Destination imagination happens every year. This was my second experience with DI. I would like to talk a bit about last year to help my reflection with comparaisons.
Last year was my first year with DI, I was a bit nervous because of what people had said about it, which mostly just it was a crazy amount of work, and that it sometimes didn’t turn out so well and people could get harsh. I got my group and was a little nervous to get started. Our DI team did not succeed very far last year. We had our priorities in total wrong order, and ended up coming in fifth for provincials, which didn’t really bother us because we felt we had actually done worse!
Switching back to this year, we only had 1 other competitor in our group, and they were grade 9 students in PLP, so we knew them all quite well. This point will play a big role later on in the post.
I felt we had an exceptionally good DI presentation. We had the the “Game On” challenge, (If you want to read more about our first steps and the regionals competition the blog post is here!) and for our challenge we chose to focus on the Game Of Life as our game, and have humour integrated in. Our perspective on the challenge was a humorous approach on stereotypes and situations that you get put while playing the game of life. An example being we tried to make many jokes on the marriage aspect of life, because you can’t leave life without being married! We also made jokes about retirement and juggling everything as a adult.
We lost a team member for our provincial tournament. Jessie was not able to make it to the tournament, so we had to plan around this. It put our team in a bit of a tight spot because Jessie was very important to our story and was definitely the main character. She had also memorized the whole script in the case that someone else had forgotten their lines, she could prod them with a line of her own to help the presentation move along. 3 days before the final presentation, we had to start to prepare without Jessie. We all took a bit of her lines, but Marshall took the most, becoming the main character. We all worked really hard for the last few days to prepare for a presentation, staying late after school one day, and working in our own time to remember the lines.
Then out of the blue Destination Imagination just rolled right up. I wasn’t feeling to hot the morning of DI, but I felt a bit better later on in the day, but our presentation was almost right away in the morning. Our presentation was at 9:20 am, so we ran through our lines for awhile then presented. All things considered our presentation went really well, we had a few stutters and parts where people forgot their lines, but aside from that we were able to make people laugh, which felt really good. It felt good to get the presentation out of the way, and then all that was left was the instant challenge. I watched quite a few performances and ate lunch, and then it was our time for our challenge. The challenge its self felt like it went well, but afterwards I stepped foot into a situation that I have learned much from, and hope to try to avoid as much as possible in the future.
I was speaking to another team about the instant challenge, we were caught, and disqualified. Talking about the instant challenge is against the rules and so we were disqualified from the whole competition.
What I have learned from this is very important. I learned that when you know someone is upset, or angry, it feels worse to put it off and ignore it, then addressing it and trying to figuring out a win win situation. What I mean by this is, if you know you’ve done something wrong think about how that makes you feel, and then instead of being scared or fearful, address those feelings and find a way to let the other person know your sorry, or how you feel about that situation. I feel bad that I had to learn this lesson with the fate of my DI team resting on my shoulders, but I think we all may have learned.
I also learned that even though DI is something that is extra curricular, and we can sometimes feel a little negative toward it, there are other people trying to enjoy it and to appreciate it, and are putting work into it, even if someone doesn’t want to be there, they have to realize that other people have really tried to put work in, and tried to make this a incredible experience for us, and that one should appreciate their work and effort.
The last thing I learned is actually from PGP, and Ms. Willemse reminded me of it. If I had gone ahead and put my self in Ms. Willemse and Mr. Hughes shoes the outcome of the day may have been different. This is very important for the future and I don’t think I will ever forget it.
All in all its the journey that matters not the destination, and even though it ended with a sour taste, the whole experience was actually very helpful, and informative.
So in the end I learned a lot am a more educated person because of it.