Here is my recommended song for this post.

Well, we are finally done DI. Forever.

I have been doing DI for three years and it has been a very interesting experience. We won’t be continuing with DI next year because PLP is going down to just 2 classes. English and socials. Since sciences and maths branch out, to different options,  we won’t have PLP scimatics as well we don’t have a maker time in which we could have DI time.

I am very happy with what me and my group achieved this year. As you know well, DI hasn’t nessecarily worked out for me but this year turned out really well. In the past, things have falling apart at either the tournament or in the week before. This year none of that happened.

My group worked hard to build and create everything we had to do and made sure things worked before we presented. On the day of regionals I realized that I was really proud of what we were about to present. Yes I was nervous but I’ve found that when I’m nervous I tend to preform pretty well (for a short period of time). After the regional presentation I was really happy that it all worked out and I got even more happy when we got first place.

In the week after the tournament we spent some time looking at our scores and figuring out what we can improve on. We decided that we wanted to improve our safety sign and instant challenge. We also wanted to practice setting up our props to maximize what the audiences sees.

Now to be completly honest we didn’t do any work on it until the week of provincials. Aiden got the safety sign reprinted and we rehearsed.

Now there was another thing my group and I had to deal with.

I am heavily involved in scouting and I volunteer a fair bit through it. There is an annual camp called Minjam which is a weekend long camp which runs a lot like a scout jamboree. A jamboree is usually a big collection of scouting youth and leaders camping on a single site for over a week in the summer. The camp offers a bunch of different “program stations” where the youth can do various fun activities from archery to sailing. In my scouting career I have been to 2 jamborees. One in 2013 called CJ (Canadian Jamboree) and one in 2015 called PJ (Pacific Jamboree). In the case of Minjam it is pretty much a practice jamboree where patrols (groups of scouts) can experience what a jamboree is like on a much smaller scale. In the past Minjam has only been held every 2 years (every year there is a jamboree in Canada) but after its huge success last year

(I volunteered that year and ran a program station) the camp chief and some of the others on the executive council wanted to make the camp an annual thing.

So in the summer I was recruited, along with my friend, to be the program coordinator for this years camp. My friend would be my deputy.

The whole role of program coordinator means that I am the most important person at camp. I plan all of the program stations, recruit the team leads for each station, get everything set up for the camp and attend and help facilitate all of the camp. Sounds like a lot fun right? It is!

So since I have such a huge role with the camp and the fact that we have doubled our participant numbers since last year (we currently have over 500 participants) I had to go up the weekend before to help set things up. The camp is on April 13-15 so the weekend before fell onto the 7th which just so happened to be the day of provincials.

Now since I was one of our Team Choice Elements I’m sure you can see how that would have proved troublesome. So I spent the week helping my team prepare. Reid (who was away for regionals) took over my role and as a team we decided that I would teach Reid how to dance for the Team Choice Element. I sent Reid some videos on how to do a few moves and I went over a few with him in class as well.

After that prep, along came Saturday. Instead of being at the tournament with my team members I was away at a scout property on the Sunshine Coast settings up an obsactle course, cutting firewood, doing camp chores and prepping the site to make sure the jamboree goes as smoothly as possible.

From what I have heard from my team, things went really smoothly. We came in second place and everything worked out well. During the following week we looked at our scores and read through the appraiser’s comments. They all really liked the comedy through our performance, which was very much like our last performance. Points wise we could have gotten a fair bit more. We got pretty close to half of the points for every category.

After that that we were officially done with DI for this year and probably for a very long time.

I must say that through DI I have learned a lot. I have gained skills like; resiliency, confidence, teamwork and many more. Although DI for me has not been the most successful project but nonetheless I am really happy that I was able to experience it all and gain and build upon some really important skills.