The anticipation really started to build up about a week before the provincial tournament. Im sure that coming to school everyday and looking at the board to only be discouraged by the slowly decreasing numbers or should I say number as DI came closer was no help. After the regional tournament I had about a three days of solitude, of relaxation, and certainly clarity. By the forth day DI hit me again, the same stress, anticipation, and questioning as before regionals.

There was one thing different about this time though, this time I had a job, this time I had to be a leader. I shouldn’t have said had it wasn’t like I had no choice because it definitely was my decision. I could have just let the opportunity slip by my hands, after all it is easier to fallow than to lead. I rose to the challenge, I took the chance and I chose correctly.

Going in to the provincial tournament we had two jobs, and many things to fix. We didn’t have much time, and by that final week we were all really done with school. Our group dished of work for us to do over the next week and even spring break, which I think was done to perfection. The days before the provincial tournament There wasn’t a worry in my mind, and the main reasons was because we had improved on all our weakest links, my lines were memorized, and the prop transportation was taken care of.

DI was kind of a blur, all we could think about was going to Ottawa for our field study. Since all of our challenges, the instant challenge and our central challenge, were earlier in the day than normal we finished them without all of the stress of waiting. The trip to Ottawa was amazing as you can see in my Ottawa blog post, but when we came back something shifted.

We were hinted on our scores on our trip but we didn’t get to see the scores in person yet. We really didn’t realize how bad we did. The raw scores showed us one key detail that we missed in the proses of revision. When we were planing our improvements we weren’t calculating the loss of score if we didn’t get scored as well as last time, performance wise. We also didn’t calculate, the new appraisers, and if they were going to mark our presentation harder than they did last time. Because of this we came in forth, (out of five teams), and didn’t even get a medal.

This made me stop and think because I could tell that something wasn’t adding up. After a lot of critical thinking, and bouncing ideas of of fellow competitors I think I might have finally found out what was bugging me. All of this time we had been creating and improving our project, we haven’t calculated if it was worthwhile, learning wise.

Now as a PLP student it is obvious that we would learn in some way, I mean you learn new things everyday. After some research I pulled up an actual page on the Destination Imagination website that some intellectual had created. The website included a handful of traits you learn by doing DI like leadership and creativity. There was basically a page filled with pros of DI, and that got me to thinking what are the cons of DI.

The first con I am going to talk about is some thing I called social struggle. In PLP, unlike most Destination Imagonation teams, we are forced to participate, and since the teams are made for us, we have little say in who is on your team. So when you get your friends on your team which hopefully happens, because you will be working nonstop for the next few months with them, there is one down side. Now this year I learned this the hard way, and to be honest I didn’t think about the possibility of social struggle until it happened. To be more specific social struggle is when socially you have to do something that you don’t feel obliged to do. Even though your social life should not collide with school, how do you tell your friends that they need to step it up a level. Or if your in a group and you have to much work on your back how do you tell your group members who gave you this work I cant do all of it.

To add on to this I don’t think you should ever be put in that position no matter what the project is about. This brings me to my final point, is it worth it. As I have already discussed the learning we do in the second year of DI is very repetitive and our skills could be improved in other ways, so that we were more well rounded. We have studded, leadership, growth mindset, and how to express our creativity, since grade eight.

Compared to the people are age and even older than us we are clearly surpassing them in these areas. So the learning aspect of DI could be learnt by doing different projects too. The amount of time, and money that we put into DI isn’t we’ll rewarded otherwise. Finally the social pressure and struggle that is placed on our shoulders out weighs, the teamwork skills that we would have been building. If I did a pole of the class to see if they thought Destination Imagonation was worth the effort, money and struggle that we had to give to the unrewarding outcome, I would guarantee you that the majority would be towards my argument. The small percentage who wouldn’t agree with me would have agreed with me last year when they didn’t get stuck with the perfect group, or place on the podium. If you don’t agree with me you can ask anyone in my group and I am sure they will say the same.