Is the destination our imagination?
From the beginning of 2017, the end of February, my class had been working very hard on something called Destination Imagination. If you have no idea what DI is, heres the website where you can check it out. DI website. Its a lot to explain but basically, DI’s mission is to empower students to change the world. The destination of this all is our “imagination.”
Anyways, we had a a big task to complete so we started with choosing which challenge we wanted to do. My first choice was the project outreach challenge, then the fine arts challenge. I ended up being in the fine arts group with 4.5 people. Why I say .5 is because one team member was gone for half of the planning and the performance so I think you get it. Anyways, our group had Syrah, Aliva, Melanie, Sofia, and me. During the beginning, our group was a hot mess. We all had different ideas, and very different work ethics. I find on big tasks like these, you need focus and organization. While the group liked to create ideas but not actually create. We soon without thinking about it, overtime became a group. It definitely wasn’t my ideal group, but I did like how I leant a lot about teamwork.
Moving on, lets talk about our journey to creating our “fine arts challenge”. Our task was to have creative story, with a vanishing act, colourful character, and a 2 team elements. The story was were we dedicated a lot of time, we decided it was the most important part of the performance. If there wasn’t a good story, what’s the hard work into the props, costumes etc going to do? We needed a good story. Our story for about a week or two was extremely different than the story we had on the day of regionals. Anyways, after a lot of brainstorming, writing and revision, we ended up with a story im very proud of.
Something im very proud of, that was kinda my project in this whole challenge was the vanishing act. I took responsibility for this so thats why im very proud of it.
Adding onto the “journey” I’m calling it… Lets talk about how I feel about DI. Personally, I don’t think all my groups hard work, time and effort was worth going into something like DI. I feel with the amount of drive and creativity we had, we could have used it in a better way. Suppose a big project on something in the curriculum. We could have learned all these team skills while learning something we will need to know moving into grade 9,10 etc. I think it would be cool if we used our tools we learned in DI in something big next year that wasn’t DI because I dont feel I would learn anything new.
DI isn’t a horrible experience but it definitely wasnt something I necessarily “enjoyed”. I felt it was too many rules, too much of my outside of school time and just overall a lot of stress. Anyways, I cant take back the experience (not that I would want to) so lets talk about what I took out of it all. I created some time management skills and learnt that all ideas need to be realistic or else we will find ourselves trying to create something very extreme. I also learnt don’t spend your time complaining. Instead of me just talking about how I didn’t like DI, I had to just get through it so I could have a overall product I was proud of.
Finishing of this blog post, I really really really really dont want to show the video of our preformance because it definitely wasn’t as good as it was when we practiced it 10 mins before. Lets just say, it was a mild hot mess. The script, props and everything were good just we had a technical difficulty that kinda threw us off board. Anyways, even though I just want to push DI out of my mind and never think about it ever again, I guess im quite happy we do have a second chance in provincials to re show our work thats im very proud of, even if it means another month of DI.