation at staff meetings is currently being established through a new college-wide constitution).
October 28, 2020
Whooo it's Wednesday! Everyone's favourite day of the school week 😄. Due to Covid restrictions and the lack of CAS opportunities this year, Wednesdays have been selected as the designated day for TOK (Theory of Knowledge) classes in the morning and our respective CAS activities in the afternoon (ex. paddle sports, astronomy, Pearson College Emergency Response Team, wilderness, coastal biodiversity, PC Kule, etc.). Once a month, we'll have Village Gathering 💻, a campus-wide meeting, before TOK (10:45am), and occasionally we'll have special topics days or presentations. Today's talk was organized by CAR (Conversations About Race) and they led a conversation about common microaggressions and alternative ways to avoid them. We followed-up on this topic during TOK before having split lunch, coming back to do more TOK, and finally taking off for CAS. Kayaking 🛶 is always incredibly exciting but today especially so because we were able to paddle out of the bay and catch sight of some enormous humpback whales 🐳 (definitely caught the smell of them as well 🤢🤣) about 200m away, a bald eagle 🦅 scavenging on some prey right on the shoreline, and a family of over a dozen seals 🦦 surrounding our kayaks! It was breathtaking. It's still hard to believe that instances like this just happen at Pearson.
In the evening after dinner I headed back to the LLT (little lecture theatre) to complete my shoremaster training 📋! As part of a waterfront CAS, we are expected to rotate shifts as shore masters throughout the year as our student job. Our duties mainly consist of monitoring the weather 🌦 and tides 🌊 whenever a group goes out on the water and performing radio checks from the control room on the docks.
October 29, 2020
Wow, for the first time this week I think I'm free for the night. Of course, this means I'll be studying for my chem and math test tomorrow...😬
October 30, 2020
Tests are done! It's time for clubs- this time, hiking 🥾! We opted for a quicker route today, just going up to see the waterfall now that there's been enough rain ☂ to finally get it going.
After dinner it was all about my dear housemate's 17th birthday party which may or may not have involved a blindfold, kidnapping, and surprise pizza dinner with tubs of her favourite ice cream 🍦 (a very valuable commodity) in the Maxbell 😋.
October 31, 2020
Halloween 👻 at Pearson is so much fun. For a group of 16 to 20 year-olds, the atmosphere was so playful and exciting. The campus houseparents and residents stocked up on candy 🍭🍬 and we went door-to-door trick-or-treating in our costumes. East House also pulled through with their annual haunted house 🔪 in the Maxbell, which, come to think, does give off a rather ominous vibe late at night...
So that's that! A week in my life as a first term Pearsonite. Thanks for stopping by!
Ps. UWC applications from select countries are still open!
As always, if you have any questions don't hesitate to reach out - I'd love to hear from you!
Until next time,
Kommentare