Ironclad

Last year they did some filming at our school.
We never really knew exactly what they were filming, and all we could really see was men dressed as soldiers walking around talking on cellphones (a very odd sight), lots of trucks with props, and a group of horses that would trot around campus.

However, the film is coming out this year and so there is now a fabulous trailer which depicts a group of dirty men defending my castle.
It is not the type of film that I would normally watch, but I think I will have to, just so that I can yell "I LIVE THERE".

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CS43OEmPUB8

Mock exams

The IB has this lovely time of the year where we pretend that we are taking our exams.
These are called mocks.
I supposed they are named this because they are not the real things - they are just mock-ups.
But to be honest I feel like they are mocking me.

They are taunting me with all of the knowledge I am supposed to have but don't.
It is rather annoying.

And what's worse is that instead of having them over a month (like the real exams), they are over a week.
Which means that today I had four exams papers (seven hours!).
My hand hurts.

On the up side, when this is over we have a five day weekend for spring break.

Wish me luck!

I Don't Like Trees

My friend, Lindsay, wrote this article about climate change:

I don‘t like trees. Simple. I don‘t hug them, I don‘t particularly think they‘re beautiful and more to the point I don‘t really care about them. I don‘t have an issue with them, or the rest of the natural world for that matter, but I certainly would not give up my time to save them.

Yet, I have a reputation for all of the above. I get questioned when I say that I don‘t appreciate the beauty of the natural world. People don‘t understand why I don‘t like being called an environmentalist. I‘m asked why I want to save the trees when I don‘t care about them. The answer is simple; because my passion is people.

When I was growing up I wanted to eradicate poverty; I read Marx and believed that it was the Gospel. I was convinced that my aim in life was to achieve global equality. Yet because of the people I was surrounded by I got drawn into climate change campaigning. I was forced to learn about it and it didn‘t take long until I realised that it was not worth caring about anything else; because what was the point in creating equality if it got destroyed by the climate. Why campaign on the rights of a certain peoples if those peoples are simply going to be wiped out in a century?

And the more I learn the more convinced I am of this. Every African leader who I saw speak in Cancun said the same thing; they‘re number one priority was poverty eradication, but to achieve that they needed to fight climate change; therefore their number one priority was climate change. Climate change currently looks to only exacerbate the gap between rich and poor, to lessen the rights of underrepresented peoples, and to further the tensions in the war hotspots of the world.

Yet at the same time my revolutionary ideas were squashed. I felt we simply did not have the time to have a revolution to deal with climate change; we had to use the channels already open. Yet the more I think about it the more I feel that this isn‘t quite true. Yes; we need to use the channels open to us. But no, we cannot continue with capitalism as we know it. To this end climate change and its impacts present a unique opportunity to reform our economic system to a more equal one. It demonstrates clearly that we cannot work on a system of exponential growth when we are living on a finite planet; finally our leaders know that something needs to change.

The more meetings I sit in on, the more faith I lose that we are going to curb the affects of climate change. To me it is unlikely that we shall ever avoid at least a 2 degree rise in our global temperatures. But nonetheless we must strive for 'climate justice‘. We must use this as an opportunity to re-invent our economic model to fit our finite resources, and our depleting oil. We must adapt the world we live in; not because of the trees but in order to sustain the human race. If we continue to live the way we are living as climate change gets worse we will self-destruct. Everyone in the world who believes in economic development must realise the necessity to adapt to changing circumstances.

I appreciate that some of this may be controversial; and I do not belittle those who still work towards mitigation. But I strongly believe that this fight is no longer about switching of lights or recycling. It is about the necessity to completely change the way we think in order to sustain the human race in a global situation totally different to the one we see today. If you like polar bears and trees, and trying to save them will motivate you; then that‘s fine. But if you‘re passion is development, or equality, or poverty eradication; then we need you in this fight. For it is, at the end of the day, new economic and political thinkers who will enable the survival of the human race in the 'post-apocalyptic‘ world

Photography

Every term I have to officially join two activities (and can do as many as I want unofficially).
This term I am working in the library and - more excitingly - doing photography.

So far, I am loving photography. A woman from outside the college comes and for two hours we do a mixture of theoretical and practical learning. Usually, we do some theory at the beginning and then are given a small task and are set loose to do it.
We have been looking at the basics like: aperture, shutter speed and ISO.
And then working on how to adjust them depending on what type of photo we are taking: moving object, portrait, lights in a dark room etc.

Here are a few of the photos I have taken so far:

Light streaks

Long shutter speed, with a flash every 5 seconds

Light graffiti

abstract

working on depth of field

Have you got talent?

Last night was our school's annual talent show:
'AC's Got Talent'.

There are three teachers who are the judges, and then there are about 12 acts.
This year was very well done and was a great mix of good talent and comedy.

The three runner-ups were:
- A group of First year boys dancing
- A Russian girl doing cultural dancing
- Drumming (I didn't know one drum could make so many different sounds)

and the winners were:
-'Billiaume' a dance routine by Bill and Aliaume based off of this video. It was so good! I couldn't stop laughing.

It was a good night and reminded me how amazing some of the people at my school are.

Ceilidh!

I wrote and article about our Ceilidh (traditional Scottish dance) for my school's website.
They have started putting up little blog posts by different students.
Most of them are basically about the author's day (so that prospective students know what to expect), but because I have been sick my days have been rather boring and so I opted to write about the last big event we had:
http://www.atlanticcollege.org/student-diary-blogs/

Weekend Part 2

This update is terrible late. sorry!
But in my defense I have been quite ill for the past week and so I haven't had much access to the Internet.
Anyways, this is the second half of my weekend (which is now from two weeks ago) and is about the Peace and Conflict Conference that we had:

The second part of my weekend was even better than the first because on Monday and Tuesday we had no classes, but instead we had a Peace and Conflicts conference.
It was a great success.
I think it went so well because it was a good mix between student and staff organization. My peace and Conflicts teacher, along with some other teachers and my vise principal, was very involved, but students also had a large role in the organization and execution of the conference.
I think it was good for the students to have a say, but I think that the teacher involvement allowed it to be more professional, and we were able to have some amazing speakers come.

Monday focused on global issues and was a mixture of lectures and workshops.
In the morning we had a man names Ray McGrath (who won a Noble Peace Prize for his involvement in the banning of land mines) give a lecture. He talked about war laws and the ways in which governments and the public view war. I found one quote that he had very interesting: “So long as weapons are not prohibited, states can use the weapons that are available to them” (British government). It was a very interesting beginning to the conference and I think it really made people think about the absurdities of war.
For the rest of the morning and for the afternoon, there were a bunch of different workshops. Students ran some of them and the speakers (such as Ray McGrath) ran other ones.

I was running one of the workshops. I did my ee on child soldiers and so I was asked to run a workshop in the topic of child soldiers, which I was very pleased to do, with the help of a 1st year in my house: Vincent (Kenya). I was bit nervous about how it would go, but in the end I think it was very successful. The workshop was completely full, which was awesome and extra people came to a few of them. The workshop was a mixture of videos, discussions and me talking. I gave a fair amount of information on what child soldiers are, where they are why they are used, and what is being done etc. I then showed a clip from the film War Dance of a boy recounting his experience as a child soldier in Uganda. Then at the end, I raised some questions about the topic such as: when is a child a child and when are they a soldier? And what should be done when a conflict is over?
It was really interesting to see what people thought and some of the discussions were quite good.

I was lucky enough to also be able to go to two different workshops, just to listen.
1) I went to one of Ray McGrath’s workshops and we talked about disproportionate retaliation and how to change public opinion on the way that governments fight their wars.
2) I went to a talk that was done by an Israeli and a Palestinian student about the conflict. It was really interesting to listen to them talk about the conflict from the two different points of view.


The second day of the conference was more focused on conflicts within the college. In the morning, we ate breakfast in our houses and had discussions about some of the broader issues at our school (such as: cultural differences, and communication issues). The day was ended with a peace flame that we lit.

So, overall it was a very successful and enjoyable conference.

I feel like I left satisfied with what I had done and with what I had learned. I was given new ideas about how to overcome difficulties on both global and personal levels. Although I did sometimes wonder if some of the simplifications of conflicts was accurate, I loved it.